I recently signed up to Alamy and just now received an e-mail from them, stating that my first three images have been accepted. After playing around with microstock for the past two years, this will be my first venture into midstock. Now, Ive got to familiarise myself with Alamy's unique key word system.

I recently signed up to Alamy and just now received an e-mail from them, stating that my first three images have been accepted. After playing around with microstock for the past two years, this will be my first venture into midstock. Now, Ive got to familiarise myself with Alamy's unique key word system.

It's not the keywords that are the problem (but they don't have stemming, which might be what you meant), it's trying to hit the wee stars to make supertags that's the big problem.

Quote from: ShadySue on October 17, 2017, 13:05

It's not the keywords that are the problem (but they don't have stemming, which might be what you meant), it's trying to hit the wee stars to make supertags that's the big problem.

Ive read about the stemming. When I type in keywords on the microstock sites, I'm very specific in using words that relate to the subjects in the image. For example, if there is one person featured, I'll never include "people." I will include "person" as well as the gender of that person.

I try to be a clean keyworder too, but sometimes stemming is relevant, e.g. exercise and exercising etc. Also if someone searches on 'cats', do they mean they definitely want more than one cat, or do they want to see all available cats? Of course, we can't read buyers' minds, but if they want to see all available cats and we have just keyworded 'cat', our file won't be seen*. Which is probably irrelevant in cats but could be relevant in a less populous search.
*then of course, if they definitely wanted to see cats plural, our 'cat' would annoy them.

Who can work out what buyers want? One of the most popular searches in the past month was v. Yup, the letter v, sic. Of course, that may be needed occasionally, but to be one of the most searched for keywords 

I'm actually very hesitant about using supertags after reading the forums. Some actually say that supertags have the opposite effect to what they're intended to do - that they'll push images considerably downwards in search results. One guy did a test - noted that his image could be found on page 3 or thereabouts. After adding supertags, the image dropped about 20 pages in search results.

That was certainly the case from my own tests in the few weeks/months after they were introduced. It may be that that has changed, though the search algorithm changes so often you could drive yourself nuts adjusting for one iteration then finding it had changed again.
For example, the old problem of having a pic of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe showing up in searches for Joe Doe, Jane Bloggs and Doe Bloggs seems to be far cleaner on my test search than it has been for about a year; however, about a year ago it was clean, then went polluted again (Joe Doe etc still appear, because the search splits phrases, but now pushes them down to some extent.)

BTW, there are a few people on their forum who are such great Alamy fans (disclaimer: I'm only submitting to Alamy at the moment, but may get back to FAA soon) that they believe absolutely everything Alamy tells them without checking it out, and quote it as gospel, and get miffed when others post the results of actual checking. 

Good luck!

Something really weird is going on at the Alamy forum. I'm being logged out every few seconds. I keep signing in repeatedly only to be logged out a few seconds later.

Yes, re-occurring issue.

North Korean hackers have been tasked to steal stock photos

Lol you're probably right.

I think you would have gone mental trying to keep up with Alamy's keywording suggestions if you had a lot of files. remember the use of [ ] tags? I think I added them for a while but it became clear they weren't actually using them.

It is a long game there, but in my case it has been worth it.