Personal use is a joke

[spacecadet]

I've had none of these- I don't know whether to be grateful or jealous.

[John Mitchell]

I've had none of these- I don't know whether to be grateful or jealous.

 

The trick is not to take it personally.

[AlessandraRC]

 

Why I have dejavu feeling that one more time we scream to the empty wall with only echo effect...?    It started in April and who knows how many of our emails are ignored with the same useless answer! Looks like there's nobody in Alamy interested in our problem. Money is money, and why ever care about good cooperation with trust and satisfaction for both sides? Our posts and future threads are useless again. We all know about the problem, nobody reacts, nobody cares... Writing here is wasting time only.

 

Ignored... Disappointed... Lost my trust... Lost motivation to support this agency anymore... Seriously.

Thank you Alamy for showing us how we can be treated like, after all this years... I'm so sorry that we are forced to start threads like this and to opt out our work agains working together... Unbelievable how much you changed your behaviour in last year!    You used to be helpfull, treating photographers with respect, listen to us and talk in a professional way... What is going on now?!! 

 

Sorry to read that you feel this way. Looking through all the communications you've had with us via email, we can see various members of staff, including senior management, have replied to your emails and you certainly haven't been ignored. Implying that you are being ignored is a little misleading here. 

 

We've stated numerous times that if anyone has specific concerns for a personal use licence, you can let us know and we will actively investigate it and work with our sales teams to follow up where appropriate. 

 

The forum is not the most appropriate place for us to always answer questions as we have to concentrate our resources in other areas but we will respond from time to time. This is set out in the 1st rule of the forum.

 

 

 

 

Arletta

 You used to be helpfull, treating photographers with respect, listen to us and talk in a professional way... What is going on now?!! 

 

I have noticed this with all of the agencies "image suppliers" over the past 2 years,  we as photographers are nothing more than a source for images,  most of us have come to realise this over the years as the industry has gone through it's changes.

 

 

We certainly don't view things that way and always aim to provide the most responsive and friendly service in the industry. 

 

 

I remember when Alamy used to have meetings with photographers in London. They were recorded and put out for everybody tp watch. Then there was the CEO on video, maybe once a year, giving us updates. Now there is nothing at all, nothing!

Rolf

 

We'd love to still hold the meetings Rolf, but with the volume of photographers and images at record levels it's just not been possible recently.

 

We produce at least one contributor focused blog per week where we try and cover a mixture of inspirational, informative and opinion posts and hopefully you've had a look at these. We're also as active as possible across social media.

 

We're currently growing the team here that provides contributor support via email and we've created a new team dedicated to responding specifically to legal and copyright queries. 

 

We pride ourselves on having one of the most, if not the most, responsive teams for photographer support in the business.

 

Best,

 

Alamy 

 

 

 

This has been my experience as far as responses to my queries, Alamy is the best. As for personal use, I would not mind have a sale for such. At least it would be one sale. 

[regen]

"As you know Philippe, with any stock licence sale there is (and always has been) an element of trust involved. We always rely on customers using the images in a way that they purchase a licence for, indeed if they do not then they know that they would be in breach of the terms and conditions and vulnerable to legal challenges down the line, either from the photographer directly or the selling agency."

 

This,of course,assumes that you know your customer, and have  built up that trust over a period of years and have in place the checks and balances to monitor their usages rather than relying on honestly which is sadly lacking these days.

 

In the case of personal use this is unlikely to be the case as the number of licences purchased will be very limited.

 

The photographer can only monitor this if the full sales details are released (which is the case with the 4 other libraries i deal with) so how about releasing those details.

 

Regen

[christian58]

Philippe!  well if thats personal use, I eat my hat. Thats typical DLs for commercial use, prints etc

[Keith Douglas]

"As you know Philippe, with any stock licence sale there is (and always has been) an element of trust involved. We always rely on customers using the images in a way that they purchase a licence for, indeed if they do not then they know that they would be in breach of the terms and conditions and vulnerable to legal challenges down the line, either from the photographer directly or the selling agency."

 

This,of course,assumes that you know your customer, and have  built up that trust over a period of years and have in place the checks and balances to monitor their usages rather than relying on honestly which is sadly lacking these days.

 

In the case of personal use this is unlikely to be the case as the number of licences purchased will be very limited.

 

The photographer can only monitor this if the full sales details are released (which is the case with the 4 other libraries i deal with) so how about releasing those details.

 

Regen

 

The problem I see is that it's much more difficult to prove there is an infringement case when the user has purchased a licence than if they have never purchased a licence.

 

e.g. "I bought the image for personal use and had it made into a print. When I moved 6 months ago I sold it because it didn't suit the decor in my new home"

[chris warren]

"The idea of offering a personal use licence means that the image is available for a print and its important to customers that they have the highest resolution possible. We need to be able to provide a file that could be printed for personal use at a large enough size - this doesn't mean that the customer always downloads the highest size. This is why we do not limit the file size that can be downloaded."

 

When will they relies that we make a lot more than $ 9.99 profit when selling prints, canvas prints and otherwise, when selling direct with no problem.

[Callie]

"The idea of offering a personal use licence means that the image is available for a print and its important to customers that they have the highest resolution possible. We need to be able to provide a file that could be printed for personal use at a large enough size - this doesn't mean that the customer always downloads the highest size. This is why we do not limit the file size that can be downloaded."

 

When will they relies that we make a lot more than $ 9.99 profit when selling prints, canvas prints and otherwise, when selling direct with no problem.

 

Damned right, I am at the moment concentrating more on POD sites because Alamy prices have dropped so much. If Alamys sales of personal use start to damage my better priced print sales elsewhere then the future is not looking bright for Alamy, as I am sure others will be feeling the same with regards the actions they will take.

[Arletta]

 

This has been my experience as far as responses to my queries, Alamy is the best. As for personal use, I would not mind have a sale for such. At least it would be one sale. 

 

 

Ola, I understand your point of view very fine as it was exactly what I was thinking at the begining of my microstock experience... I didn't know about macros back then and reality that days... I invested thousands to buy good quality camera, and everything else. Unfortunately or rather luckily I learned very fast that I'm not able to update my gear (camera, programs, computer, etc.) with the low earnings... If you are good financial observer you can see that in general our living costs are going up, not down, but earnings are falling down, a lot! Are you really feeling good, are you ok with selling your work for super cheap and explaining to yourself that a sale is a sale? I'm not. Here's why...

 

We had another thread here saying in details about PU destroying our business. In short words an example for you to consider:

I sell prints on POD site regularly every month just like I sell licenses here on Alamy. When client buys PU license he pays 14$ (or now even 10$). I get half of this! Now when I sell a print on POD site I get in average 100$. Net.

My question to you, how can you be happy with kicking away the money that you could get? To help the answer, please see the price for editorial use and other usages as we all know that clients will not print the PU purchased images because they are clearly editorial stuff...

I hope you'll open your eyes that we have a big problem here...

[Craig Yates]

 

 

 

 

We pride ourselves on having one of the most, if not the most, responsive teams for photographer support in the business.

 

Best,

 

Alamy

 

 

 

 

This has been my experience as far as responses to my queries, Alamy is the best. As for personal use, I would not mind have a sale for such. At least it would be one sale.

 

 

 

 

Strange! I still didn't receive an answer to my questions. Instead, I got a reply to a question I didn't ask (see page 3).

 

AlessandraRC, so you would be pleased with € 5 while in fact you should have been paid at least € 25 (Magazines, newsletters and books € 49.99)

because some - ahum - "client" ignored all license requirements and just went straight for the cheapest option because he knows damn' well his printed publication can't be traced.

 

A little reminder. The following are "Personal Use" sales. REALLY...?????

 

 

 would post more but reached my daily limit

 

Some of those have been reported several months ago. What did Alamy's monitoring reveal? Anybody received a re-licence yet?

 

Just an idea. Why not showing a gallery with hand-picked SUITABLE images which could be used to hang on a wall or as a postcard, for REASONABLE prices (lower price for postcard)?

 

Cheers,

Philippe

 

 

No, no re-licence here. Are they even bothering to look into this, it's their financial loss as well as ours.

 

 

Regards

Craig

[Bill Brooks]

In the age of the internet value is based on the number of views. You are therefore underpricing a $500 image on a company website home page that gets millions of views, and overpricing a $10 personal use image that gets hardly any views at all. If an image gets hardly any views, then a $10 sale price is more than reasonable.

 

I would rather have a monthly income of $2,000 from thousands of  low priced sales than only one sale returning $2,000. The thousands of sales will be a steady monthly income because they are spread over many clients. The one sale of $2,000 is from one client that may or may not repeat itself in the following months.

 

The $2,000 sale is an ego sale that gives you a year’s bragging rights at the pub, but not necessarily a steady income.

[Bill Brooks]

So rather than complain about low price sales, we should be complaining about not enough low price sales?

 

7-8 years ago is an eternity in internet years. Those days are gone forever. I remember 4 and 5 figure sales 25 years ago, but so what? They are all fond memories, but irrelevant in today’s world.

[John Mitchell]

 

So rather than complain about low price sales, we should be complaining about not enough low price sales?

 

7-8 years ago is an eternity in internet years. Those days are gone forever. I remember 4 and 5 figure sales 25 years ago, but so what? They are all fond memories, but irrelevant in today’s world.

 

 

So, we should be encouraging Alamy to promote personal and presentation sales big time?

[MDM]

I think a big part of the issue here is the potential for deception where some buyers are clearly not playing the game. Human nature, stable doors and bolting horses come to mind in terms of the reaction from Alamy. Offering full size images at prices significantly lower than other licences and relying on honesty and integrity may not be the best business model for the image supplier.

 

Direct comparisons with print on demand sites should keep in mind that the POD sites sell prints not licences permitting the download of full size images. A solution that might be agreeable to photographers could be for Alamy to team up with some of the labs that offer POD with web hosting companies like Zenfolio (e.g One Vision and Loxley here in the UK do this).

 

However, that still doesn't solve the Presentation licence which apparently also allows downloads of full size images for no apparent reason when much lower size images would be more than adequate. And it is not possible to place restrictions on these it seems.

[Paul Mayall]

 

MDM

I think a big part of the issue here is the potential for deception where some buyers are clearly not playing the game. Human nature, stable doors and bolting horses come to mind in terms of the reaction from Alamy

 

I only wish some of the image suppliers would open department stores,  we  buyers could just name our price with money back guarantee.

[Allan Bell]

 

Direct comparisons with print on demand sites should keep in mind that the POD sites sell prints not licences permitting the download of full size images. A solution that might be agreeable to photographers could be for Alamy to team up with some of the labs that offer POD with web hosting companies like Zenfolio (e.g One Vision and Loxley here in the UK do this).

 

 

 

I did suggest this some time ago.

 

Allan

[SCWLee]

I'm setting up a quiz for work colleagues.

 

I'm thinking of doing a picture round where I show several images and ask for the common theme, or something like that.

 

Looking at the pictures in this thread, I can see some of those images used for such a quiz.

 

Admittedly, most people would probably just steal from where ever they find the appropriate image.

 

Being a contributor, I understand the work needed to create those images, so I would be looking to licence those required images.

 

But I'm not that well paid, so the £10 fee is very expensive for what I'm going to use it for, especially since I will need a dozen or so.

 

Conclusion.  I'm going to first see if I can get the images via other (legal) sources.

[Arletta]

Lee, just thinking:

- there are also clients who hardly pay $3-5, should we all go to microsites to sell? There are also clients who still respectfully pay $xx - $xxx for the same file (and that's why most of us upload to Alamy and other macros or self pricing sites).

- lets say you need to buy D810 camera for making better quality and larger size images but it's to expensive for you (any other photog.). Should you steal it or earn more money to get what you need?

- Alamy is not microstock (yet), most photographers here don't upload their work to micros because they want to be paid reasonably for work done.

- about prints, as said many times before, we do sell a print for 10 - 100 times more (net) than actual Alamy PU price (gross). Do you think it's fair that clients pay high price on POD sites for one print but could get the same image in large size, to use it as many times as they want, just because here on Alamy it's for $9,99?

 

And yes, discounts are good for both sides (if massive client), but the base price should still be reasonable in respect to author of work.

[KWheal]

Whilst i agree about personal use being unpolicable what if alamy got rid of it? Any unscrupulous buyer would either download for a presentation at the same price or for a website at £5 more so really moaning about personal use is really no good. Don't get me wrong , I agree with most of what has been said. I too have had some weird personal use downloads but as I said get rid of that and they will just use presentation download for the same price although this time you may not complain because you may feel any subject could be used for this.. So really the argument is about across the board licencing prices and not personal use (which is another argument altogether). Anyone who wants to cheat the system will. The only hope is that it has created some buyers who otherwise would not buy from alamy but would normally right click and save for free from google searches.

 

Kevin

[MDM]

"Personal Use", "Presentation" (why on earth offered in HR when it's used for Power Point or similar? Hey, why offering website licenses in HR? Questions I asked several times, but never got an answer ).

 

 

Yes this is a key question that doesn't seem to have been answered - assuming that the Presentation licence does provide a high res download (I think it was Philippe who originally said that this is the case). Many people who would actually use a presentation licence wouldn't know the difference between high resolution and a new year's resolution. In fact high res images would actually be disadvantageous as they would be complete overload and may cause PowerPoint or similar to slow down. There would be no problem if the files were low-res as is appropriate for presentation - apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to be possible to opt out of the Presentation licence by placing restrictions as is possible with Personal Use.  Perhaps MS can do it as they seem to have done for some people with Personal Use.

[MircoV]

This what Lee is saying is exactly what happens if an agency don't adopt to the prices. People are going to look at an other legal source ...(microstock). 1 sale less on Alamy. Second problem is the quality on micro is on those days not less then here. So it is like getting the same quality fish and chips ON A PLATE at another restaurant for less money. That's a real problem and not to ignore.

[Bill Brooks]

This what Lee is saying is exactly what happens if an agency don't adopt to the prices. People are going to look at an other legal source ...(microstock). 1 sale less on Alamy. Second problem is the quality on micro is on those days not less then here. So it is like getting the same quality fish and chips ON A PLATE at another restaurant for less money. That's a real problem and not to ignore.

 

 

+1 MicroV. It needed to be said.

 

We are all entitled to a point of view, and we all argue from our own perspective. For an aggregator like Philippe, low prices must be truly devastating. 

 

If a sale is $10, Alamy takes $5. Then Philippe has to take his commission from the $5, and pass the remainder on to one of the 18 photographers he represents. http://arterra.beIf the $10 is an Alamy distributer sale, then Philippe’s photographer’s cut is even less money.

 

Philippe’s arguments make sense from his perspective, and his photographer’s perspective, but not necessarily from Alamy’s or mine.

 

I deal directly with Alamy. My mean sale price is between $350 and $15 for usually a 50% payout. This is an Alamy trick that the microstock and other agencies cannot match.

 

I would like to see much increased volume of $15 sales, because I would be meeting the competition, and making money at the same time.

 

Lets not close the thread. It is thought provoking.

[John Mitchell]

Sure, I'd love to see a big increase in sales volume, even in $15 sales, but with "over 36,000 individual photographers and 600 picture agencies in 173 countries" is it realistic that this could happen for the little guy (i.e. individual contributors with a few thousand images)? As it is, most of us make a handful of sales per month, so it's understandable that low priced sales aren't exactly popular.

[regen]

MircoV, on 10 Jul 2016 - 11:20 AM, said:

This what Lee is saying is exactly what happens if an agency don't adopt to the prices. People are going to look at an other legal source ...(microstock). 1 sale less on Alamy. Second problem is the quality on micro is on those days not less then here. So it is like getting the same quality fish and chips ON A PLATE at another restaurant for less money. That's a real problem and not to ignore.

 

 

"+1 MicroV. It needed to be said.

 

We are all entitled to a point of view, and we all argue from our own perspective. For an aggregator like Philippe, low prices must be truly devastating. 

 

If a sale is $10, Alamy takes $5. Then Philippe has to take his commission from the $5, and pass the remainder on to one of the 18 photographers he represents. http://arterra.beIf the $10 is an Alamy distributer sale, then Philippe’s photographer’s cut is even less money. 

 

Philippe’s arguments make sense from his perspective, and his photographer’s perspective, but not necessarily from Alamy’s or mine.

 

I deal directly with Alamy. My mean sale price is between $350 and $15 for usually a 50% payout. This is an Alamy trick that the microstock and other agencies cannot match.

 

I would like to see much increased volume of $15 sales, because I would be meeting the competition, and making money at the same time.

 

Lets not close the thread. It is thought provoking."

 

Interesting thoughts and broadly agree if file sizes are designed to fit the end use rather than being oversized which invites stealing.  However Alamy have been in this market for the last umpteen years through NOVEL USE and have not even made a dent in the market!

 

Regen

[Alamy]

We've removed the posts discussing different price points.

 

Like most stock sites, we will trial different price points to different users to determine what works best across the site.

 

This open forum is not the place to discuss this so please keep that in mind for future posts.

 

Cheers

 

Alamy