It says on the Alamy site that iptc data will be imported.  Mine wasn't. completely blank, title and all !?  am I missing something ??

I haven't uploaded in a while, but I remember I had problems in the bulk editor, however the old editor worked fine.

I found a post of yours from a while back saying u had trouble with iptc on alamy, but no one came back on it !?

Anyone want to help this time ??  ;-)

hm. i had no troubles with the old editor - but the new version didn't work well for me. i don't remember though, i haven't had the time yet to upload big bunches to alamy, there are still my 4 initial pictures only. the keywording worked flawlessly for them... 

Did u go and put your acceptance images through to your portfolio, or are they still sitting there waiting ??

I did 3 of mine (the 4th was for acceptance only), but I think I had to redo all the data !?  (can't truly remember)

Haven't had a problem with the new or old editor. Sometimes the uploader is flaky, but it ususally works or errors out.

The uploader is abysmal !!  not flaky !  ;-)

It took several attempts to get 4 files up for review, and that's on more than one occasion ! 

I manually enter my data, but here's some help. Since I want my keywords in the Essential and Main areas, I don't bother to upload and then waste time moving them around from Comprehensive. It takes much longer than just sending everything with no IPTC data. Comprehensive can be viewed by all while Essential and Main are searched but private. (hidden)

Description = NOT searched.
Date shows a "-" may be Low?
Caption and Location = low

Three of the fields that are imported are either not read or low importance.

The one that does count, Keywords, is placed in the public Comprehensive field, which is lower in the search priority than Essential or Main.

That's a lot of typing and effort, to get words and caption and description in, when it hardly makes any difference.

Note: Semicolon!

IPTC headers

We import the IPTC metadata when we upload your images, but only extract the caption, description, keyword and date fields depending on which version of Photoshop you are using.
IPTC headers in Photoshop 6 & 7

    * The caption field corresponds with our caption field which is limited to 128 characters. If you add more than 128 characters in Photoshop we will transfer your data to our description field. You will then need to add a new caption.
    * The keyword field corresponds with our comprehensive keyword field. We limit the keyword field to 856 characters and we truncate any words over this amount.
    * In the IPTC keyword field add each word individually as there is a cut-off point of 32 characters (including spaces) beyond which Photoshop will truncate a list of keywords. Click Add after you�ve entered each keyword.

IPTC headers in Photoshop CS and above

    * The description field corresponds with our caption field. We limit the caption field to 128 characters and any additional IPTC data overflows to our description field.
    * The keyword field corresponds with our comprehensive keywords field. We limit the compehensive keywords field to 856 characters and any additional IPTC data is truncated.
    * Separate your keywords with semicolons in Photoshop to ensure they transfer correctly.

Alamy help page that deals with this.

http://alamy.com/contributors/stock-photography-captions.asp#iptc-headers

Good Luck.

Thanks for that RacePhoto, very helpful

I tried the semicolon bit, but ProStockMaster didn't like them, so will need to do it after upload using 'FindKeywords' which splits thing off ready for Alamy (handy bit of software!)

I think it reads ProstockMaster line separated with the comma. That's the way the software makes sure it's right with PSM. I haven't added any data in about a year. Like I mentioned which probably got lost. You have to cut and paste nearly everything over to the important fields, so why do it twice? I don't want my keywords in comprehensive, just in case there's someone who's trying to display ahead of me in some instances. Why undo what you just did?

I do have some throw away words in there, and I started putting the Descriptions over when they dropped it from the search, but found that cause more confusion. I put the important data in Main and have plenty of space left over. 300 characters is plenty of space for Main keywords!

Alamy Best Match: In theory (because there's no solid proof) Alamy searches for number of matching words out of the total words. If you have "Keyword1" and 50 other words for one image, and "keyword1" and 20 words for another image, and someone does a search for "Keyword1"... the image with a higher relevancy, will come up first. 1 in 20 is better than 1 in 50. Of course smart people search for two words, so two good words are now a .10% match, where 2 in 50 is a .04% match.

People make too much of Alamy rank. If you have good photos and it's not the same subjects as 20,000 other photos, you will get views.

Based on keyword spamming, which lowers the rank and best match, which is above, you are better off with less words that are accurate, and not hunting for obscure words that someone might just enter by accident.

Word Order and Proximity Count! They repeat this and it's in the video and in the help files. Someone searching for "Vintage Race Car" will see the files with those words, in that exact order before they will see, "Vintage, Car, Great Britain, track, Fall, leaves, corner, fast, speed, racing, Goodwood, race.

The Alamy search is not intuitive. If you have "Dogs" and someone searches for Dog, it won't match. But it also won't find Doggone, Dogwood, Hot Dog, and other words that have "dog" in them. You win some, you lose some. Exact words only. Of course if you have one dog, why would you put dogs in the keywords? A single tree is not a forest nor a woods. 

With the mouse over, it appears that views have gone down. Since that's the same for everyone, it shouldn't change anything?

People complain about their name being search enabled. If your name is Rocky Tree, maybe you're in trouble, with most common names, everyone has the same chance of getting a bad hit. Don't panic. I searched for "pete" and got 24,972 results. Only an idiot looking for images would type in one word for a proper name! Using Pete Seeger I got 11 hits, and none of them are me.  So when someone searches and your name is one of the words, the only time it will come up is if BOTH your first and last name are in the search words. Or two names out of your pseudonym if you have three.

What was I saying about Less Is More? Then I write a monologue about keywords? 

Quote from: RacePhoto on December 25, 2009, 19:17

What was I saying about Less Is More? Then I write a monologue about keywords? 

So u did !    but very helpful, thanks Pete

I like the new editor on Alamy, it makes quick work of editing keywords and data. Just double click on an image, hit next and it saves all the new information when you hit Save All Data. (it may save as it goes, but I'm not testing it and re-typing all that.) Batch edit, easy cut and paste, beats the old editor for speed and simplicity.

Only place it gets a bit sticky is marking the licensing and areas for distribution. Since most of mine are Editorial, it's easy. For some people with more complex requirements it's down a menu from the main Flash Editor.