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.