KODAKovic Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 Hi everybody, my Alamy experience started badly with me having only 4 major sales in over one year and now 2 months from the last sale occurred in late May. It's my fault since i've uploaded in the beginning a lot of similars and may be bad keywordered files with the "cream" of having not properly post processed all my images. Most of you all veterans advised me about these things but it seems i'm a bad student My CTR is low but my views are up (few zooms actually) so it seems topics i covered are requested by customers and my CTR is not so bad. What do you suggest me at this point? 1) Delete badly post processed or similar files 2) Improve keywording BEFORE adding new files 3) Add new files caring more about the above points 4) Play with pseudos 5) Start a new account and add new files there I know 2) and 3) i should do by the way but it would be enough without doing 1) , 4) or the worst option 5) ? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 Carry out 1, then 2. Keeping lots of poor quality and badly captioned and keyworded images doesn't help you or Alamy. You currently appear to have loads of images with exactly the same captions and inappropriate keywords (e.g. "Medieval stones in Tuscany represented for years the impassable limit and the strongest boundary built by humans") even thought the images are of many different subjects. See FWDXEN and the (more than 50) of your "similars" (which aren't similar subject matter) shown by Alamy Having such badly keyworded images on-line damages Alamy's reputation, annoys customers and drives them away from Alamy, HURTING ALL OF US. If you can't face doing 1 then 2 QUICKLY, then delete your entire collection and start again. Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 I've yet to see firm evidence that using various pseudos makes any real difference. They may be useful for cataloguing your shots into categories, or as a pre delete dump, but that's about it. Happy to have this view challenged. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inchiquin Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 1 hour ago, Bryan said: I've yet to see firm evidence that using various pseudos makes any real difference. They may be useful for cataloguing your shots into categories, or as a pre delete dump, but that's about it. Since CTR is calculated on a per-pseudo basis, if pseudos no longer have any relevance then presumably neither does CTR. So is rank now solely dependent on sales and fairy dust? Alan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marc Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 I would curate your collection into 2 pseudonyms. Put strong and properly lit and composed shots into 1 and the rest into 2. That will allow you to easily see if your good work is being zoomed and is selling. Going forward given where you are located you are often working in the travel market much of the time for Italy. Get some great shots (best light, different angles, with and without people) of the well known destinations. You are competing against lots of other great images, but no reason you won't sell those when they come up. Shoot the less well known destinations. Then shoot newsy type Italy pictures that work in the international market. Think about what stories are told in the news, these need images. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KODAKovic Posted July 25, 2017 Author Share Posted July 25, 2017 Thanks all for the advices. Actually i've a great backlog so i could not only think about Italy like for travel destinations and, yes, i've unusual angle of views or lighting for common or unusual subjects, So, it seems to me the majority of you are saying i could work on my mistakes without restarting a new account right? Geoff has been very clear about that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KODAKovic Posted July 25, 2017 Author Share Posted July 25, 2017 Also, as a sidenote i forgot to add i have some images here also on GI and i noticed they sell there so i should have removed these images from my GI port but it's difficult to do now because of their policies on existing images on their catalogue. That is something i should do asap because as most of you said in the past Micro is competing against me this way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jill Morgan Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 I can't help but notice the shadows in a lot of your images. Some shots definitely need to be lightened in the shadows and to me so many overly tight shots that maybe should have been a bit of a wider angle. I would work on some of these in PP, upload the newer one then delete the older one, putting the Alamy number in the keywords of the new image in case someone is looking for it. Jill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malcolm Park Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 59 minutes ago, KODAKovic said: Also, as a sidenote i forgot to add i have some images here also on GI and i noticed they sell there so i should have removed these images from my GI port but it's difficult to do now because of their policies on existing images on their catalogue. That is something i should do asap because as most of you said in the past Micro is competing against me this way. If, by this, you mean GI (another image library) then the same images should not be on here as far as I'm aware. GI is exclusive. Alamy is not. Correct me if wrong. It’s also not clear from the comment if your images are classified as micro elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malcolm Park Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 24 minutes ago, geogphotos said: Not for Editorial. It is non-exclusive. Fair enough. Didn’t see any reference to Editorial when I read the string. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted July 26, 2017 Share Posted July 26, 2017 21 hours ago, geogphotos said: I am not trying to challenge you and I don't know what evidence you want. But do a search for this : Saint Mary, Letheringham, Suffolk, England, UK All the pics that come up are mine split into 3 pseudos: geogphotos - top pseduo, zooms, sales, editor pics geogphoto - pseudo with no zooms/sales OR all zooms and sales removed, AND editor rejects (SuffolkChurches - older stuff, no activity)- ignore this one But before you look at the results ask yourself this: If pseudos make no difference what would the search order be like? Random would be your answer wouldn't it? Images from the pseudos would be intermixed with no sign of order. Compare where 'geogphotos' and 'geogphoto' come in searches. Haven't tried other searches on the same subject so am not challenging you or saying that this is definite evidence of anything. But for me I see that my two main pseudos have different strength. You may have other explanations. I am not being categoric. I would like to think that your best performing pseudo would come top in the searches, and that may well be the case. However when it comes to money earned from the overall collection I'm not sure that this helps. Some of my most remunerative sales have come from the most unlikely candidates whose success I would be unable to predict. I have a pretty good idea which run of the mill shots will be picked for regular newspaper web use, but they yield peanuts. I have only two pseudos, one is for discarded shots, and that has never achieved a sale, or probably even a zoom. If Alamy is calculating the rating of my shots based upon a simple average of my pseudos, then this second pseudo is killing the game. I hope that is not the case. If it's a weighted average, i.e. taking into account the numbers of images in each, then its affect will be negligible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KODAKovic Posted July 28, 2017 Author Share Posted July 28, 2017 Is it random? In the day (yesterday) i started deleting similars (500+) and moving the best pics to a primary pseudo (as someone here suggested) i had 3 zooms. I never had 3 zooms in a day. The strange thing is that none of these zoomed pics have been touched yesterday but it seems CTR (which bumped 40%) greatly affects zooming which is something i don't understand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted July 28, 2017 Share Posted July 28, 2017 4 hours ago, KODAKovic said: Is it random? In the day (yesterday) i started deleting similars (500+) and moving the best pics to a primary pseudo (as someone here suggested) i had 3 zooms. I never had 3 zooms in a day. The strange thing is that none of these zoomed pics have been touched yesterday but it seems CTR (which bumped 40%) greatly affects zooming which is something i don't understand. I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Your zooms affect your CTR. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KODAKovic Posted July 28, 2017 Author Share Posted July 28, 2017 Due to my bad english may be i gave you this impression but i do have a good understanding of either CTR or how pseudos work. A better CTR should lead to better (number of) Views/Zooms/Sales right? When increasing his/her own CTR one's image ranking on search results would be higher so one's images would be in the first pages. Right? I know a better CTR means you have a better ratio between views and zooms for i.e. but in my case i have more zooms without adding or editing images, just deleting some. A potential customer zooms if he/she wants to have better infos on your image before buying. What does that mean to me? That after deleting some of my similars my other images remain quite "visible" the same as in the past but now they "stand up" better than in the past. Instead of just viewing my 30 images across al the others, may be now a potential customer "stops" (zooming) a bit more on the remaining ones of mine he/she prefers. Could it be an explanation? I agree with Mark and Geoff a customer is annoyed when viewing so much similars and skips a page or two completely. May be now on my case the same customer stops more time on my images and zooming some of them (the incredible thing is that happened in just one night!) Replying to all the others here kind answers i have to say i also started to move all pictures on a worst performing pseudo expect the ones i'm re-keywording and re-adjusting (captioning, focusing on best ones among other similars ecc ecc..) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KODAKovic Posted July 28, 2017 Author Share Posted July 28, 2017 On 7/26/2017 at 07:18, Bryan said: I would like to think that your best performing pseudo would come top in the searches, and that may well be the case. However when it comes to money earned from the overall collection I'm not sure that this helps. Some of my most remunerative sales have come from the most unlikely candidates whose success I would be unable to predict. I have a pretty good idea which run of the mill shots will be picked for regular newspaper web use, but they yield peanuts. I have only two pseudos, one is for discarded shots, and that has never achieved a sale, or probably even a zoom. If Alamy is calculating the rating of my shots based upon a simple average of my pseudos, then this second pseudo is killing the game. I hope that is not the case. If it's a weighted average, i.e. taking into account the numbers of images in each, then its affect will be negligible. Bryan, so how did you choose images to be uploaded here? I mean, when you uploaded several candidates and you're saying you are surprised of that didn't you upload other similars you had on your computer? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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