MicrostockGroup

I just checked on alamy and they have added to their alamy measures tools.  Check this page out

http://www.alamy.com/Customersearch/Customersearchhistory.aspx

Not only do they now have your own personal alamy measures to find out what people are searching for and what images of yours turn up (and much more) but they also have the info for ALL of alamy, which means you can see which are the most popular search terms, how many sales that term has, views.. etc. etc...   very nice.

Yeah it is a great insight as to how buyers search, not all buyers are part of measures only some selected buyers and the Alamy research team view and add to lightboxes which they sent to customers, these are not recorded.

The column that is missing is the number of images returned by a search, this is not views, they are related to the number of pages the buyer looked at, often over 100 pages at 102 thumbnails.

But for research it can be of use, look at the low views and then do a proper search.

Another thing Microsite contributors will need to factor in is that 76% of sales are editorial, and 78% RM images, but this is not so relevent as RM is often cheaper than RF.

David 

Hm. Interesting to see that the number of views has nothing to do with the number of sales:
"Russia" has 46,957 and 0 sales, while "Orkney Island Doug Blane" has 17 views and 3 sales.

So it doesn't really matter how many views an image gets when it comes to sales.

I mentioned it couple weeks ago:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?topic=5538.0

That's kind of sad. No wonder I have no zoom in three months. Maybe that's because I'm not uploading everything that's technically good and otherwise crap. I owe nikon d50 which is kind of a crap in those days with high ISO and MP.

It could be also that even that what I think is good is crap anyway. And I only have 33 pictures online at the time. What's that compare to 13 millions. But I haven't give up. To bad for PSC down. Beside Alamy everything that I've online. I try micro for a few month. But I don't like philosophy of micro.

Thanks Seren for adding some value to what I know. Well 10.000 pics. That a lot of work. How do you manage with your time. Do you have a regular job beside ?

p.s. : for D50. Maybe it's good enough for Alamy. But after two years and a half of heavy use it's not good enough for me anymore. I need more. But looks like that photography won't buy me next camera. I've fixed 50mm and 17mm. So I can't blame lenses

Best regards, Stoz.

Hehe, so true Seren - we photographers always find the time..don't we   

Of my four initial images, 3 of them were taken with a Nikon D1X, about 5 mp camera, so just because you do not have 10 mp camera does not mean you can not get accepted and compete.  In fact the only image that has sold for me so far was one of those intial 3 images.  So give it a try. 

Remember, Alamy only looks at the technical merits of the image and with good technique it is not problem.

The new measures are very interesting and i think it can hel pus figure out better keywords.

I also was a bit depressed about PSC closing, but it has gotten me more focussed to work a bit harder to get into an bigger possiblly better more boutique agency.

Scott

Of course there is hope, d50 is quite capable of alamy
- but, you can't do major crops with 6mp and then upsize it
- at least mine isn't operating well when there is not enough light, to much noise and to slow at focusing


I shot raw, you should too
you can do wonders with raw image in first phase of processing, I'm using photoshop mostly for upsizing, everything else I do with adobe camera RAW, but sometimes when I'm in kind of art mood, I do some strange things in photoshop, well, nevermind

Thanks guys for your advice.  I will start researching the forums as suggested and learn all I can...then give it a go!

karen

Don't bother to crop your images, you could be throwing away a sales opportunity. Let the buyers do that if they want to. Give them the space to do it with.

you will, litifeta. if it makes you feel any better, my girlfriend passed Alamy
with images not in SS.
it really depends on your images. she submitted some images that passed SS and failed 5 times.
then i told her maybe to send something SS didn't pass, and she passed Alamy,
 and have never failed since then.

good luck.

Read the forum link if it's still confusing.

Here's the easy way. Make the longest side if it's landscape 5100, bicubic resizing, (is there anything else?) save at best or large or whatever your software says, (only because of quality, it has nothing to do with photo size) and it will be big enough. They are talking about the Photo size not the File size on your hard drive. It's confusing.

If I have to crop, and it's more than just cutting off a tiny bit that's unattractive, I send the photo somewhere else.

Everything I have on Alamy is exclusive for Alamy. Some people claim to sell the same photos for $400 as they do for 40c RF on Micro. BAD BAD Karma! If a buyer discovers that, you are shooting yourself in the foot and making everyone else look bad.

Alamy judges photos for quality, not content, as long as you don't have it licensed wrong or it doesn't contain improper material.

If it's a perfect shot of a boring rock on the sand and has little potential of being interesting to anyone, or selling and it's the right size and well exposed, with proper color balance Etc. It will get accepted.

I'm going to repeat the answer to the initial question. The 48M refers to the photo size, not the file size on your hard drive. If you have elements or photoshop it's in the little box on the bottom that shows the photo size/file size.

Wasn't this thread about Alamy measures?  I joined the BHZ game last week. Added "BHZ" as an essential keyword to one photo. After indexing I was on page 9 of 61. Lots of people use this to test the ranking of their portfolio. Guess what, it's just a game. I see much better photos and collections than mine, they have sales too, and are lower in the BHZ.

I get about 30 views a month with no sales yet, but I have very specialized material which doesn't lend itself to the European market. When the US office opens in 2009 I hope this will change. I'm about 97% Editorial.