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Topics - BelIblis

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1
Alamy.com / Customer Search Activity
« on: January 11, 2013, 07:32 »
Hi,

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the "Customer Search Activity" on ALL images (not just my images) on Alamy for the past 12 months. Not many sales there at all....

For example: there were only about 40 searches related to "Tikal" (famous ruins in Guatemala, UNESCO World Heritage), and only 4 sales.
Searches related to "Grand Canyon": only 8 sales in the past year!

Surely this can't be true Alamy wouldn't be able to stay in business with that bad a sales performance!

Quoting Alamy: "If you are contemplating which images to submit to Alamy, you can use this tool to research how often a subject is requested and how many sales, zooms and views were recorded."

Well.... not much of a tool if they don't show us all their data, no?

2
Alamy.com / Restriction settings for Fina-Art print sales
« on: January 11, 2013, 07:17 »
Hi,

Does anyone know what "restriction settings" I should use, so my images on Alamy can't be sold for fine-art print sales? I've found some settings for other merchandise, but not explicitly for fine-art prints.

If necessary, I'd be happy for customers to produce posters/postcards with high print-runs and/or on standard paper. But I'd like to stay in control of what gets reproduced as fine-art giclee prints etc...

Any ideas?

3
Alamy.com / Average time before the first sale on Alamy
« on: January 07, 2013, 08:25 »
Hi,

I do a blend of travel and studio stills (mainly food). Been with Alamy for a long time now, but it's been over 4 years since I last submitted to them. In the old days, it often took up to 6 months or more before an image sold on Alamy.

From my other agencies (both RM and RF), in the past 2-3 years I found that quite often I get sales within 1-2 months after I uploaded an image. Is it the same with Alamy these days? Or is it still around the 6-month mark?

Of course, each image is different. But what's your overall "benchmark" so to say?

4
Alamy.com / Alamy's Creative Collection
« on: December 22, 2012, 12:23 »
Hi,

I've already got around 400 images with Alamy, and want to contribute more. Does anyone know how to get into Alamy's "Creative" collection? Is it possible to move certain pseudonyms into creative, whilst keeping others non-creative?

Thank you :)

5
Hi,

Through one of my agencies' sales reports, I know client's names & where my images have been published. Some of them are quite prestigious for example Qantas, or Mitsubishi. Plus a few big advertising agencies and newspapers.

I'd like to put together a list for my website, to display these names. But I can't really call them "clients" or "customers". Although, in a few instances there are direct clients / commissioned work.
Does anybody have any suggestions as for how to phrase this nicely & correctly?

I thought of something like
"Publications / Clients include..." followed by a list of names.

What do you think?

6
Hi,

I've been submitting to Macrostock / Midstock agencies for quite a while now, but don't have any images in microstock.

I'm now preparing my first submission (about 50 images, mainly photography & 3d renderings). My general workflow is to organize & keyword all images with standard IPTC fields, so that I can easily submit the images to a number of microstock sites including any potential newbies in the future. Not rocket science, I know and I'm sure there's a lot of people here who do it like that.

As I'm not familiar with submitting to ANY of the microstock sites, I've got a few questions, which I hope  you can answer. All about submitting/keywording:

Besides the additional work of uploading: Is there a reason why I should NOT submit to "as many agencies as possible" (just in theory)? I don't mean exclusivity vs multi-agency. I mean 5 agencies vs 20 agencies.
The reason why I'm asking is because I've seen a few threads here where people said they pulled their images from greedy agencies. And because of one thread I came across is this one is this something to be aware of (apart from FT):
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/return-to-start-fotolia-reserves-right-to-put-you-back-at-white-ranking/

Are there any agencies who don't support IPTC keywording / captioning or who have an awkward 'custom IPTC' system similar to Alamy (with its 'Essential' keywords,...)? Or agencies who want each keyword to be painstakingly classified (particularly keywords with different meanings)?

If I end up submitting to many agencies at the same time, I won't be able to check if my type of content is already abundant with a particular agency. "Everyone gets everything". Do agencies care & put you in the 'bad books', I mean do they expect contributors to research in advance what an agency might want? (BTW I don't mean "pretty flowers, white cartoon figure on white background,...).

Many thanks!

7
Hi,

I guess I can consider myself lucky to have a house collection contract with Getty Images for both RF & RM. ('House Collection' meaning I am not restricted to Photographer's Choice). Most of my stuff on Getty is standard editorial/travel photography.

I'm currently looking into doing some illustrations in 3d. Straight-forward, iconic imagery / easy concepts. Kind of similar to these:

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-17334146-bullseye.php?st=26bd918
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-16705954-3d-small-people-compass.php?st=26bd918
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-17911764-coins.php?st=26bd918
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-15064848-billboard.php?st=26bd918
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-12249338-map-of-france.php?st=26bd918

The question for me is: Where should I submit that kind of imagery to maximize profit?
Straight to Getty (meaning it'd probably end up in one of their RF collections)
Or 'self-distribution' to several Microstock Agencies.

I guess I could always do a test, but that would also mean waiting for about 6 months before could do a representational sales analysis  :(

Any ideas / guesses?

8
General Macrostock / Getty vs Corbis
« on: October 05, 2011, 04:39 »
Hi,

Has anyone here got experience with both Getty AND Corbis?

And what is your experience  not just in RPI, but also overall? (Submission procedure, Editors, being "taken care of" as a contributor,...)

Many thanks!

9
General Stock Discussion / US National Parks Release
« on: June 06, 2011, 00:01 »
Hi,

I'm currently photographing in a few National Parks in the US. Does anyone know what's "the deal" regarding photography releases? I mean doing things by the boek: do I need a release? If so, how much are they? I tried googling it but couldn't find any info...

Thanks a lot!

10
Hi,

I've been in the stock industry for a while now, but new to microstock. Although happy with my earnings from my other agencies, I'd like to diversify for a certain type of photography, which I believe might be best placed with microstock. I've also been with Alamy for a while but haven't submitted anything for years, because I find them too labour-intense for keywording.

So, I'd like to at least submit to the "Big 4", i.e. Shutterstock, iStock, Fotolia, Dreamstime. (Possibly to some others as well). But it all depends on the amount of "manual work" I have to put in AFTER retouching and IPTC Keywording.

My workflow is as follows. (And I'd imagine other photographers to have a very similar workflow):

1) SHOOT
2) IMPORT images from camera card onto hard-drive & database (Lightroom in my case)
3) Creative EDIT on the images (i.e. throw out the crap / outtakes)
4) KEYWORD my 'Selects'
5) EXPORT selected/keyworded files as a tif (captions, keywords,... embedded in IPTC fields)
6) RETOUCH camera dirt, logos, noise, brightness, contrast,...
7) CONVERT retouched tif to jpg, ARCHIVE the tif
8) UPLOAD the jpg file
9) Back to 1)

Given the low sales price per image, I don't want to spend precious time for any cumbersome online-keywording / non-standard IPTC fields like I'd have to do with Alamy. (With Photoshelter, it used to be similar: very labour intense classification & clicking-through-keywords AFTER the upload... a real pain!)

Which of the Microstock agencies you're using would suit my above workflow? In other words: Where can I upload my files and then get on with shooting? And which ones of the micro-agencies have a similar workflow?

Thanks a lot!

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