MicrostockGroup

I go back and forth between loving and hating this site.   Right now I love it.  I just had a photo sell for over $300 and I get 60%!!!!

The upload process is weird.  If they find one image in your batch that does not pass QC they fail all of them.  My meta imbedded keywords have to be re-distributed.  And sales are very sporadic.  The other thing is that I find following my earnings difficult to understand. ( and I do have a MBA).   It looks like you have to wait for the sale to clear before it is yours.  So there is a balance and a cleared balance.  In addition, there have been a couple of refunds so they take the commission back on those.  And they have a high threshold before payment and then as much as a month delay before payment.

But.... You gotta love the fact that 60% of the sales is yours and the higher prices for RF images.

I've been loosing my mind for 3 weeks now, because of the PITA upload process. Not only that imbeded keywords have to be redistributed, if you input them using Irfanview, it reads just a fraction of all keywords and you have to do it all over again anyway. I just wanted to add something over 300 photos and in 3 weeks time, working on it every day, I'm still not through. While I'd be finished in way less than 3 hours at any of the 7 MS agencies I contribute to, except at IS of course. I just hope I'll love it anytime soon for the huge sums of money I'll be getting on regular basis. But I guess you need an even much larger port than at MS agencies in order to achieve that. Better content too.

I uploaded almost 500 photos without getting a single rejection though

Hi there -

Often happens that if you have 1 image from a large batch rejected the rest will pass. Best tip though is smaller batches. Watch out with Infran View, not all software saves keywords correctly. Infran View embeds meta data Micro agencies can read, but you need IPTC data for Alamy to pick it up.I use Fotostation which is great for multiple image captioning - you could use Photoshop depending which version you have, some older versions though are not IPTC compatible.

When you get a good sized portfolio here you will get paid every month. Sales will be plentiful and it's just the same system as sending off an invoice and waiting to get paid a month later. With micro we are all used to instant sales being reported and the money credited to our account - Alamy deal with customers who settle invoices / accounts monthly, hence the delay. Just a more convention approach to payment for sales.

Not sure why I'm praising Alamy though, I earned more money before they came along! Oldhand

Rejected or upload error? I've never seen a rejection for image and allowed the batch to go through. Screen shot of the rejection. What color was it.

Oldhand, what qualifies as a good sized portfolio at Alamy? Thanks!

'Partially failed' is a technical error at upload, maybe file size, wrong camera or a file getting stuck during upload. The latter used to take a week to resolve, as someone went in manually to fix it after a week. Haven't had one for a while, so maybe that's changed.

If the technical quality is good enough for the main micro sites it is good enough for Alamy. Their inspection is a doddle as long as you are careful. It must be two years since I had a rejection and then only because I was messing around.

The upload processing is a PITA and sales are erratic but usually nice when they happen (though its annoying if they get reversed).

No rejection here either, sales are OK, people are friendly and know their stuff. They got many years of experience.

I'm exclusive, so my only option at Alamy would be RM correct? I've never really looked into it, I wouldn't be able to generate a large enough portfolio as the majority of my work is on IS as RF. I do have a handful of photos I don't submit, however not enough to create a decent port. Not to mention, the RM sales are pretty rare I imagine.

I hate to go along with the naysayers, but I've never had a rejection on Mostphotos either and there are some low earning micro sites that will take almost anything I upload.

Problem isn't getting past QC, it's making sales.

Alamy is a fine place, pays well and works nice. I don't mind the lengthy keyword process, it just helps reduce the high volume people who would dump everything on the drives, onto Alamy. It makes people decide what's really worthwhile and also the review process has the same effect. No game of thorwing up anything and see what sticks. For that reason I like Alamy.


For people who like letters and numbers. RPD is about 150 times what you get on Micro, but the PRI is about 1 / 150th of what you get on Micro. In my case, I look at it as Less is More. Where sometimes Micro is based on more images, more sales, sheer numbers and volume of sales.

Alamy and Micro are two extremely different ways to make some sales.

Thus it's an 'error', not technically a 'rejection'.