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I've heard a few of you mention about personal use licences being refunded PDQ, but hadn't experienced it till today. Given the amount that are refunded something has to be amiss. Are they using it in their presentation then having it refunded? Alamy need to do something about this. Clearly we're being played for mugs. Maybe one refund per customer per year would put some chancers off. Any better ideas to stop this? Alamy?

 

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Yes, we are being played for mugs. Firstly I don't believe any of the so-called 'personal sales' are any such thing. These are mainly people getting full size files for a pittance and using them for whatever they want. This rash of refunds is because they have found that they can then get their pittance back without question and still retain the full size image file and use it with impunity.

 

Pete Davis

www.pete-davis-photography.com

http://peteslandscape.blogspot.co.uk/

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Are these usually quite quick refunds? If so it chimes in with the buyer's claim of mistake. You think you've ordered a toaster, a picture of a toaster arrives in your inbox, oh bugger, didn't mean to do that.

The few I have had (sales, not refunds) are quite consistent with personal use. The presentation licence is a similar price anyway.

One can watch to see if they turn up online- mine haven't.

Just another viewpoint.

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Surely if Alamy cancels 'Personal Use' all buyers will do is purchase under 'Presentation Use' at the same price.  At least under that one they won't be able to say they thought they were buying the item.

My worry is that a full size un-watermarked image is out there in the hands of possibly 'dodgy' individuals.

 

John

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23 minutes ago, Colblimp said:

This is why I'm getting rid of the Personal Use choice on my images.  Can't be doing with it.

i would like to block the PU choice for my images as well. how can i do that?

thanks

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I had an editorial photo, which was from a set with a limited (but possible as secondary editorial) end use, so unsurprisingly has attracted no interest over the years on online.

One one particular day, it was zoomed, and later that day bought as a personal image.

I thought the coincidence was too much, with it being a low-interest, non-pictorial image, so I contacted Support.

They said first of all that I was wrong to think that zooming only reflected zooms from Alamy's top buyers, it's a cross-section of buyers.

Their second point was that the PU buyer hadn't had to register before buying, so they had no way of checking the sale (no personal details).

 

So what's to stop a company searching on their main account and then getting someone to buy with a personal card?

How can there be no personal details. Wouldn't they have to have given an email address for the file to be delivered to?

 

Oddly, I had a PU sales of a pic of a medical tablet box which hasn't been refunded. Support said they would refer that to the infringments team (presumably that buyer had registered?), but as always, I've heard nothing since. I suspect the 'infringements team' is based on Alpha Centauri. :-<

 

Support also said I would be amazed at how many people buy PU thinking they're getting the item, and not just medicines.

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I have had another Personal Use refund.  Contributor Relations say it was a credit card fraud and there is nothing they can do about it.

 

But Alamy could do something about it for the future, (a) by not releasing the image until payment, and (b) not allowing refunds unless there is a proven technical issue (e.g. something missed in the QC process) such that is it not fit for purpose (that purpose being limited to the use permitted by the licence). 

 

I have decided that the scope for abuse is not acceptable.  Fortunately it is possible to disable this licence, which is what I have now done for my entire portfolio.  I am sure I will miss a few genuine sales (a couple of mine have been of images where the subject matter would make a nice personal print), but for myself, the scope for abuse is too great for me to continue with this.

 

Graham

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4 hours ago, Graham said:

I have had another Personal Use refund.  Contributor Relations say it was a credit card fraud and there is nothing they can do about it.

 

But Alamy could do something about it for the future, (a) by not releasing the image until payment, and (b) not allowing refunds unless there is a proven technical issue (e.g. something missed in the QC process) such that is it not fit for purpose (that purpose being limited to the use permitted by the licence). 

 

I have decided that the scope for abuse is not acceptable.  Fortunately it is possible to disable this licence, which is what I have now done for my entire portfolio.  I am sure I will miss a few genuine sales (a couple of mine have been of images where the subject matter would make a nice personal print), but for myself, the scope for abuse is too great for me to continue with this.

 

Graham

Yes, absolutely agree. If these sales are truly for 'personal use' then they should be paid for by credit card before downloading. The fact that most are paid some time later gives it away that these are account clients and therefore, by definition, not 'personal'. I'm afraid that Alamy's pandering to dubious clients and dubious extra usage, way over and above that of the 'licence' has gone way, way too far. I'm sure Alamy as a library is not the only offender here but here is where we are.

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On 22/07/2017 at 10:23, Graham said:

I have had another Personal Use refund.  Contributor Relations say it was a credit card fraud and there is nothing they can do about it.

 

But Alamy could do something about it for the future, (a) by not releasing the image until payment, and (b) not allowing refunds unless there is a proven technical issue (e.g. something missed in the QC process) such that is it not fit for purpose (that purpose being limited to the use permitted by the licence). 

 

I have decided that the scope for abuse is not acceptable.  Fortunately it is possible to disable this licence, which is what I have now done for my entire portfolio.  I am sure I will miss a few genuine sales (a couple of mine have been of images where the subject matter would make a nice personal print), but for myself, the scope for abuse is too great for me to continue with this.

 

Graham

It's possible to change the setting not to allow personal use, but when you do this it says that it will be applied to all future photos.

So there doesn't seem to be a way to change it for photos already uploaded, without doing it individually for each photo, or is there ?

 

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33 minutes ago, Sally said:

It's possible to change the setting not to allow personal use, but when you do this it says that it will be applied to all future photos.

So there doesn't seem to be a way to change it for photos already uploaded, without doing it individually for each photo, or is there ?

 

 

You can e-mail contributors@alamy.com and they will do it for you.

 

However, bear in mind that by doing so, you're also opting out of distributors sales if you're opted in.

 

Gen

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Quote

So there doesn't seem to be a way to change it for photos already uploaded, without doing it individually for each photo, or is there ?

Yes. it is possible to do them in batches of up to 500, as I have discovered.

 

Select a submission (left column), then holding down Ctrl (on a PC - possibly Cmd on a Mac, but I don't have one) select the next one, and so on.  This enables you to select all the images in any particular group of submissions.  The total number of images cumulatively selected will show on the top of the central section.  You can either watch the count here, or see when the check box "Select all passed" at the top changes to "select first 500 passed": if it changes in this way, step back one so that you are not selecting more than 500.  Then check "Select all passed" on the top bar (which can take a little time to respond, so you may have to be patient), then once this shows as checked, in the Optional section you will be able to tick the box to disable personal use for all the selected images.  I have some 12,000 images and even at up to 500 at a time it still took a long time, but it is possible with a little perseverance.

 

I wish there was some way to check (search for) the status of individual licence restriction settings.  As I was going through this exercise, I was expecting that all 4 of the "restrictions" boxes would be clear and unchecked.  To my surprise, on several occasions as I made selections of groups of images, some of the top three restrictions boxes appeared filled with a green square, indicating that some, but not all, of the images in the selection had been restricted already.  With a very limited number of exceptions, I was not expecting this: I had thought that almost all of my images are on sale free of restrictions (other than the new PU restriction).  I would like to be able to search for the images that have restrictions other than a PU restriction, so that I can check whether there is a good reason for the restrictions to be in place, but I cannot see any way of doing so.  If this is possible, I would be grateful to hear how to do this.  Certainly I am not going to trawl one by one through over 12,000 images to find out which have restrictions other than the PU restrictions I have just created, but I am concerned that some (an unknown number) may somehow have become accidentally restricted: of course, unless I deliberately choose to set a restriction, I want all possible licences to be available.

 

Graham

 

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8 hours ago, Graham said:

Yes. it is possible to do them in batches of up to 500, as I have discovered.

 

Select a submission (left column), then holding down Ctrl (on a PC - possibly Cmd on a Mac, but I don't have one) select the next one, and so on.  This enables you to select all the images in any particular group of submissions.  The total number of images cumulatively selected will show on the top of the central section.  You can either watch the count here, or see when the check box "Select all passed" at the top changes to "select first 500 passed": if it changes in this way, step back one so that you are not selecting more than 500.  Then check "Select all passed" on the top bar (which can take a little time to respond, so you may have to be patient), then once this shows as checked, in the Optional section you will be able to tick the box to disable personal use for all the selected images.  I have some 12,000 images and even at up to 500 at a time it still took a long time, but it is possible with a little perseverance.

 

I wish there was some way to check (search for) the status of individual licence restriction settings.  As I was going through this exercise, I was expecting that all 4 of the "restrictions" boxes would be clear and unchecked.  To my surprise, on several occasions as I made selections of groups of images, some of the top three restrictions boxes appeared filled with a green square, indicating that some, but not all, of the images in the selection had been restricted already.  With a very limited number of exceptions, I was not expecting this: I had thought that almost all of my images are on sale free of restrictions (other than the new PU restriction).  I would like to be able to search for the images that have restrictions other than a PU restriction, so that I can check whether there is a good reason for the restrictions to be in place, but I cannot see any way of doing so.  If this is possible, I would be grateful to hear how to do this.  Certainly I am not going to trawl one by one through over 12,000 images to find out which have restrictions other than the PU restrictions I have just created, but I am concerned that some (an unknown number) may somehow have become accidentally restricted: of course, unless I deliberately choose to set a restriction, I want all possible licences to be available.

 

Graham

 

That's great, thanks, I will give it a try.

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