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The Image Manager thread


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What has happened to the ability to sort images within a submission?  It used to be possible to sort images by your reference, Alamy reference, upload order.  This seems to have disappeared, but it is essential for legacy images.  It used to be essential, because there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which the images appeared in IM under the old system, irrespective of their naming, and one needed this facility in order to be able to group images in order to edit batches of images together (without using the old IM batch edit, which did not work, for example, to add one keyword to a field).

 

I have just been looking at some old submissions in the new IM, to try to, for example, add locations.  My submissions tend to be mixed, because I process and upload images as the mood takes me.  There might, for example, be pictures of wildlife in my back garden interspersed with images from various travel locations, all in the same upload, of sometimes dozens of images.  Previously it was not a problem, because I could sort by my reference, even though the default order in which they appeared in IM seemed to be pretty random.

 

Looking at my old submissions, the  images remain in Alamy's random upload order.  If, for example, I want to add location information to my, say, six Santorini images, which are interspersed with my twenty images from Portsmouth, my fifteen birds (which are themselves not contiguous because they are separated by species name, which is how I name my images), and my eight squirrels, all of which were uploaded in the same batch, I have to find the images I need from the random order in which they were sorted by Alamy on upload.  Having to go through and select each image from each location to group them, in order to add location information to each image in a group, is a real waste of time, and is not something that it is worth doing across my portfolio of over 11,000 images.

 

Why has the ability to sort images within a single submission been removed?  Or is it there, and I just cannot find it?  Location information is just one example: suppose, for example, there is a typo in the caption of a series of ten images - you should have the ability to sort the images by your reference, to bring them all together to make it easy to select them all to make the correction, not have to hunt around for them (and probably miss one or two while you are about it).

 

And why do different selection methods produce different results?  Click on an image to select it, then click on another, and both are selected.  Drag across a group of images to select them, then drag across another group, and the images in the previously selected group are deselected.  Why the different behaviour according to selection method?  Surely if images are to remain selected until the "clear selection" tick box is clicked, then that should be the case all the time, whether the images were selected by clicking or by dragging.  If your old submissions have been split up by the way in which Alamy ordered them on upload, and related images are in several non-contiguous blocks, I had assumed that dragging across one block to select a group of images then dragging across a later block would select all of them (for the batch edits referred to above, such as adding location), but no, it does not work like that.   The new version seems to make it difficult to work wit legacy images at every turn.

 

Graham

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There is a search function. Has using that not worked for you? Maybe when dragging for another batch you need to hold down the command key as you usually would for selecting individual images in other programs.

 

Paulette

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There is a search function. Has using that not worked for you? Maybe when dragging for another batch you need to hold down the command key as you usually would for selecting individual images in other programs.

 

Paulette

No. Ctrl doesn't work, the previous selection is lost.

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There is a search function. Has using that not worked for you? 

No, the search function only works across the entire portfolio, not within a submission.  Ctrl does not work (on a PC - cannot say for a Mac, but I assume it's the same).  And the search function does not include searching by your reference (i.e. the filename you allocated to the image).  

 

For example, if I want to search for "robin" for location purposes, I only want my images which are called "robinxxx.jpg", which are (unsurprisingly) my pictures of a robin.  I do not want my images which include the guitarist Robin Le Mesurier, tagged/keyworded, or those with comics containing Batman and Robin, but not within an image named "robinxxx.jpg".  And of course my images originally keyworded "Robin Le Mesurier" now have the three tags (which actually have come out as three of my available supertags) "robin" "le" "mesurier" (sigh...), but that's a separate issue.

 

Graham

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There is a search function. Has using that not worked for you? 
No, the search function only works across the entire portfolio, not within a submission.  Ctrl does not work (on a PC - cannot say for a Mac, but I assume it's the same).  And the search function does not include searching by your reference (i.e. the filename you allocated to the image).  

 

For example, if I want to search for "robin" for location purposes, I only want my images which are called "robinxxx.jpg", which are (unsurprisingly) my pictures of a robin.  I do not want my images which include the guitarist Robin Le Mesurier, tagged/keyworded, or those with comics containing Batman and Robin, but not within an image named "robinxxx.jpg".  And of course my images originally keyworded "Robin Le Mesurier" now have the three tags (which actually have come out as three of my available supertags) "robin" "le" "mesurier" (sigh...), but that's a separate issue.

 

Graham

If you just want the images that you have taken of a Robin, would you not simply search with the keywords 'robin'and "bird'? This is me assuming you would have the keyword "bird" included in your tags. This would filter out the Dynamic Duo or any other Robins you may have.

 

Jill

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My Alamy account just went to the new system today and it's a total mess.  It is telling me I have over 7,000 images, I have just overy 5,000, if I do a seach for my name it gets the right number.  Not sure what the extra 2,000 are.  Around 900 images have the wonderful green tag, except that in those images it seems to have added the last lot of keywords to my last submission?    I also have to question the reason for having the green orange markers if they are only relevant to the number of keywords.  I mean say a robin sat on a tree blue sky background , I challenge anyone to get fifty keywords to go with that, unless you add the keywords from another submission, which is what seems to have happened to me.  Anyone else has similar problems re keywords being added to the wrong photos?.  I have emailed alamy help so lets see what they come back with.

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My Alamy account just went to the new system today and it's a total mess.  It is telling me I have over 7,000 images, I have just overy 5,000, if I do a seach for my name it gets the right number.  Not sure what the extra 2,000 are.  Around 900 images have the wonderful green tag, except that in those images it seems to have added the last lot of keywords to my last submission?    I also have to question the reason for having the green orange markers if they are only relevant to the number of keywords.  I mean say a robin sat on a tree blue sky background , I challenge anyone to get fifty keywords to go with that, unless you add the keywords from another submission, which is what seems to have happened to me.  Anyone else has similar problems re keywords being added to the wrong photos?.  I have emailed alamy help so lets see what they come back with.

 

The image total will include any images that have been deleted.  So if you deleted some from your port, or found you had doubled a submission, then deleted the doubled images, then these all show in your count.  I would think the count is more like "images submitted" as opposed to "images on sale".

 

Jill

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Hi guys,

 

Am finally on the new system...

 

Found a bug that I haven't seen referred to yet...

 

Two images with identical tags in identical order,(26/50 tags. 10 supertags identical on both images)
When either image is selected all it's associated tags are visible.
When both images are selected some tags disappear.

 

Have sent a mail to CR asking why...

 

Will post response.

 

Phil

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My Alamy account just went to the new system today and it's a total mess.  It is telling me I have over 7,000 images, I have just overy 5,000, if I do a seach for my name it gets the right number.  Not sure what the extra 2,000 are.  Around 900 images have the wonderful green tag, except that in those images it seems to have added the last lot of keywords to my last submission?    I also have to question the reason for having the green orange markers if they are only relevant to the number of keywords.  I mean say a robin sat on a tree blue sky background , I challenge anyone to get fifty keywords to go with that, unless you add the keywords from another submission, which is what seems to have happened to me.  Anyone else has similar problems re keywords being added to the wrong photos?.  I have emailed alamy help so lets see what they come back with.

 

The image total will include any images that have been deleted.  So if you deleted some from your port, or found you had doubled a submission, then deleted the doubled images, then these all show in your count.  I would think the count is more like "images submitted" as opposed to "images on sale".

 

Jill

 

Hello, ,many thanks, that at least answers one of my questions.  Although I can't imagine I have deleted 2,000 images from my account !  Why is this information on the dashboard, I/we don't need to know how many images we have put up and  taken down. If they have been deleted then presumably it's because we don't need them on alamy any more.  Oh well !  Its about five hours since I submitted my question to alamy member services and still no reply.  I am at a conference which James West is due to attend on saturday so I'll see what I can find out ! 

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Customer relations came back to me about the date issue.  

 

"When our system processes an image the ‘Date taken’ will usually be taken from the ‘Date created’ field in the image IPTC but it can depend on the camera you are using as to which date the system will take.

 

You should be able to manually override the date by selecting a new one from the calendar drop down and saving the changes. If you want the date to appear blank we recommend that you try removing it from the IPTC of the image before uploading.

 

If you are still having issues with changing the date then get back to us with a screen grab and we can look into it for you."

 

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Has this happened to any of you?

 

I had two batches of images approved on January 28th, one with 14 images, and the other with 13 images. They are all photographs and have been added as photographs in the IM system.
 
After they were put on sale I noticed they did not show in my searches. I then used the advanced search option, filtering the images by my contributor name. None of the images appear in the search when I select Photographs, but oddly enough, they appear when I select All images. That means that, although they are all photographs, none of these images will show up on buyers searches if they select Photographs as the search criteria.

 

 

I cannot reproduce what you describe Rubens. It seems to be working for me.

 

Normally, if you do a search with an empty search box and select your pseudo in the advanced search option you should be able to see all your images that are on sale. I just noticed that none of the images from the two last batches I mentioned above, which are now on sale, is displayed in the search results. However, as mentioned before, they do show up on generic searches for All images, but not when I select Photographs as the search criteria. I sent a message to Alamy about this issue and I'm waiting for a reply.

 

Alamy did not come back to me with an answer on why the images would not show as photographs, but after I submitted my last two batches everything went back to normal. Now all images are displayed when I search for "Photographs".

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It looks very sleek and nice to get away from the flash format, BUT it now takes 20 times longer to process images - the whole 'supertag' thing needs to go. I'd hoped we were going to loose the essential keywords, alas they've been resurrected as 'super tags'.

 

 

 

What do you not like about the multi-tiered keyword approach?

 

Anyways, no one forces you to use supertags. If you don't like it, just skip it.

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Right I finally have the new Image Manager and whilst some things seem good, superficially! It seems that 2/3rds of my photos are classed as poorly discoverable, another 2/3rds (of all images) seem to have too many tags, but not enough supertags and I need to delete loads of tags in order to do this, because they have too many.

 

What is on sale optimised? I don't have any of these!

 

Now, prior to the new upload I knew many of my earlier photos had too many tags and could be accused of spamming, but I only discovered this recently as I used to keyword for web and hadn't realised Alamy didn't work that way. However now it looks like it does?

 

Is anyone the wiser? Has anyone found any definite answers, or do I need to look through all the 33 pages on this thread and all the other threads and will I be any wiser if I do, or am I best ignoring it all and pretend all is fine and start re-keywording everything?

 

Confused!!

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I am just working through my images with the new IM and it appears that if you select the submission batch from the left hand side you cannot scroll up or down to the next batch via the center window. Being able to scroll is helpful as it allows me full access to previous submissions if I have images that would share common keywords. It seems you can only scroll via the center panel if you start off there. It would obviously be great to select the batch from the left panel and continue scrolling from there. Please correct me if I am wrong.

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Hey! Whoa! Stop! Wait a minute!

 

I just had a thought and wondered if it might have anything to do with the order of tags (keywords) and searches generally.

 

When an image is found by a customer in the general search and they look at it on the sales page all the tags (keywords) are shown in alphabetical order.

 

Could it be that if the tags (keywords) are stored that way on Alamy's system then there would be NO NEED for us (the contributor) to ORDER tags (keywords) and just present them in any order we wish.

 

Letting the search engine do all the hard work.

 

Allan

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Hey! Whoa! Stop! Wait a minute!

 

I just had a thought and wondered if it might have anything to do with the order of tags (keywords) and searches generally.

 

When an image is found by a customer in the general search and they look at it on the sales page all the tags (keywords) are shown in alphabetical order.

 

Could it be that if the tags (keywords) are stored that way on Alamy's system then there would be NO NEED for us (the contributor) to ORDER tags (keywords) and just present them in any order we wish.

 

Letting the search engine do all the hard work.

 

Allan

 

But if you look at an image in AIM, they aren't in alphabetical order. Indeed as far as I can tell, they are in the order I entered them.

 

Putting keywords into alphabetical order when showing them to the customer makes sense as it looks tidy and ordered. Showing them in the potentially random order that a contributor thought to enter them into AIM would look messy.

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Spotted another quirk (or feature) of the new MI. If you enter the same keyword twice, it only enters it once as a tag (as expected). But if you enter the same keyword twice with different capitalisation (e.g. Wednesday and wednesday) it adds two tags. Given that the search engine has always ignored capitalisation, is this another bug in the new MI?

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I like where the IM is going, but I don't think it's arrived just yet - still a lot of work to do:

1. Biggest problem is that I can't upload anything.  Tells me "Upload Failed" against each image, and no further information.  I haven't changed how I process images, so don't know what's going on.

TAGS 

 

2. Tags simply not long enough.  Documentation says tag lengths are unlimited, but they seem to be limited to 4 words per tag.  That means I can't properly tag the couple of thousand images I have of the "Police Service of Northern Ireland".  It's also not possible to use the tag "President of the United States".  This really isn't good!

3. How are composite (multi word) tags searched?  If I have "police officer", will I get a hit if I search for "police" or "officer, or only if I search "police officer".  In one way this is good, but it means that for every composite tag, I'm going to have to also include all other possible combinations.

4. I agree that the 50 tag "goal" is wrong.  Not every image can have 50 *relevant* tags, and some may require more..... which brings me onto 

 

FILTERS

 

5. The filters are not sufficient.  I want to see all the images that I haven't reworked on the new system (all 25,000 of them!)  Even if an image has poor discoverability, it may have all the tags which are relevant.  We need a way to flag images as 'keywording complete'.  If I add tags like "xxxx,xxxxx,xxxxxx,yyyy,yyyyy,yyyyyy,zzzz,zzzzz,zzzzzz" I get to the magic number and the bar turns green, but the quality of these tags is poor.  At present this is the only way to filter images that have been reworked.

6. There needs to be filters for things like "no category", or "number of people not set" to allow images with incomplete metadata to be filtered for further work.

 

CATEGORIES

 

7. Insufficient number of categories.  There needs to be more make categories in any way useful for the customer.  e.g. music, politics, military, emergency services - just a few which immediately spring to mind.  I agree that the number needs to be kept under control, but there needs to be more.

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Good suggestions, Stephen. Alamy has already told us that the individual words in a phrase will be seen in a search for them. They also say that the phrase gets some sort of advantage. Not so certain that is true based on experiences reported on the forum.

 

Paulette

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Hi guys,

 

Am finally on the new system...

 

Found a bug that I haven't seen referred to yet...

 

Two images with identical tags in identical order,(26/50 tags. 10 supertags identical on both images)

When either image is selected all it's associated tags are visible.

When both images are selected some tags disappear.

 

Have sent a mail to CR asking why...

 

Will post response.

 

Phil

I had the same problem and mentioned it on another thread, I take it you haven't had a response Phil?

 

Chris

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