Alamy Lightroom Bridge and Discoverability

[Stephen Barnes]

I have a strange problem when using Jim Keir's Alamy Lightroom bridge.

I spend quite a lot of effort trying to get my metadata fully optimised (10 supertags/50 tags, and ensuring everything is filled in).  The bars on each image shows full green.  Not a problem.

However, when I use the plugin to do a "Set Alamy Data" the discoverability bar on the left side image grid shows orange, but the discoverability bar on the right side image summary shows full green.  It's only when I change the Primary or Secondary Category does it pop back to full green indicating it's optimised.

Has anyone else seen this issue, and do you know of a simple solution, rather than having to reset the category on every affected image?

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ootwbe8rsltyr62/Screenshot 2018-03-28 20.31.09.png?dl=0

Stephen.

[spacecadet]

The problem with filling in 50 tags is that it's then very difficult to add any more later because deletion is generally so tedious. I have precisely no optimised images FWIW.

[Russell]

Apologies if I'm slightly off topic, but I'm confused (not difficult some say!) I've been trying to build a "database" of my zoomed images, and also to reconcile my filenames with the Alamy image no. So I thought I'd try the Jim Keir Bridge & installed the trial. Note I'm more than happy to cough up £25 if it does what I want.

 

Nothing much happens. I get a few smart collections in Lightroom & can enter my login parameters. But there seems to be no data traffic from my machine to Alamy. Moreover, looking at the available smart collections, none of these seem to reflect Zooms. This field must be available within Alamy, but doesn't seem to be part of the Bridge.

 

Can anyone enlighten me please?

[John Richmond]

11 hours ago, spacecadet said:

I have precisely no optimised images FWIW.

Me too.  It's always seemed pointless.

[Cryptoprocta]

On 28/03/2018 at 20:36, Stephen Barnes said:

I have a strange problem when using Jim Keir's Alamy Lightroom bridge.
I spend quite a lot of effort trying to get my metadata fully optimised (10 supertags/50 tags, and ensuring everything is filled in). 
Stephen.

Like others have said, there really is no value in 50 tags unless they are relevant to the file.

There can surely be no possible value in keywords like xxxx, xxxxxx, xxxxxxx, yyyy, yyyyy, yyyyyy just to bring the number up to 50, though I'll grant that they are less egrecious than putting in irrelevant keywords, because they're not contaminating (m)any searches.

 

If I'm missing something on this (the xxxx and yyyy scenario), please explain.

 

[spacecadet]

10 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

 

If I'm missing something on this (the xxxx and yyyy scenario), please explain.

 

You're not.

[Craig Joiner]

15 hours ago, Russell said:

Apologies if I'm slightly off topic, but I'm confused (not difficult some say!) I've been trying to build a "database" of my zoomed images, and also to reconcile my filenames with the Alamy image no. So I thought I'd try the Jim Keir Bridge & installed the trial. Note I'm more than happy to cough up £25 if it does what I want.

 

Nothing much happens. I get a few smart collections in Lightroom & can enter my login parameters. But there seems to be no data traffic from my machine to Alamy. Moreover, looking at the available smart collections, none of these seem to reflect Zooms. This field must be available within Alamy, but doesn't seem to be part of the Bridge.

 

Can anyone enlighten me please?

 

You need to fetch the Alamy data for images on Alamy before anything will be visible in LR. Part of this process will automatically match images in your LR database with images on Alamy but it’s a manual process which needs to be kicked off from the Export dialogue in LR (Ctrl + Shift + E on a PC) and selecting 'Fetch Alamy Metadata', but if you haven’t done so yet, check the instructions at https://www.lightroom-plugins.com/downloads/Alamy%20Uploader%20Manual.pdf

first which explains all the options and how to match images.

Lots of useful stuff is downloaded (check out 'Alamy Plus' in the Metadata panel in LR) but unfortunately views and zoom data is not. I guess Alamy have not made that available for the plugin to use otherwise I’m sure it would be there.

[Russell]

Excellent, many thanks for the feedback Craig.

[Stephen Barnes]

The replies seem to be a little off topic - I assume I'm therefore alone in finding this behaviour?  It's really a frustrating exercise having to go into all your images that you've already optimised only to find they're showing up in orange on one side of AIM, and green on the other.

[Sally]

49 minutes ago, Stephen Barnes said:

The replies seem to be a little off topic - I assume I'm therefore alone in finding this behaviour?  It's really a frustrating exercise having to go into all your images that you've already optimised only to find they're showing up in orange on one side of AIM, and green on the other.

To be honest I am not sure what you mean by “left side and right side”. I use the plugin all the time and have not noticed this. But at any rate none of that matters. As others have already said, whether an image is orange or green, is an irrelevance. Your efforts should focus on the accuracy of captions and tags, not optimising. 

 

As as an example P60B1K has tags “junk, fatty, buildings, burger bar, burger joint, unhealthy, eat eating” none of which IMHO (what do I know I’m a relative newbie compared to your portfolio) strike me as relevant to the picture. And what’s missing is where this is.

 

I’ve got much more selective with tags as time has gone on to avoid too many irrelevant searches without zooms that will harm my rank and I am sure I can tweak a lot of my images to reduce tags to specific concepts.

[Stephen Barnes]

Sally - left side and right side of the Alamy Image Manager - left side shows the grid of all images, right side shows the score for the selected image.  How can the two be different when one single image is selected?

|s for your advice about P60B1K, I 've never found my [recent] keywording style to be a problem when they're relevant (for example in this particular image: "take away" normally refers to fast food, usually burgers and chips, which is always high in fat, responsible for the obesity problem, and the location doesn't matter when it's a generic photo like this.  It could be taken anywhere.

Many people do say keep keywords relevant to what you can actually see in the image, but I've been pretty anal about analysing (see what I did there?) my search results, as well as the "All of Alamy" results, as well as similars across other stock agencies when available, to see what people buy vs. their search criteria.  (My day job is in Big Data Analysis).  Generalising:  customers haven't a clue how to search for images,  It's not their fault, they're generally journalists, or authors, or publishers, not data analysts with a background in taxonomies, data classification or extraction.  So, if they have a story about "childhood obesity" they're going to search for "childhood obesity" as their first search - that's only natural.  They're not going to search for "fast food outlet", or "hamburger plain ketchup"  first - that might be a second or third search.  They're not going to search for "Obese child" as that just isn't politically correct these days, so that's not in my list of keywords.  I'd rather be in their first set of results to get the sale.

FWIW, and getting back on topic, I've found a (time consuming) workaround, but over 10,000 of my images which had been marked as "Not for sale" on the discoverability ranking have now been freed up.  I've also determined that these images haven't had any sales, even though they appear pretty parse compared to the images that were discoverable.

[Sally]

18 hours ago, Stephen Barnes said:

Sally - left side and right side of the Alamy Image Manager - left side shows the grid of all images, right side shows the score for the selected image.  How can the two be different when one single image is selected?

|s for your advice about P60B1K, I 've never found my [recent] keywording style to be a problem when they're relevant (for example in this particular image: "take away" normally refers to fast food, usually burgers and chips, which is always high in fat, responsible for the obesity problem, and the location doesn't matter when it's a generic photo like this.  It could be taken anywhere.

Many people do say keep keywords relevant to what you can actually see in the image, but I've been pretty anal about analysing (see what I did there?) my search results, as well as the "All of Alamy" results, as well as similars across other stock agencies when available, to see what people buy vs. their search criteria.  (My day job is in Big Data Analysis).  Generalising:  customers haven't a clue how to search for images,  It's not their fault, they're generally journalists, or authors, or publishers, not data analysts with a background in taxonomies, data classification or extraction.  So, if they have a story about "childhood obesity" they're going to search for "childhood obesity" as their first search - that's only natural.  They're not going to search for "fast food outlet", or "hamburger plain ketchup"  first - that might be a second or third search.  They're not going to search for "Obese child" as that just isn't politically correct these days, so that's not in my list of keywords.  I'd rather be in their first set of results to get the sale.

FWIW, and getting back on topic, I've found a (time consuming) workaround, but over 10,000 of my images which had been marked as "Not for sale" on the discoverability ranking have now been freed up.  I've also determined that these images haven't had any sales, even though they appear pretty parse compared to the images that were discoverable.

Your comments about tagging are interesting, and given your day job I should pay attention. It’s contrary to the general advice given about stock photography.