Older Images selling very well.

[cbimages]

I did some tag tweaking in AIM, and whether coincidence or as a result, seem to be licencing more older images. From 3 November to 1 December I've had 7 licences. One image ID started with an E, One with an A and 5 started with B.

[Betty LaRue]

I agree. In the past 3 months, and after extensive work on my legacy images, I’ve sold 5 Bs, an A, a C, and a D. A few of those licensed within a few days of fixing them. It’s not that I never sold an oldie, I did, but not this many. 

 

I left location out of many captions of the oldies, and I fixed them. It was a sin to have a bird but not tell the area or country the bird belongs to. Nor did I have it in the tags on some. I guess I thought the common and Latin names were enough. WRONG!

Betty

[Bill Kuta]

I have not done any legacy work, but this year I've sold more A images than any other, as usual pretty much in line with the distribution of my collection.

[Pearl]

Those of us who have been here long enough probably have more A, B and C images because it took a lot longer for numbers to build up in the early years.  I always sell more of the older images but it has been more noticeable since the search engine change last December.  My older images tend to come up before the more recent ones in most searches and it's not because I have gone back to re tagging etc, quite the opposite in fact.  Perhaps I did a better job back then than I do now.

 

Pearl 

[John Mitchell]

My older images continue to do well (relatively speaking) despite the fact that for the majority of them I have yet to clean up the tag mess that resulted after the new AIM was introduced. However, I am noticing that some of my old repeat-sellers are starting to get buried in the pile. 

[Keith Douglas]

If you have been contributing images at a regular rate for many years then you will have far more images beginning with D than you do images beginning with, say, J. This is because the later letters are being used up much more quickly as the rate of addition of images to Alamy has increased over time.

 

Therefore, if sales are distributed evenly by age of image you would expect to see a much higher number of sales of your images beginning with D than you do sales of images beginning with, say, J.

 

The corollary of this is that if you are seeing the same number of sales of your images beginning with D as you are of your images beginning with J, your older images are actually doing much less well than your newer ones! 

 

I estimate the D to J ratio to be roughly 4:1

[spacecadet]

Perhaps it's more useful to keep track of the year rather than reference.

I have a spreadsheet of year taken against year sold and as you'd expect it bulges in the middle. But perhaps it's only practical if you have comparatively few sales. Keith probably wouldn't have time to fill it in.

In case anyone is interested:

C-spring 2011- Nov 2012

D- to Apr '14

E- to Aug '15

F- to Apr '16

G- to Sep 16

H- to Mar 17

J- to 21 Aug 17

[Betty LaRue]

All of that doesn’t explain why I’m selling double/triple of older images than I did before working over my images. 

I expect some of the differences just might lie in the fact my older images

Were. Not. Tagged. Or. Captioned. Well.

Now they are. They also did not fare well with the new Aim. Truncated, broken up, single letter from a tag in a box by itself making that tag worthless. A quote on one side of a one word tag that used to be a phrase.

”German Shepherd dogs” might become

“German

shepherd

d

og

s”

 

Maybe yours always have been tagged well enough and fared better than mine with the changeover.

Betty

[Stokie]

Sold an image from 2008 this morning for $58.94.

 

Not done any retagging. Just looked at the image in AIM and it is green, so it must have been tagged properly originally.

 

John.

[Bill Brooks]

18 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

All of that doesn’t explain why I’m selling double/triple of older images than I did before working over my images. 

I expect some of the differences just might lie in the fact my older images

Were. Not. Tagged. Or. Captioned. Well.

Now they are. They also did not fare well with the new Aim. Truncated, broken up, single letter from a tag in a box by itself making that tag worthless. A quote on one side of a one word tag that used to be a phrase.

”German Shepherd dogs” might become

“German

shepherd

d

og

s”

 

Maybe yours always have been tagged well enough and fared better than mine with the changeover.

Betty

 

Hi Betty:

I think your keywords were always truncated etc before the new AIM. The new AIM, did not actually do the truncating, just pointed that truncating out, and gave you a chance to correct it.

If you corrected the truncation in the new AIM then you should see better results particularly with old images.

In the old AIM my keywords appeared in the bottom box like so Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3

Then I used that keyword string to cut and pasted keywords into the top two boxes.

The the top box had cut and paste Keyword1

The second box had cut and paste Keyword2

The third box had Keyword3 left in place.

Note the loss of commas and spaces. I thing that was the problem.

The system saw the string as one keyword only Keyword1keyword2keyword3 because of the loss of commas and spaces due to my cut and paste. It should have seen it as Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 and would have, had I left the commas and spaces in when I cut and pasted. This did not help my search position.

[Betty LaRue]

I had some older images with just spaces, but several years ago, I began using commas and quotes. The commas seemed to come across ok, but I believe most of my trouble came from phrases I put quotes around. And I did that a lot.

 

Also, when we had the old 3 box way, I put commas and quotes in the Essential and Main, but often was too lazy to put them in comprehensive. A lot of problems were from Comprehensive.

I always cut and pasted then put in the commas and quotes last thing.  That’s why I got lazy with Comprehensive! 😁

You see, if I used a lot of keywords, I would not only put in commas, but remove the spaces. By the time I got to Comprehensive, I was sick of it, lol.

Betty

[Robert M Estall]

By far the greatest part of my sales codes start with an A or a B. I can't really remember the issue, but there was a change which meant I had to rework all my image details. That was quite a few years back. I never fiddled about with commas or quotes. 

 

Thank heavens old images still sell or I would be up the creek without........

[spacecadet]

7 minutes ago, Robert M Estall said:

By far the greatest part of my sales start with an A or a B. I can't really remember the issue, but I do remember a change which meant I had to rework all my image details. That was quite a few years back. I never fiddles about with commas or quotes. 

 

Thank heavens old images still sell or I would up the creek without........

To be fair that's probably due more to your upload rate. You can't sell recent images you don't have. Besides the "bulge" I mentioned there's also a weaker correlation in my sales with number of images uploaded in a given year.

[Robert M Estall]

Mostly guilty as charged. I did have an archive of 75,000 images from which to select, scan and keyword. There were a lot of what we used to call camera originals so that I could supply my publishing clients with originals rather than going to duplicates. No need for that strategy come digital but I still have an awful lot of 67cm and 35mm transparencies filed away.

 

 So that's why the big "bulge" was right at the beginning. Fortunately they were all comprehensively captioned on a custom database so it was doable. I have a nice little DSLR now and have uploaded sporadically and there have been some sales. I just don't feel the motivation to knock myself out uploading images which seem just padding out the system. Who knows, I may get the old urges back. Looking at my most recent page of uploads there are at least half a dozen have sold so perhaps I should soldier on.