ShadySue - re your "I'm quite cokka with Alamy today, as I got a sale yesterday for $500/$300 to me, so I'm just holding my breath until it clears."

Congratulations on big sale, ShadySue  sooo exciting!

Think good thoughts; Pollyanna would. 

Thanks so much for sharing your method Lisa, that's really helpful.  Also for the tip on entering the year.  Most grateful.  

@ Sue - as KB said 'Think good thoughts'.  I hope that payment comes to fruition for you.  Don't spend it all at once!  (Hang on... that's my Grandmother channeling through me.... AFAIC you can spend it however you like!!)  

Quote from: ann on December 11, 2010, 15:53

ShadySue - re your "I'm quite cokka with Alamy today, as I got a sale yesterday for $500/$300 to me, so I'm just holding my breath until it clears."

Congratulations on big sale, ShadySue   sooo exciting!

It's really nerve-wracking, as I keep hearing about sales that don't go through on Alamy, though I've been lucky so far with my smaller value sales.

Well, on the Alamy forum users might be more likely to mention a good sale that falls through than a successful one, unless it's first sale or price is amazing.

If odds weren't strongly in favor of decent sales clearing I think we'd be hearing a LOT more about problems.

No! Commas do nothing and never will. They take up space and make it so you have less room for more good keywords, but I'll give up on that one too.

I know the commas don't work. I started uploading to Alamy back in 2006. I only had 60+ pictures on there and I sorta forgot about it. Those early pictures had comma's in the keywords. They were horrible pictures to I might add.... I didn't know any different back then which is probably why I never had any sales (or because they were horrible pictures) and quit uploading. Didn't they have a different system back then???...I don't remember it having the three field forms for keywords.

I'll try with real words, instead of a simple concept, about ALL WORDS ARE SEARCHED which is simple. But ask again, do you want it to ignore words through some psychic computer formula? Be logical. OK example...

five keywords in the hypothetical photo: brown toad stone bridge water

a person searches for - green toad -, and it will show. A person searches for - water skiing -, it will come up. A person searches for - Elvis leaves the building wearing a white leisure suit with sequins and walks across a bridge - IT WILL SHOW UP!   Any word that matches and all words that match. Again, would you like searches to ignore words that people search for, which would be absurd.

But, if someone searches for (with the quotes, which is important) "Green Toad" the image will not come up, because the exact words, between the quotes are not ALL found. Words precisely together in that order, will come first in the results. That's a simple two word search.

As for names and towns, people need to get over it and stop whining! Everyone's name can be found in a search and madelaide or Leyden is far less likely to be searched and found in error as about 1000 other common names including first names! Tom, Dick, Harry, Smith, Jones, Lee. Everyone's name is probably the name of a town or object, someplace in the world. In other words, we're all the same except maybe for someone named Zyzzx!

Remove the pseudonym search and people will complain that buyers can't find their work by artists name. Is there no end to the fault finding and nit picking?

If you want every detail to be in a searchable field that can be excluded or included, then we will have to enter all that data, on every one of our photos, manually. Ethnicity, cutout, what else will make a difference to someone else's pet complaint for a specific field, where's the end? Then people will complain about how complicated it is to keyword and fill in all those fields!

Have you ever heard of Occam's Razor?

All you've done is dwell on some minor negatives and ignored all the positives.

ANY WORD IN A SEARCH WILL BE FOUND! It can't be any easier and straight forward. Words between quotes in the search, are exclusive and must all be found!

"blue car" = 2,478 Results
blue car = 47,279 Results

What you've proven is that crappy searches, will produce crappy results, but not that there's something wrong with the available tools. One word searches are extra poor (and foolish as well), two word searches are pretty stinky and at three words start to refine things for a buyer. You shouldn't be getting your name, near the front pages of someones three word search. Try it yourself?

Leyden = 1,749 Results
Leyden Holland = 99 Results

And if you type in Leyden, you'll see that Alamy makes suggestions, with number of images, none of them being a pseudonym. Leyden Jar, Leyden Cheese, Leyden Holland, Leyden University. Which to me kind of shoots big holes in your theory that people are giving you false hits, to any great number, because of your name!

Amusing enough, my last name produces = 1,769 Results, and my first name = 372,510 Results!   My pseudonym 1,448 Results and as far as I can see, all are my photos and nothing else matches, not even an errant dead movie star?

Last one. Alamy using quotes, the way the search was designed. Sorry, no images were found for '"white rose potato"' In other words, it works.

This isn't just for you, but since you brought it up and others have the same complaints, there's the evidence and my opinion. It's a non-issue.

Last one. Alamy using quotes, the way the search was designed. Sorry, no images were found for '"white rose potato"' In other words, it works.

actually, my point wasn't about "white rose potato", but since you mention it, there's a niche for an American Alamy 'tog.

My point was that because you shouldn't enter 'white wine', 'red wine' and 'rose wine', presumably contributers enter e.g. red white rose wine, so images of bottles/glasses of all three show up in a perfectly good and logical search for white rose.

Quote from: madelaide on December 14, 2010, 04:09

I like the way Alamy uses the three groups of keywords for relevance, but I,do wish that photographer names was a separate field in the search form, like other sites do, and also that they would consider keywords in quotation marks. for example, I have images with "varig airlines" and "south american" and it appears in a search for American Airlines.

I'm under impression that Title words factor into search results, madelaide, so I'm guessing you got that American Airlines result because the words Airlines and American are in your Title, if they each appear only as part of a phrase in quotes in keywords.

yes, both title and caption are also searchable, so you have to be careful how you write them, and decide which words should go into the caption and which to the description. Sometimes a difficult call, trying to second-guess how a buyer would search, bearing in mind that buyers don't always think like 'I' (and, by extension, 'you') do!

Does putting quotes around words in a Title - say "Cradle of Aviation" - get them treated as a phrase in searches?

No, unless the person doing the search does it. " around things" and [around things] in OUR keywords, and to reinforce, commas as well, all Do Nothing in our keywords at this point in time.

That's the whole simple point, but since I write paragraphs instead of simple answers, the simple parts get lost!

I'm sure people have linked to the answer page from Alamy many times, which shows which fields are searched, which aren't and how important they are,

Should you want to read a bunch for yourself and maybe print it http://alamy.com/contributor/help/sell-images.asp (which I did when I started) then click on "How To Submit" and have a ball. Under #6 Manage and then Captions and Keywords... you'll find this bit.


Caption and Location are the lowest importance, but they are searched. We can assume that Pseudonym is also lowest in the search.

The ranking means the buyers get the most important fields first, showing in their results first.

This is much better than the rest of all the sites, that just search "keywords" (maybe in order, maybe not since they are alpha sorted. they don't even tell us what fields are searched on most sites!) Alamy lets us put the most important words first, in order in three fields, and we control the results to a great extent. No not perfect, but it's actually the best around and the easiest, up front, for us to manipulate our own images as we want, instead of some great mystery or secret search algorithm like the micro sites use.

Diversity means that if I have 60 pictures of the same thing and eight other people have one each, there will be one of mine and then the other eight, before my second image of the same thing, shows in the search. It's a little more complicated, but that's the point. It won't show all of one persons photos first, before anyone else. We all get a better slot at getting viewed.

Word order and proximity means if you have Red Dog Under a Tree in your words and someone else has Red Tree with a yellow dog under it and someone else has Red Tree Dog Watering it and a buyer searches for Red Dog your photo will show up first, the one with Red and Dog closest together in the keywords, and in the highest box, will show up second, and the next one will be last.

So put your 50 characters of Essential words first and don't waste those valuable 50 characters on commas. By the time I get to Main Keywords, at 300 I usually don't need to worry about how many spaces I have, as 300 is a bunch of words. Maybe too many if I want only good searches and good views, not mistakes and errors.

Comprehensive is the small stuff when someone might find something, searching for some obscure words or in my case a proper name. I don't want it coming up first.

Last of all. Alamy Rank is overly worried about and not as important as good accurate keywords and good images. Rank hardly comes into play with searches, when you consider keywords and diversity are spreading out the views, from the start. It's not like you are going to be hidden on some back page, because of your rank. Go do some searches for your images and see where you come up.

Use Three Words or more, not one or two! Anyone who is looking for a specific image is smart enough to not just use one word or two word searches!

Does putting quotes around words in a Title - say "Cradle of Aviation" - get them treated as a phrase in searches?

Oh, oh, I wasn't clear at all. Should have written:

Does putting quotes around words in the CAPTION - say writing "Cradle of Aviation" in quotes for image of that air & space museum - get them treated just as a phrase in searches?
 
(If not, those photos are bound to end up in searches for baby cradles, unless I leave name of museum out of caption of photo of the museum.)

ShadySue,

Exactly, they are using OR instead of AND. If no results returned with all keywords, I could understand going further and showing partial matches. Even if examples such as yours are shown in the last pages, it is nonsense.

If someone searches for red car, even without quotes or without boolean operators, it's almost 100% sure that he doesn't want red ties or blue cars.

I think Race Photo is right that quotation marks and brackets are ignored in Alamy searches. And even if it was used,  terms in brackets are searched individually as well.

I think Race Photo is right that quotation marks and brackets are ignored in Alamy searches. And even if it was used,  terms in brackets are searched individually as well.

Putting "Quotation marks" around two or more Keywords does affect search results. (Now, if the point was that quotations marks are seldom used by searchers, that's different.)
Here's another example:

red car =   All of Alamy  (45,326)          and you get same results for [red car]
           Creative(2,580)

"red car" =     All of Alamy  (3,454)    
               Creative(259)