Tips from the Alamy stand at the Photography Show

[mickfly]

I would have liked to ask if ANY staff members use AIM themselves as contributors, and if so, why it hasn't been fixed when they took time off work with RSI?

 

[Alamy]

Hello everyone

 

We’d like to elaborate on the different subjects as we can see this thread has caused a bit of confusion.

 

Keywording

 

As a business Alamy has always asked contributors to keyword their own images. This means you can get your images on sale quicker with the most accurate information. As a potential one off, we can apply the super tag allocation for some photographers if they have a very large batch of images they need to supertag but it’s not something we can do automatically for each individual submission. 

 

The idea of the 10 first tags automatically turning to supertags is a good idea, but would unfortunately not work for everyone, and could have a negative effect for many photographers that are uploading images with attached metadata. We want contributors to consider their supertags carefully which is another reason why this process is not automated. 

 

Multiple accounts

 

We don’t recommend creating several accounts for your images. The advice was given to a specific scenario, for most situations having different pseudonyms is the most appropriate course. If you have any questions on what would be the best option for your collection please get in touch with contributor relations.

 

Batch sizes

 

We recommend to upload fresh images on a regular basis. New images can be filtered in the search results so if you’re uploading fresh images regularly they will be shown higher up if customers are using this filter. It doesn't mean that uploading regularly gives you a higher rank.

 

Captions only

 

Images submitted through Live News or archive route can go online with just captions. We highly recommend to add tags and supertags to your archive uploads to make the images more searchable. For any photos uploaded through stock, a minimum of 5 tags are required.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Thanks

Alamy

[Ed Rooney]

Someone please give James a hug from Edo!

 

Thanks

 

[famousbelgian]

Mmmm ... I was going to reply but I sense it is probably best that I don't. 

[John Mitchell]

By "better overall rating," perhaps Alamy also means your QC rating -- i.e. you're more likely to move up to three QC stars if you successfully upload small batches of images frequently rather than, say, uploading one large batch every couple of months or so.

[Ed Rooney]

Keywording

If, like me, you keyword your images in advance before uploading to Alamy and, like me, put the 10 most important keywords in the front, you can ask Alamy to turn the first 10 keywords into supertags. This avoids you having to go into the AIM to pick your 10 supertags manually. A simple email to Contributor Relations is all that is required.

 

  >>> I do my tagging after QC passes my images, and I do everything manually, one image at a time. 

 

Valuable Images

I never realised you can ask to create several accounts with Alamy (within reason of course). This means you can have one account (A) for all your more unique or valuable images, and another account (B) for the images you don't mind selling for below-average prices. Images in Account A can then be restricted for Personal Use, Novel Use, Editorial, etc without your images in Account B being affected by these restrictions. This is particularly useful if you have some historically important and unique images which a potential buyer is not going to find anywhere else. Note that having two accounts is NOT the same as having two pseudonyms as any restrictions in one account will apply to all pseudonyms in that account.

 

  >>> I have only one account, one pseudo, and as I said, I work manually on one image at a time. 

 

Batch sizes

They confirmed to me that there is a definite advantage when uploading small batches of images, i.e. it is better for your overall rating to upload a batch of 100 images once a week compared with uploading 400 images once a month.

 

  >>> I usually submit small batches of 6 to 20 two or three times a week. I find larger batches intimidating to deal with in PP and tagging.

 

Captions

Captions are very important to the search engine. In fact, you can submit images without keywords but they MUST have a caption. An example was given of contributors with massive bulk uploads who normally only include a caption.

 

  >>> That's good, because I've been taking captions very seriously, and I try to have them full of information. 

 

Thanks for the report.

 

Edo

 

[wiskerke]

Multiple accounts

 

We've seen some contributors using it to post here with 0 images concealing their portfolio. Much frowned upon.

 

However consider this benefit: you could enter our Monthly Challenge twice!

(-8 days left)

 

wim