I know there were not many replies here but I thought I'd post a link to the first round of answers to this as there may be some interest.

Many thanks!

http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2013/06/21/5400.aspx

James Allsworth
Content Executive
Alamy

Just an explanation as to why they're not doing the suggested things.
Hope the next one is going to explain why they insist on that arcane keywording system, when it doesn't matter where you put the keywords, any combination from any searchable field can show up on a search.

it would be interesting to know why do we need to handle a very exhausting submission process, talking about the keywording, all those boxes etc

perhaps time to shrink it down, thanks!

p.s: that is one very cool video James, thanks for taking the time to do it, believe we never seen anything like this from other agency, looking forward to the other 2, appreciate it!

I have a minus! oh man, I love this forum!

Rectified that for you Luis and opposite to the @sshole's intention, you now ended up with an extra + in your profile 

I'd like to ask:  Why not include RF editorial (to compete with SS, IS and DT)? 

I watched part of it, but it just seemed very flat, fact free and excuse laden.

For example, in explaining that the customer's billing cycles were the reason you had to wait three months before pursuing unauthorized usages, he totally dodged the issue of why in the world they give customers so long to pay, particularly for RF sales.

Another example on keywording training. He said it wasn't feasible to do in house training because of the global nature of contributors. What about exploring web based options for this (Creative Live's sessions come to mind where they take questions via twitter or other social media during live web broadcasts)?

We've done it this way for forever so we'll just keep on going...

For example, in explaining that the customer's billing cycles were the reason you had to wait three months before pursuing unauthorized usages, he totally dodged the issue of why in the world they give customers so long to pay, particularly for RF sales.

I've hearted your post as a whole, but I've read before that the pay cycle is to provide a 'benefit' to customers over the micros.
BTW, how do RF price averages compare with micros? I have no way of knowing - it's a genuine question.

I like the idea of an alamy exclusive collection.  All my RM images are only being sold by alamy, might as well let the buyers know that.  The payout levels coming down seems like a sensible idea, now that prices are much lower than a few years ago.

Having spent such a lot of time doing the alamy keywords, I couldn't disagree more.  They aren't going to change it just to keep the microstockers happy.  I like the way they do it and think every other site should do the same.  Giving all keywords the same priority when people use 50 keywords isn't a good idea because all the spam keywords mess up the search.

But it makes no difference.
Their search engine picks out words from title, caption or any of the keyword fields at random.

Do you know it makes no difference?

Just because words in the title show up in the search results (as they are supposed to, for better or worse) doesn't mean that those listed as the main keywords aren't given highest priority.

Do you or anyone else know whether the search engine actually gives more weight to the main keywords as it's supposed to, or does it weigh all terms equally?

With relatively low bandwidth I'd much rather see questions and answers in text, then I could just skip the ones I don't care about and read the ones I do. There are some things that work better in video, but answering text questions is not one of them.

Totally agree.

Quote from: sharpshot on June 25, 2013, 11:22

Having spent such a lot of time doing the alamy keywords, I couldn't disagree more.  They aren't going to change it just to keep the microstockers happy.  I like the way they do it and think every other site should do the same.  Giving all keywords the same priority when people use 50 keywords isn't a good idea because all the spam keywords mess up the search.

But it makes no difference.
Their search engine picks out words from title, caption or any of the keyword fields at random.

Are you referring to our search engine here? If so, that statement is incorrect. Full info here:

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

I have also read this page:
http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp where we are advised to put quotations around keyword phrases and square brackets around related words. Do either of these actually work?

Ha, ha! You know that they don't. 

But I sure would like to hear from Alamy why they don't remove this page entirely, since it's clear that they never intend to add these features. In the meantime I continue to keyword this way, hoping (stupidly) that they might. 

The point is, Alamy is not showing any sign of growth in sales, it survived very well the recent years while other agencies had to leave the market but it ain't grabbing any market share from Getty, the Alamy experiment with news images leaves a lot to be desired, the new search engine messed up all the rankings, and to top it off contributors fees have been lowered.

REALLY?

I submit mostly editorial images...I have covered news events.  I've received telephone calls (Colorado - United States) from the news desk directly (located in the UK) encouraging me to submit images surrounding events I've covered.  Alamy has also licensed images from those events on my behalf.  In fact, Zuma Press has submitted over 1.8 million news images to the agency as a secondary market.  Their news images are doing quite well.

Alamy has fared the recession quite well compared to other picture libraries...

http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/alamys-2011-financial-results-revealed

While it's true that contributor royalties were lowered (which are still higher than any other micro agency or Getty, or Corbis) and they changed the search algorithm last October, I'm not sure where you are getting your information from.

Quote from: Alamy on June 26, 2013, 03:24

Quote from: ShadySue on June 25, 2013, 11:24

Quote from: sharpshot on June 25, 2013, 11:22

Having spent such a lot of time doing the alamy keywords, I couldn't disagree more.  They aren't going to change it just to keep the microstockers happy.  I like the way they do it and think every other site should do the same.  Giving all keywords the same priority when people use 50 keywords isn't a good idea because all the spam keywords mess up the search.

But it makes no difference.
Their search engine picks out words from title, caption or any of the keyword fields at random.

Are you referring to our search engine here? If so, that statement is incorrect. Full info here:

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

I have read that, but looking at my measures, and at random search results doesn't suggest that it works as it should, although spam clouds the issue on a general search.

I have also read this page:
http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp where we are advised to put quotations around keyword phrases and square brackets around related words. Do either of these actually work?

Two points here:

1 - the keyword weighting does work and the search results are formed from a combination of elements including ranking and customer activity data. It certainly is not random.
2 - the full set of additional annotation options are not live at the moment but it doesn't mean they never will be. We constantly run test scenarios on the searches and test this feature out, but due to the prevalence of inaccurate entering of data from a wide range of contributors, the overall effect does not improve the search results sufficiently for us to deploy the feature to the live site right now.

The concluding part of James West's responses are now live for you:

http://www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2013/06/21/5400.aspx

Wonder what he meant by the easier upload 'like the news feed'.
The news feed isn't any easier. You have to write a more detailled caption, and you still have to fill in the other sections eventually if not right at the time of upload. Then Good Practice dicates that after the photo is no longer newsworthy you should go in and  change the caption so that your caption, "Crowds wait to see Sir Chris Hoy competing in the Coca Cola Unicycle Race" doesn't result in false searches for Sir Chris Hoy, Coca Cola and Unicycle. Even if Sir Chris and the Unicycle are shown in the photo, there would still be a false return for most buyers searching on 'Coca Cola'.

Quote from: ShadySue on June 26, 2013, 04:38

Quote from: Alamy on June 26, 2013, 03:24

Quote from: ShadySue on June 25, 2013, 11:24

Quote from: sharpshot on June 25, 2013, 11:22

Having spent such a lot of time doing the alamy keywords, I couldn't disagree more.  They aren't going to change it just to keep the microstockers happy.  I like the way they do it and think every other site should do the same.  Giving all keywords the same priority when people use 50 keywords isn't a good idea because all the spam keywords mess up the search.

But it makes no difference.
Their search engine picks out words from title, caption or any of the keyword fields at random.

Are you referring to our search engine here? If so, that statement is incorrect. Full info here:

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

I have read that, but looking at my measures, and at random search results doesn't suggest that it works as it should, although spam clouds the issue on a general search.

I have also read this page:
http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp where we are advised to put quotations around keyword phrases and square brackets around related words. Do either of these actually work?

Two points here:

1 - the keyword weighting does work and the search results are formed from a combination of elements including ranking and customer activity data. It certainly is not random.
2 - the full set of additional annotation options are not live at the moment but it doesn't mean they never will be. We constantly run test scenarios on the searches and test this feature out, but due to the prevalence of inaccurate entering of data from a wide range of contributors, the overall effect does not improve the search results sufficiently for us to deploy the feature to the live site right now.

Why tell us to do something when its not even working. It might someday. but after all these years it still doesnt. I struggle to see the logic James. Sorry.