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Failed submissions - non-discrimination


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3 hours ago, Colblimp said:

I've just had my first ever QC failure and I'm absolutely fuming.  Apparently the failure was due to CA, I've looked at 100% over and over and there is no CA.  Methinks someone at Alamy Towers is taking the piss!!!  :angry:

 

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

I went through a bad patch a few years ago. But QC were invariably right. And a couple were for CA- some of it hard to spot.

 

3 hours ago, Colblimp said:

I've just had my first ever QC failure and I'm absolutely fuming.  Apparently the failure was due to CA, I've looked at 100% over and over and there is no CA.  Methinks someone at Alamy Towers is taking the piss!!!  :angry:

Take a hard look at upper corners if you have trees against a bright sky. I missed the tiniest bit in the upper left once...tree against sky...and got a fail. I really honed in carefully after that. 

Betty

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4 hours ago, Colblimp said:

I've just had my first ever QC failure and I'm absolutely fuming.  Apparently the failure was due to CA, I've looked at 100% over and over and there is no CA.  Methinks someone at Alamy Towers is taking the piss!!!  :angry:

 

Seeing this comment (and your subsequent tweets on this) lead us to double check your recent failure. We'd flagged two images (to try and be helpful) in this case and looking at them again, the CA is very obvious even before we look at 100%.

 

This is a simple thing to fix and an easy thing to check for. Your comments on our decision in this thread are rather misleading. It's up to you if you want to post examples for others to look at here but they may help point out the problem areas for you.

 

If you have any questions about the process, please email contributors@alamy.com and the team will be happy to help.

 

Alamy

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Hi again

 

Well thanks for all your comments and thoughts which have at least shaken the hornet's nest if not knocked it off the shed roof.  I have learned a great deal and I agree that there is not much point in arguing with an organisation which bases its quality and public credibility on sensible rules.

 

I am still having items rejected but this is because on some of my work I do 'normal' shots - parks and gardens, icebergs and railway stations type of stuff and on the other I paint and stress photo images to almost destruction in Photoshop, deliberately over-manipulating them to produce 60 meg images with amazing colours. Alamy have emailed me separately saying that is sadly not acceptable to them because of their rules so I will have to stop uploading all that sort of stuff and stick to railway stations (only joking!)...in fact I have a very nice shot of a Lammergaier Egyptian Bearded Vulture if anyone would like to see it!

 

I am much happier now, having understood how it all works.  It has taken me one month to settle in.

 

I am not sure if the remark was aimed at me but someone said that 'horizons were not straight'. I was thrown out of the hearse at my father-in-law's funeral at speed so have a damaged right arm. Maybe if you did mean me, it will help to remind me to check the horizon!  

 

All the very best to you all

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geophotos, it actually really helps to read that even a very seasoned contributor with such a huge port of images can fail submissions. So thanks for being so honest and posting your comment!

 

It really puts the whole thing into perspective much more. When I had a failure (think it's over a year ago) I wasn't aware of the forum, so had a whole lot of "why me, it's not fair" going on, was convinced this must surely only happen to newbies and wanted to give up. Wish I'd seen these sort of comments then, makes a big difference to read about everyone else's mishaps.

 

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Failed pics are really helpful to all of us.

Seeing at 100% what has been rejected beats any discussion or assumption.

 

However, be warned: it has led to (new) glasses here and there in the past. ;-)

 

wim

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1 hour ago, geogphotos said:

Failed again, l the ethos of Alamy is to provide an opportunity for the buyer to have choice.

 

Am a tad puzzled to be honest but not complaining.

Oh dear.

Better ditch the one with the borderline camera shake from my latest sub, then. Thanks for the heads-up.

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1 hour ago, wiskerke said:

Failed pics are really helpful to all of us.

Seeing at 100% what has been rejected beats any discussion or assumption.

 

However, be warned: it has led to (new) glasses here and there in the past. ;-)

 

wim

 

My last failure (for soft / lacking definition) was a week before I finally got my first ever pair of reading glasses.

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14 hours ago, Darkstar said:

Hi again

 

Well thanks for all your comments and thoughts which have at least shaken the hornet's nest if not knocked it off the shed roof.  I have learned a great deal and I agree that there is not much point in arguing with an organisation which bases its quality and public credibility on sensible rules.

 

I am still having items rejected but this is because on some of my work I do 'normal' shots - parks and gardens, icebergs and railway stations type of stuff and on the other I paint and stress photo images to almost destruction in Photoshop, deliberately over-manipulating them to produce 60 meg images with amazing colours. Alamy have emailed me separately saying that is sadly not acceptable to them because of their rules so I will have to stop uploading all that sort of stuff and stick to railway stations (only joking!)...in fact I have a very nice shot of a Lammergaier Egyptian Bearded Vulture if anyone would like to see it!

 

I am much happier now, having understood how it all works.  It has taken me one month to settle in.

 

I am not sure if the remark was aimed at me but someone said that 'horizons were not straight'. I was thrown out of the hearse at my father-in-law's funeral at speed so have a damaged right arm. Maybe if you did mean me, it will help to remind me to check the horizon!  

 

All the very best to you all

Yes, it is you who has some crooked horizons. I constantly use my level line on my camera because I always tilt to the left if I don’t. And my arms are just fine!   If your camera has that feature, turn it on. Really helps for buildings, too. The line in my viewfinder turns green when I have it level.

Betty

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Hi Betty - first of all thanks for the advice on horizons. I do have the cross-hairs showing but I must obviously pay more attention to them!  Anything to get better.

 

A few questions as you are so experienced having been a contributor since 2006:

 

How can you see my photos?

 

Are you Alamy staff or do you have a way of mapping my forum name Darkstar to my real name - in which case what is the point of having a forum name?

 

Why do we have to log in to the forum again with the same email and password when we are already logged in to the system via the dashboard?

 

Despite Alamy writing to me telling me they will accept my art, I am having it all rejected because of the rules as I am too experimental so I am going to have to give up on uploading photo-manipulation. All my normal stuff is being accepted and all my experiments are crashing and burning. I just put up some shots I did on the Venice Festival which I had made into what I thought were quite striking posters but they said they contained too many repeat images and that is because they were made up of lots of minute repetitions.  So I think with Alamy, it's got to be stock material and not art - hey ho!

 

You may have seen stuff by David Hockney and David Bailey made up of thousands of images and I was using that idea but sadly I will have to just do it as a hobby.

 

kind regards and thanks

 

David

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2 hours ago, Darkstar said:

<snip>

How can you see my photos?

</snip>

 

Hi David, 

just click on the blue number of images under a photographers icon in the forum. 

This links that forum name to the associated pictures. 

Everybody can do that :)

 

 

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4 hours ago, Darkstar said:

Hi Betty - first of all thanks for the advice on horizons. I do have the cross-hairs showing but I must obviously pay more attention to them!  Anything to get better.

 

A few questions as you are so experienced having been a contributor since 2006:

 

How can you see my photos?

 

Are you Alamy staff or do you have a way of mapping my forum name Darkstar to my real name - in which case what is the point of having a forum name?

 

Why do we have to log in to the forum again with the same email and password when we are already logged in to the system via the dashboard?

 

Despite Alamy writing to me telling me they will accept my art, I am having it all rejected because of the rules as I am too experimental so I am going to have to give up on uploading photo-manipulation. All my normal stuff is being accepted and all my experiments are crashing and burning. I just put up some shots I did on the Venice Festival which I had made into what I thought were quite striking posters but they said they contained too many repeat images and that is because they were made up of lots of minute repetitions.  So I think with Alamy, it's got to be stock material and not art - hey ho!

 

You may have seen stuff by David Hockney and David Bailey made up of thousands of images and I was using that idea but sadly I will have to just do it as a hobby.

 

kind regards and thanks

 

David

Hi David,
I was fascinated by your fishing boat picture at Birling Gap as I'd never seen anything like it.

birling-gap-views-west-of-eastbourne-KGW

 

That is the sort of picture which (in my opinion) is great for stock, but it really needs keywording better (there are only a few similar ones on Alamy), ie, describe exactly what it is.
Your keywords seem pre-occupied with the cliff, whereas the boat and the lift are IMO more important and the caption is very basic.
The 'more information' field is not searchable, so try to get that info into keywords or caption instead.


This is only friendly advice from someone who is slowly but surely trawling through my own submissions trying to fix excessive keywords and poor captions, but as a result is suffering massive eyestrain from the lousy tagging system on AIM.

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The Birling Boat is a historic photo because the coastguard cottages and hotel/pub at Birling Gap between Eastbourne and Newhaven on the south coast of East Sussex, UK have been demolished because the chalk cliffs are being eroded at a fantastic rate and are falling into the sea. The wave-cut platform is eating into the cliff base and so the nice fisherman had to give up his boat and his home too!

 

He used to lower the boat onto the beach and then winch it back up out of the way of the high tide - an amazing enterprise which we all enjoyed seeing.  Now you cannot even get down the cliff because the metal staircase to the beach has been removed.  I have taken many shots of the sea cliffs here and will put some more onto Alamy (QC permitting!)

 

I also have a boat out of water that is being lifted by a crane in Anzio harbour south of Rome, Italy, so I will put that on too.

 

In passing, I wonder what you can see in your location in the way of sea level rises? I am taking shots of all the fallen trees that collapse onto the beaches and estuaries as the sea undermines their roots - a set of these is already on Alamy. Whole islands will start to disappear too in the Pacific. It is molecular expansion that is doing it more than Greenland melt.  I've been up on the icecap in Greenland and  I lived on the Okstind Glacier in North Norway for 10 days in a tent so I know just how much melting is going on!

 

thanks again

 

David

 

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10 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

Yes, it is you who has some crooked horizons. I constantly use my level line on my camera because I always tilt to the left if I don’t. And my arms are just fine!   If your camera has that feature, turn it on. Really helps for buildings, too. The line in my viewfinder turns green when I have it level.

Betty

 

Me too, my designer sister used to edit images for me and laughed about the ones where Iwas obviously "carrying a heavy camera bag on my left shoulder" ;) Therefore, I use the level in my camera assiduously.

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6 hours ago, Martin P Wilson said:

 

Me too, my designer sister used to edit images for me and laughed about the ones where Iwas obviously "carrying a heavy camera bag on my left shoulder" ;) Therefore, I use the level in my camera assiduously.

She gave you a “poor excuse is better than none!” escape.  :)

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Earlier in the forum I was advised that I needed to ensure that the number of pixels was at least 6 million to have QC accept the file. But I have now been banned for 10 days for uploading using the wrong kind of digital camera. My 2009 shots of the Lofoten Islands, North Cape etc were all taken on a digital camera but it seems that back then I did not have the right type of digital camera. Has anyone else been banned for using the wrong camera? Any idea when DSLR cameras were first up for sale and any idea what Alamy did before they existed? Some of you have been on this site since 2009 or even earlier maybe so how did you manage back then?

 

When my ban is over later in November I shall have to abandon all my old shots some of which show rare items of historic value and some are unique and unrepeatable like my work on the Lebanese border with Israel. What a shame.

 

We live and learn I suppose.

 

Thanks

 

David

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I used to use an Olympus E1 which was 6mp and have sold many images on here from that and they still sell.....I didn't notice it slip from the approved list to the unapproved list and I got a QC fail when I uploaded after that date ! I replaced that with a Nikon D700 and all was fine from then on.

If you have images from back then that are, as you say, of historical interest or are unique, it may well be worth your while applying to Alamy for approval to contribute using the archival route as images uploaded that way bypass QC.

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Well first I bow to someone who has over 10,000 images for sale - you must be doing something right!   I have been using Canon then changed now to Nikon D800. Pixel totals are 12 million for my first digital camera and 17 million for my second (and 36 megapixels for the Nikon)  but the early stuff is sometimes soft - I don't know if pixels degenerate over time like prints going orange!?

 

You have cheered me up because I have Greenland, Iceland, Spitzbergen, Faeroes, North Norway, Lofotens, Cyprus and Lebanon including the Bekaa, Baalbek and right down south in Hisbollah/UN territory so am keen to offer them. So I will do as you suggest. Sincere thanks.

 

kind regards

 

David

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56 minutes ago, Darkstar said:

But I have now been banned for 10 days for uploading using the wrong kind of digital camera.

 

That is absolutely ridiculous, Alamy is treating us like children, which we're not.  Banning the people who essentially pay your wages for using the wrong type of camera?  Alamy, cop on to yourself and stop pissing people off!!!  :angry:

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2 hours ago, Colblimp said:

 

That is absolutely ridiculous, Alamy is treating us like children, which we're not.  Banning the people who essentially pay your wages for using the wrong type of camera?  Alamy, cop on to yourself and stop pissing people off!!!  :angry:

Some older fixed-lens cameras simply can't produce images sharp enough to pass QC. This has always been the case. It's not a new policy.

OP, there have been DSLRs throughout Alamy's existence.

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It’s  a perfectly reasonable policy. If a text book company pays out for a lush double page spread and when they open the file it turns out to be a snap taken with a snapshot camera with a sensor the size of a tealeaf, they are not going to be too impressed. Not all cameras are equal and Alamo is right to police this. As Bill said in another post - Quality quality and quality. 

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46 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Some older fixed-lens cameras simply can't produce images sharp enough to pass QC. This has always been the case. It's not a new policy.

 

 

I appreciate some older cameras don't cut it any more, but banning someone because of the camera they use is childish and pathetic.

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