or so it says.
Short of inventing extra keywords, does anybody think this visibility lark makes any difference to anything at all?

No, it's just a stupid thing which encourages spam.
Note that even their own exemplar video only has 15 keywords on the example file:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw

At the moment, and for a couple of years at least, the caption has at least equal, probably more, weighting in searches (that could change).

And as always, any word from the caption can be linked with any keyword to muck up a search.
For example I get searches for west Africa, because I have images from 'South West Madagascar' (an official region) which is in the caption, and Africa is in the keywords. Both of these are correct, but West Africa is a false 'hit' for these files. It's the way their system works.

In this thread, are we talking about any one particular agency, or is it just a generic, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety stock photography agency?

Curious minds want to know.

Quote from: marthamarks on June 22, 2019, 22:39

In this thread, are we talking about any one particular agency, or is it just a generic, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety stock photography agency?

Curious minds want to know.

As its posted in the Alamy section I got the impression they were talking about Alamy and their discoverability bar which to be honest is a stupid red herring and often throws up questions about it i.e. how do you get it to go green and so on.

I don't know why Alamy bothered introducing it   

It seems simply to require unnecessary keywords to get your count upto 50.  Pointless.

If you add more info. in the Optional section, it can turn green 

Location, Category, Further info. etc....

Only if you also  have a high number of keywords.

Consider this: if a file has 50 nonsense keywords, viz not just spam, but completely made-up words, the bar will turn green and the file will be deemed to have 'high discoverability'.
NB: I do not advocate this!

As its posted in the Alamy section I got the impression they were talking about Alamy

I missed that. Sorry.

I have not change my Alamy photo info. Maybe I should but I don't thank so. With my images marked with poor visibility I still sell 200-800 bucks per month on Alamy. The selling dollar amount is like a rollercoaster .

Of all the conspiracy theories I've read on here over the years, this one is the most bizarre. For the moment, I'll put it down to stupidity rather than malice.
(Though I have to wonder why they don't change it now that the spam effect has been pointed out on their forums so many times.)

I love you too Shady......

Well, you see PZF.....not only are you supposed to buy the equipment, find the location, take the perfect shot, download it onto your computer, spend the time with that expensive equipment to re-touch and perfect your image, upload to Alamy, fill in all the important keywords and data....but they also want you to do the majority of promotional work as well while they fill their pockets providing "window dressing"... and you get your $0.31 for your measly efforts. "Poor visibility"? How 'bout "Poor agency"?

As others have pointed out, the discoverability bar is something of an aberration by Alamy. A well-captioned and keyworded image will only rarely reach 'green' discoverability, and the impact on the findability of the image is not affected by it.  Seasoned contributors are well aware that 'discoverability' can be safely ignored if all the metadata is completed thoughtfully.

Most of the rest of the process you describe, from buying the equipment through to uploading and filling in the important keywords and data, is basic to being a stock photographer and little different from other stock agencies. Alamy requires a little more on metadata, but time invested in filling in that information is usually well spent.

The comments about them wanting the contributor to do the majority of the promotional work has no basis in fact that I know of. I have never needed to do any promotional work for my own images on Alamy, they do everything to achieve sales for me and themselves, which is what I would expect. There is nothing stopping a contributor promoting their own work on social media etc, but it's not essential.

The $0.31 you mention is a figure which is rare (even under the price-depressing onslaught of microstock), and certainly not typical, as you seem to be suggesting. In my eight years there I have never netted less than ten times that amount for a sale and typically each sale is much more likely to bring me 50 to 100 times that $0.31. Many contributors do considerably better than I do.  Having said that, I don't put my Alamy images on microstock, so I'm never undercutting myself.

Your comment in another post about Alamy selling 'social' information to other businesses would imply that they are breaching European data protection regulations as they don't to the best of my knowledge, have permission to sell our data to third party companies, other than making our images available through their distributor network.

Far from being a poor agency, they are probably, even with their known shortcomings which are regularly acknowledged on the Alamy forum, one of the best agencies for a stock contributor to deal with.

I've had a handful of Alamy sales netting me under a dollar, but the lowest (so far?) has been 66c. (Not NU, which I'm not in.)

What fields make sense to fill in?
What are the important field to fill?

I upload my images ad for editorial images, I mark the editorial checkbox

What fields make sense to fill in?
What are the important field to fill?

I upload my images ad for editorial images, I mark the editorial checkbox

I fill in all fields in both the Mandatory and Optional tabs in the image manager, except for Category 1 & 2, which I don't think are significant, at least for the time being.

Even though they are in the Optional tab, it is important to complete the people and property fields. If you indicate that the image contains people or property, you will be given an additional field to say whether or not you have a release. This important information for the potential purchaser.

If you are selling an editorial image as RM, it is not essential to tick the editorial only box, though it may be advisable in some cases - you need to research this on the Alamy forum to get the full picture. If you are selling an editorial image as RF you MUST tick the editorial only box. Note that 'people' at Alamy doesn't just mean recognisable people, it means any person, near or distant or even part of a person, whether or not they can be recognised.

In the Mandatory tab make sure you put accurate detail in the caption - the caption is heavily weighted in the search. Also make sure you mark the most relevant tags/keywords as Supertags - these too carry a lot of weight in the search.

Avoid adding keywords which are not relevant and don't add supertags which are peripheral to the subject of the image, just to get up to the maximum 10 allowed. As was the original subject of this thread, don't add irrelevant or peripheral keywords just to get the Discoverability bar green - it won't help you to get sales. In fact, in the long term, irrelevant keywording and supertagging is counter-productive because it creates false positives in searches and this will slowly but surely knock down your search ranking so you no longer appear in the first pages of any search.

Thanks for the answer!
I tought the field wasn't important
I had only 2 ($12 an $45) sales

To increase the change of a sale, i gonna fill fields