Allan Bell Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 I hope the rerank will happen before the new tools. This has been a good year for me and I expect to rise a bit. Of course, there are no guarantees but I'll feel better able to cope with something new if I have a better position. Paulette I suspect they will make the re-rank coincide with the new tools so that we can't see how the latter damages/helps our positioning. I hope I'm wrong. Pearl I suspect there has been a re-rank but (BHZ) not updated somehow as I am experiencing a much increased number of zooms over the norm for my port this last 4 weeks. Not that I am complaining you realise. Allan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanGibson Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 Something unusual happened with my last uploads which passed QC. I typically enter the description in Lightroom and if I go over 128 characters, I rework it when I am keywording. My batch contained a couple of images with over 140 characters in the description field, yet they were accepted in full, not truncated at 128 characters as they usually would be. Moreover, even though I had not sorted out my keywords into essential etc, these images immediately showed up as ready, even with a blank essential keywords field. I wondered if they really were ready and whether they would show up as being on sale in this state when the database was next updated, so I did no more to them; sure enough, next day they were on sale with blank essential keywords and the over 128 character descriptions (at which point I arranged the keywords into their three fields as I normally would, but left the extended descriptions). Maybe this is just a one-off glitch, but perhaps it is an indication of how things will work in future, which somehow was implemented early for these images: I don't know and am just guessing, but it is unusual that this new behaviour appeared in my last upload batch a few days ago. Graham Do you mean the caption field? The description field has up to 2000 characters. I have just tried to put more than 128 characters in the caption field, and I am not able to. Or perhaps it is a LR thing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 Something unusual happened with my last uploads which passed QC. I typically enter the description in Lightroom and if I go over 128 characters, I rework it when I am keywording. My batch contained a couple of images with over 140 characters in the description field, yet they were accepted in full, not truncated at 128 characters as they usually would be. Moreover, even though I had not sorted out my keywords into essential etc, these images immediately showed up as ready, even with a blank essential keywords field. I wondered if they really were ready and whether they would show up as being on sale in this state when the database was next updated, so I did no more to them; sure enough, next day they were on sale with blank essential keywords and the over 128 character descriptions (at which point I arranged the keywords into their three fields as I normally would, but left the extended descriptions). Maybe this is just a one-off glitch, but perhaps it is an indication of how things will work in future, which somehow was implemented early for these images: I don't know and am just guessing, but it is unusual that this new behaviour appeared in my last upload batch a few days ago. Graham Do you mean the caption field? The description field has up to 2000 characters. I have just tried to put more than 128 characters in the caption field, and I am not able to. Or perhaps it is a LR thing? The flash control in manage images is probably what's restricting how many characters can be entered. Whereas a direct upload has bypassed this check and may have revealed that the Alamy database can now handle more characters? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin P Wilson Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 Something unusual happened with my last uploads which passed QC. I typically enter the description in Lightroom and if I go over 128 characters, I rework it when I am keywording. My batch contained a couple of images with over 140 characters in the description field, yet they were accepted in full, not truncated at 128 characters as they usually would be. Moreover, even though I had not sorted out my keywords into essential etc, these images immediately showed up as ready, even with a blank essential keywords field. I wondered if they really were ready and whether they would show up as being on sale in this state when the database was next updated, so I did no more to them; sure enough, next day they were on sale with blank essential keywords and the over 128 character descriptions (at which point I arranged the keywords into their three fields as I normally would, but left the extended descriptions). Maybe this is just a one-off glitch, but perhaps it is an indication of how things will work in future, which somehow was implemented early for these images: I don't know and am just guessing, but it is unusual that this new behaviour appeared in my last upload batch a few days ago. Graham Do you mean the caption field? The description field has up to 2000 characters. I have just tried to put more than 128 characters in the caption field, and I am not able to. Or perhaps it is a LR thing? The flash control in manage images is probably what's restricting how many characters can be entered. Whereas a direct upload has bypassed this check and may have revealed that the Alamy database can now handle more characters? The Alamy database certainly copes with the 600 character captions of images that have gone into stock via the News route. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 Yes, sorry, I meant caption - please forgive the terminological inexactitude. What should have been limited to 128 characters was not truncated. This was a standard upload, not news feed which has a different (600 character) limit. Graham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MircoV Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 I suspect there has been a re-rank but (BHZ) not updated somehow as I am experiencing a much increased number of zooms over the norm for my port this last 4 weeks. Not that I am complaining you realise. Allan There hasn't been a re-rank since February. I keep a note of many of my image positions for various searches, and nothing has changed other than the odd shift of a few places due to newer images being added over the months. Why it takes so long to do a re-rank, I have no idea. It has to be an automated process so surely it just needs to be triggered. Sales are dramatically affected by our ranking, and to leave it so long is unfair to those who put in a lot of hard work doing things right. Those who keyword spam, license incorrectly by using RF with no releases (so their images appear higher in results, therefore pushing correctly licensed images down the page or off the first page altogether) have to have their ranking lowered, and it shouldn't take so long. I also want to see a re-rank before the new tools are introduced, so I can gauge how things have changed before the new system distorts things. We could speculate on the reasons it's not happened but I'd rather have some facts. Alamy simply do not give us enough feedback, so we have to speculate on why things are done a certain way, which is then sometimes met with criticism and red arrows for voicing an opinion. I'm glad Alamy have at least given us some sort of feedback in this thread now. As has been said already by others above, I hope the blog post answers all our questions and I very much hope things are going to be better FOR THE CONTRIBUTORS and not JUST the clients. Geoff. I am very convinced that this tools update is largest part about the contributor. I fully support improvements in being able to get the images as fast as possible online. I am quit sure this new tools will be awesome . Time to get some refreshment. Without being a slimer . I really think Alamy gives us even to much information with in addition the ability to suggest things on special opened threads. I remember one Alamy thread where we could add ideas and questions..... then there was a second thread from Alamy about what we can expect from the tools. We all where free to put our comments and questions. Believe me that other agencies that i know dont even bother to answer .... let alone letting contributors make suggestions. Still a little time to go and we will see. Just give it a try. Mirco Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Callie Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 I would totally agree with you Mirco that Alamy keep us better informed than any other agency, which to me is a good thing, no information is too much! The problem here is when a little extra info is posted on the microstock forum - it was, as far as I can see, a little more than what we were told in any thread on this forum - this is not a good way for contributors to find anything out. It is easy to make a mistake of course when dealing with different forums, but now it has left us with extra questions and concerns - hoping they will be answered by Alamy in the next few days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 The nature of the posts is quite different. When we get it, we get details appropriate to established contributors, which we are. I wonder if we tend to over-interpret the words-of-one-syllable type of post that Alamy put elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MircoV Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 In general i feel we will be most happy when we actually finally are working with the new tools. Looking at the Alamy thread about what we can expect it seems that we should be able to make our images even more visible what means better placement here and better placement on all the distributors what should lead only to more sales. Getting images faster online means also more time for photography. Mirco Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHill Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 If the change means that IPTC keywords automatically go into the middle or lower (comprehensive) keyword field and that's all we need to do for the images to go live, and then we can later move them into 'essential' or otherwise as we want to help control where the image appears in searches, I think that would be a good outcome. David. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MizBrown Posted November 24, 2016 Share Posted November 24, 2016 I wonder what the motivation is. Alamy is, for me at least, a comparatively high maintainence agent. With others some do the keywording for me. Most I just upload the images which I have already keyworded in LR and thats that. Having to muck around with fields is extra work. As others have pointed out, its sometimes extra work which delivers an advantage, but often not. The playing field seems to be being levelled, which'll have winners and losers. Lets not forget one of the micro's is now owned by the company delivering the software most of us use... I can easily foresee them giving the option to export directly onto the marketplace... giving them a wee advantage over the likes of Alamy. All this assumes that a lack of contributors is a problem... which doesn;t seem to be the case. BTW I concur with the feelings about the communications. The highlighted part - That has already happened in the latest version of the software. Geoff. Can't sell to them from where I currently live, and may not be able to use their software in the future. CaptureOne is okay fine with me being in Nicaragua with a US credit card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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