Do Larger Size Images Sell Better Than Smaller One?

[Ed Rooney]

'Siesta' is so much more, ah . . . continental than 'nap.' It's been raining, so I'm at home and I cooked authentic Romano and teated myself to a Valpolicella, not the top Italian red. Brunello and Barolo would hold that place.  But Valpolicello is my favorite. In England I found it labeled as Bertani Secco.

 

Is wine going off topic here? Wine is NEVER off topic! 

[alphaomega]

I look at the corners of the image to determine if downsizing is required. This is mostly if I use my A6000 with the 10-18mm w/a zoom at the wide end. Remarkably, my RX100M3 is mostly sharp at full size even in the corners. A built in good Zeiss lens will always have the correct distance from lens to sensor to produce consistent results even with a smaller sensor.

 

On sharpening, I never sharpen in Photoshop. I need to sharpen in Camera Raw as an unsharpened Raw image would fail. The pre setting in ACR is 25 in any case. I give it some help if required especially if a lot of luminance needs to be removed in shadowy areas.

 

There is a failure in Alamy QC relating to pictures "without definition". Hard to image many RAW based images passing without a little assistance from "Contrast" and/or "Clarity" in PS.

 

Who knows how much sharpening the camera manufacturers add to their JPEGs to make the images look attractive.

[Bryan]

Not a direct answer Ed, but I've noticed that my highest dollar sale (by far) was for a mural on an office wall. I guess that pixel count would be a factor in that instance, but I can't confirm that the buyer searched by image size. For the record I think it was taken with a 5DII, which, from memory, has about 21 MP. 

 

One of these mega sales provides an income comparable to numerous newspaper leases, so, maybe there is an argument that bigger is better.

[John Mitchell]

24 minutes ago, Bryan said:

Not a direct answer Ed, but I've noticed that my highest dollar sale (by far) was for a mural on an office wall. I guess that pixel count would be a factor in that instance, but I can't confirm that the buyer searched by image size. For the record I think it was taken with a 5DII, which, from memory, has about 21 MP. 

 

One of these mega sales provides an income comparable to numerous newspaper leases, so, maybe there is an argument that bigger is better.

 

Come to think of it, my best sale on Alamy was for billboard use. The image was captured with a 10 MP Sony DSLR but upsized to 52 MB back when we were required to uprez every file to at least 48 MB.

 

I think that bigger can be better, but bigger isn't necessary for the majority of sales, especially editorial.

 

 

[ReeRay]

5 hours ago, Bryan said:

Not a direct answer Ed, but I've noticed that my highest dollar sale (by far) was for a mural on an office wall. I guess that pixel count would be a factor in that instance, but I can't confirm that the buyer searched by image size. For the record I think it was taken with a 5DII, which, from memory, has about 21 MP. 

 

One of these mega sales provides an income comparable to numerous newspaper leases, so, maybe there is an argument that bigger is better.

 

Again, my highest license was for a restaurant outdoor promotion shot with a Canon 5D2 at 54Mb, the previous highest licence being a 70Mb medium format film image. I do believe that one should upload the biggest possible size that meets QC. 

[Ed Rooney]

I don't factor rare one-offs, like the ones mentioned by Bryan, Geoff and ReeRay, into my workflow. But thanks, guys. 

[MDM]

4 minutes ago, GS-Images said:

If anyone's interested, this is the reply I just received about file size from CR (thanks Corin):

 

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200MB is the maximum file size (25MB compressed) but we recommend files between 50 – 70MB as we’re very rarely asked by customers for images bigger than this and larger images can cause processing errors.

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Isn't 25MB the point after which the SizeChecker utility says it's too large? I remember one of the contributors here saying that's no longer an issue. Although compressed files vary a lot depending on the content of course.

 

Geoff.

That was me I think.  The 25MB disk size hasn't mattered for years ((I've never seen it) but the 200MB uncompressed size is the thing to watch with panoramas. However, I uploaded one accidentally a while back that was over the 200MB and it wasn't rejected so I did wonder if that had been lifted. Obviously it hasn't. 200MB is still a huge file for Alamy as noted above.

[MDM]

1 hour ago, GS-Images said:

 

Thanks for that. I've just re-uploaded the same image at just under 25MB (I forget the uncompressed size, but I made sure it was under 200MB). I wouldn't usually upload something so huge - My first time actually. 

 

Geoff.

Forget about the 25MB file size on disk, it is completely irrelevant nowadays. I guess it must have applied in the past but it is out of date and misleading. Most files from a D800/810 are larger than that 25MB on disk (with an uncompressed size of about 104MB in 8-bit) so would have to be downsized or cropped in order to get under that bar which is certainly not desirable and not the case. Just focus on the uncompressed size (pixel dimensions in Photoshop).

[Michael_Jacobs]

Might not have enough "large size" images in my collection, most are 12mp, I do have some up to 36mp (if my memory serves me well). Second thing is the sale resolution is not always given in Alamy's report... But never sold images beyond 12mp, a very few...