Have you done your legacy images?

[Betty LaRue]

I tested nine images dating back from 2009 to 11. One wasn't on the first 3 pages, I didn't go deeper. One was on the second page.

All the rest were on the first page, several at #1. Like one that was #1, #4, and #7, first page.

 

I'll keep on doing what I'm doing.

Betty

[Pearl]

26 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I tested nine images dating back from 2009 to 11. One wasn't on the first 3 pages, I didn't go deeper. One was on the second page.

All the rest were on the first page, several at #1. Like one that was #1, #4, and #7, first page.

 

I'll keep on doing what I'm doing.

Betty

But how many pages altogether in the search you did Betty?  I am just finding that for a given search, those that have been done are generally behind those that haven't.  One image in particular was nowhere to be seen and I gave up at page 100 whereas it had been on page 1.

 

Pearl

[John Mitchell]

26 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I tested nine images dating back from 2009 to 11. One wasn't on the first 3 pages, I didn't go deeper. One was on the second page.

All the rest were on the first page, several at #1. Like one that was #1, #4, and #7, first page.

 

I'll keep on doing what I'm doing.

Betty

 

I'm starting to see some of the old images that I've reworked move up in search results. Whether or not this will result in more sales remains to be seen. However, I plan to keep on meandering through my collection when the urge strikes, tinkering as I go.

[Betty LaRue]

Pearl, the images I chose weren't subjects with only a few pages of results. I'm sorry, but I didn't pay that much attention to that. Just know there were quite a few pages.

And, Geoff, if I had as many images as you do, I might have the same opinion.  But we of relatively small ports need some way not to be buried behind you of huge ports. 

All I can say is that my zooms are very healthy, so I would assume that my highly placed images are of interest to buyers. And, while I'm not selling a lot, even so, August sales were nearly double of July's. My sales are pretty much following the formula of one sale per 1000. Sometimes less, sometimes more. And that gets harder and harder to maintain considering how bloated the total image count of Alamy is getting. Way more competition than when I joined. I'm not prolific, so I'm constantly losing ground.

 

That said, we all who don't have large ports have good months and bad months, that's the nature of it, and has always been so. 

 

Pearl, you strike me as a very competent processor, so I doubt that you failed to have good captions like I did and do. I'm good recently, but like I said before, I failed captions miserably for years. Fixing those probably plays somewhat into my success with my reworked images. 

Hard to say. I do know I'm adding phrases to quite a few of the oldies.

Those of you who have done it right from the beginning might not see the improvement I'm seeing. Hard to improve on near perfection. 

I added a lot of quotes to my tags at one time. Those didn't translate well. A mess. I'm having to delete those tag phrases and add them again.

and I'm finding long strings of what should be single tags lumped together into one. Fixing those messes has to help.

Betty

[John Mitchell]

5 hours ago, geogphotos said:

Trying to look at the big picture can anyone see how all this activity is improving the search experience for buyers?

 

It strikes me that really all that  is happening is that contributors have been offered a way to improve the search positions of their own images compared with the previous system which was more based on customer activity. 

 

How is this a better system overall, rather than from the perspective of the individual contributor?

 

To put it crudely if your images ( and mine!) were where they were out of merit based on customer activity and sales then being able to elevate them though doing busy work that others won't do seems a strange, actually contradictory, way to improve things for the buyer.

 

 

 

Did buyers actually ask for an improved search experience, I wonder (?).

 

It seems to me that rank and sales still count a lot more than any minor changes that might come about through busy work -- i.e. reworking tags probably won't be of much help to contributors who have a low rank and few sales.

 

 

[Colblimp]

I don't know what to do re: 'legacy' images.  I'm so new that none of my pics can really be called 'legacy'!  I guess doing my port now whilst it's still so small is the thing to do.

 

Re: Phillipe, my goodness, isn't he missed?!  I can absolutely understand why he felt the need to leave as certain people on here seem to be cantankerous, which there's absolutely no need for - manners cost nothing and it's nice to be nice!  Anyway, I wish Phillipe would come back!

[Pearl]

12 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

Pearl, you strike me as a very competent processor, so I doubt that you failed to have good captions like I did and do. I'm good recently, but like I said before, I failed captions miserably for years. Fixing those probably plays somewhat into my success with my reworked images. 

Hard to say. I do know I'm adding phrases to quite a few of the oldies.

Those of you who have done it right from the beginning might not see the improvement I'm seeing. Hard to improve on near perfection. 

I added a lot of quotes to my tags at one time. Those didn't translate well. A mess. I'm having to delete those tag phrases and add them again.

and I'm finding long strings of what should be single tags lumped together into one. Fixing those messes has to help.

Betty

I have always put fairly comprehensive captions on my images including location where that mattered so I am now only adding a bit more info with the extra characters that we have.  

What distresses me particularly is that the image I am referring to that is now on page >100 has sold a couple of times for reasonable prices.  It is not a true legacy image as it was shot last summer but was keyworded in the old system. Now it is so far out of sight that I doubt it will sell again unless for a very specific search.

I should add that the tests I have been doing that had such bad outcomes were single word searches.  Double of multi-word searches give much better results but not necessarily better than before.

 

Pearl

[Betty LaRue]

8 hours ago, geogphotos said:

 

Yes, it would help to know what was 'broken', or at least what the goal is. I can see that from an individual perspective that there are tools available to tag work and gain an advantage knowing that others won't. But I can't see the overall gain from that process.

 

Not sure how this AIM change increases Alamy and contributor revenue and would like to see some initiatives more focused on that purpose.

You are missing the point as far as I'm concerned.

Read my lips...

My legacy images did not transition well in the new AIM.  Many broken tags with a single end letter missing from a tag and the single letter in a tag box all by itself.  How would you feel about a tag "bird" ending up "bir" "d"?  Every phrase where I used quotes completely shattered. Long strings of what should be single tags clumped together in one tag box.

I'm just trying to get my tags back to the searchable experience they had before the transition. I'm not gaming the system. I'm just doing the work to restore them to what they used to be.  That has no impact for the buyer experience, other than they can find my fixed images now with a keyword search that is as it once was instead of broken.

As far as gaining an advantage over those who don't do the work? Who knows....some say their images slipped after doing the work. And if I want to do the work and others don't, that's not my fault. My good or bad, your good or bad.

I can only control my portfolio, I can't control yours.  I doubt my paltry port and sales will impact yours. If I had your numbers, Geoff, and I did the work and you didn't, that might change a bit. Not that much, though, because few images of my subject matter would be in your port to compete with. Only if you traveled to the U.S. And shot the subjects I shoot.

Betty

[John Mitchell]

It seems to me that the new AIM was mainly an attempt to "modernize" the system. It did address some of the issues that contributors had with the old system, but it has also created new ones. That's always the case, though, which is why  I never "upgrade" anything until I absolutely have to.

[Betty LaRue]

45 minutes ago, GS-Images said:

 

*Cough*

 

I know you can't help thinking about me, and I don't blame you - Who wouldn't constantly think about someone who likes cows? It's perfectly natural. However, on this occasion, it caused you to use my rather splendid name in place of Ian. Your punishment is that you aren't allowed to visit my cows for a week.

 

Oh and if you get it right, changing tags is very beneficial. I'm very happy that most don't bother because I know I get a big advantage, and to be honest I've had enough of explaining why it works for some and not others, but it falls on deaf ears.

 

Geoff.

Lol, yes, I must've had you on my mind! That's because of your winning personality and all of those beautiful cows! Although I must admit a little lingering resentment after one cow bucked me off when I was eight. Thank heavens for my stepfather who rescued me mid-air.

Never, never substitute a cow for a longed-for horse. Besides the fact that cows have bony backs.

Betty

[Betty LaRue]

I can see that from an individual perspective that there are tools available to tag work and gain an advantage knowing that others won't. But I can't see the overall gain from that process.

 

Sorry, but that reads like you think I'm doing the work to gain an advantage when all I'm doing is restoring the images searchability to what they once had. That is my overall gain.

I rest my case. 

[John Mitchell]

27 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I can see that from an individual perspective that there are tools available to tag work and gain an advantage knowing that others won't. But I can't see the overall gain from that process.

 

Sorry, but that reads like you think I'm doing the work to gain an advantage when all I'm doing is restoring the images searchability to what they once had. That is my overall gain.

I rest my case. 

 

I too see it as house-cleaning. My little office needs dusting and vacuuming as well. I tend to procrastinate...

[Betty LaRue]

Maybe it just seemed that way since this was my thread. 

[ChrisC]

On 9/3/2017 at 22:41, Betty LaRue said:

I'm not so organized myself, John. But better at that than having technical knowledge. I title all of my new subs as I upload.  You know what's in the batch, so soon as it begins uploading you can title it. 

For instance, a few months back one of my uploads was of chocolate cake, home made. Titling "Chocolate Cake" allows me to find that subject in AIM should I want to duplicate some of the tags for a newly uploaded image.

 

And Geoff, you are so right about the forum having a forlorn air without Philippe. His personality is larger than life and he injected that energy into his posts.  

There was another Geoff (Kidd) who was very knowledgeable that I believe was driven out a few years ago because a few people were very argumentative with nearly anything he said. He helped me years ago more than I can say through PMs explaining how to do cutouts among other PS skills. A good guy and a gentleman.

And remember Linda Matlow? She withdrew her images to protect them. She's still busy shooting celebs in Chicago. She was up for trying out about every new camera.  Miss her on the forum, too. But I keep up with her on social media.

Betty

Didn't know Philippe had gone? That's a shame, he seemed a good guy to me too and always gave good advice, I vaguely remember Linda & Geoff too.

 

I hope he's ok and wish him all the best, if anyone actually speaks to him, let him know please

Chris

[geoff s]

Continuing to go off topic.....

Whatever happened to David Kilpatrick ? A useful source of technical hardware knowledge.

 

Geoff (not the one that's gone AWOL)

[Betty LaRue]

48 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

 

I understand that today he is at Photovision in Ireland promoting Cameracraft. He is on Facebook 

Happy to know he's still active. Wish he was active here. I always trusted his expertise.

[Doc]

Hi Betty and others,

 

Betty, you said in one comment,

 

"My legacy images did not transition well in the new AIM.  Many broken tags with a single end letter missing from a tag and the single letter in a tag box all by itself.  How would you feel about a tag "bird" ending up "bir" "d"?  Every phrase where I used quotes completely shattered. Long strings of what should be single tags clumped together in one tag box."

 

I have not really looked much at keywords in my legacy images for reasons already explained. However only a very small proportion have the problem of loads of keywords all merged in to one tag. Is anyone aware of any reason why that should have happened in those particular instances, and, more importantly, does anyone know of a way of searching out those legacy images where it might have happened, to make repair easier?

 

Kind regards

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

[Bill Brooks]

Doc

It wont make it any easier for you today but I think my merged keywords happened when I lost some commas when dividing my keywords between the three boxes in the old AIM

The keywords came into the bottom box complete with commas, and in importance order.

The I cut and pasted the first most important keywords, complete with commas into the top box.

Then I cleaned up by deleting the dangling comma and maybe the space at the end of the last keyword in the top box. BIG MISTAKE !!!

It meant that there was no comma or space between the last word in the top box and the first word in the middle box, resulting in those two keywords becoming one tag.

The old AIM still needed a string of all keywords separated by commas to convert to the new tags.

Fortunately I was inconsistent in comma deletion, so most came out OK

[Bill Brooks]

On 9/4/2017 at 15:42, geogphotos said:

How is this a better system overall, rather than from the perspective of the individual contributor?

 

To put it crudely if your images ( and mine!) were where they were out of merit based on customer activity and sales then being able to elevate them though doing busy work that others won't do seems a strange, actually contradictory, way to improve things for the buyer.

 

 

 

I look at cleaning up my legacy keywording and applying the new features in the new AIM as an upgrade. The same way I occasionally upgrade my software, camera, computer etc.

 

If contributors use the new AIM to keyword properly, eliminate keyword spam, delete inferior images, use keyword phrases, convert some RM to RF, give Google location information, use trending new words, relate old images to today’s problems, fill out the people places info, select the two categories, use the additional information box, indicate if available only on Alamy, I think that would result in a better search experience for the buyer.

[Betty LaRue]

5 hours ago, Bill Brooks said:

 

I look at cleaning up my legacy keywording and applying the new features in the new AIM as an upgrade. The same way I occasionally upgrade my software, camera, computer etc.

 

If contributors use the new AIM to keyword properly, eliminate keyword spam, delete inferior images, use keyword phrases, convert some RM to RF, give Google location information, use trending new words, relate old images to today’s problems, fill out the people places info, select the two categories, use the additional information box, indicate if available only on Alamy, I think that would result in a better search experience for the buyer.

I agree. All of the information a buyer might want would be available.

[John Mitchell]

1 hour ago, geogphotos said:

And as yet nobody has pointed out what the problem is that the new system is supposed to be fixing. 

 

 

Only Alamy can answer that one. No?

 

My uneducated guess is that there was no overriding problem that the new AIM was supposed to fix. It was just time to upgrade mainly for upgrading's sake, which is a very common phenomenon these days.

 

 

[Betty LaRue]

1 hour ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Only Alamy can answer that one. No?

 

My uneducated guess is that there was no overriding problem that the new AIM was supposed to fix. It was just time to upgrade mainly for upgrading's sake, which is a very common phenomenon these days.

 

 

One advantage that was asked for was the ability to add a tag globally to already tagged images without losing the tags already in place. Another, say you have a set of three similars you've just uploaded, tagged ahead of time or not. You can select all three, add a phrase you've just thought of to them at once, or completely tag all three at once,  rather than add it to one in the old system, then copy and paste to each of the other two.

Once I get my legacy images finished, I'll be happy. I tag my images in Bridge. I use Bridge to create templates of often used basic tags that I can apply to new images, then add ones that suit that particular image. (Think bird flying, bird perching) Once in AIM, doing the rest on the Optional page is quick. It probably takes me half the time to ready a new upload in AIM than doing it the old way and having the tags clumped together and then doing all the copy/paste to separate them into three boxes.

I have a basic template with basic information. Then I have separate templates for every bird, butterfly, plant, etc. with common and scientific name in the tag field. Included is location, since 95% are shot in my home town. Any subject that you may shoot multiple times deserves a template.

 

By using templates for commonly used tags, I avoid needing to figure out how to find an old image to copy tags over to a new image. The templates are titled and easy to find alphabetically. Highlight my image(s), apply the template with one click, add a couple of differentiating tags and I'm done. Upload.

So the new system suits me and my way of working better than the old. 

The ability to do the prepping on my iPad is great. My sofa is more comfortable than my desk chair.

This is how the new AIM makes it better for me, but I can't address the buyer's needs.  It seems when I do searches, everything works as before. As far as the tinkering with the search engine, I guess Alamy is attempting to make that better for the buyers, but so far with mixed results.

All that said, the new AIM only makes doing new images easy. But it sure messed up over 4000 images. 

 

[John Mitchell]

"One advantage that was asked for was the ability to add a tag globally to already tagged images without losing the tags already in place. Another, say you have a set of three similars you've just uploaded, tagged ahead of time or not. You can select all three, add a phrase you've just thought of to them at once, or completely tag all three at once,  rather than add it to one in the old system, then copy and paste to each of the other two."

 

Good examples. Those definitely were things that needed fixing in the old system.

[Martin Carlsson]

3 hours ago, geogphotos said:

And what percentage of the 105 million images on Alamy would you estimate have been reworked so far? And will ever be?

 

My assumption is that none/hardly any of the agencies or larger contributors will find the time, that a lot of contributors have lost interest since they started and are hardly active, and that it will only be a relatively small proportion of contributors and a relatively small proportion of images that ever get to be reworked. I doubt that agencies sending in a new hard disc or submitting by FTP will even get around to using the new AIM system for new and current images. I send in images by FTP,  they go on sale more easily than before, and that is good enough for me. 

 

Surely the whole point is that an individual CAN improve their own position because most images WON'T be reworked.  Great for the contributor but I don't see how it ends up making much difference to the overall search experience.

 

And as yet nobody has pointed out what the problem is that the new system is supposed to be fixing. 

 

 

The new AIM being faster to get new images to live (in my experience) and more slim lined with only two classes of tags/keywords.

 

If visible advantages are not convincing enough, one could speculate that perhaps it could be a back-end issue i.e. the roadmap ahead for developments in the tech that we don't see (storage, search tech, admin etc.) would not agree with old AIM or being a limiter, thus making an upgrade necessary. Just guessing.

[regen]

3 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

My uneducated guess is that there was no overriding problem that the new AIM was supposed to fix. It was just time to upgrade mainly for upgrading's sake, which is a very common phenomenon these days.

 

Which is why I aint playing unless they are paying.

 

4 hours ago, geogphotos said:

My assumption is that none/hardly any of the agencies or larger contributors will find the time, that a lot of contributors have lost interest since they started and are hardly active, and that it will only be a relatively small proportion of contributors and a relatively small proportion of images that ever get to be reworked. I doubt that agencies sending in a new hard disc or submitting by FTP will even get around to using the new AIM system for new and current images. I send in images by FTP,  they go on sale more easily than before, and that is good enough for me. 

 

Surely the whole point is that an individual CAN improve their own position because most images WON'T be reworked.  Great for the contributor but I don't see how it ends up making much difference to the overall search experience.

 

And as yet nobody has pointed out what the problem is that the new system is supposed to be fixing. 

+1

 

Regen