MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => General Stock Discussion => Topic started by: aly on May 09, 2013, 19:18
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I am amazed at the way Alamy has put the search terms , eg-under gum tree a picture of a lake emerges! Under betting a pic of a horse in a field. :-[ No wonder no sales for me when there is such discrepancy.
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I agree with TS, for Gum Tree, the first 120 results sorted by age, creative or relevance look pretty good. I didn't look carefully, but there wasn't anything that jumped out as being awful.
Same with betting, though I'll grant there's a series visible under age with a woman on a laptop, who 'could' be betting, or she could be on Facebook, or buying from Amazon or ...
I can show you much worse searches than that on virtually any agency, Alamy included. If you want to know how good/bad an agency's search is is, try Blue Whale, though in evaluating, it clearly helps if you can identify one ;) Spam, ignorance and bad search engine, throwing anything with 'blue' and 'whale' together make for generally pretty poor results.
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When I look at the number of times my pics are viewed that is when the heading comes up, ie-gum tree=lake. , feet=kangaroos in field, etc. I cannot see how that is relevant.Also no sales compared to SS eg. Very disappointing I have stopped uploading to alamy at present as it is a real hassle with all the subsections, etc.
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When I look at the number of times my pics are viewed that is when the heading comes up, ie-gum tree=lake. , feet=kangaroos in field, etc. I cannot see how that is relevant.Also no sales compared to SS eg. Very disappointing I have stopped uploading to alamy at present as it is a real hassle with all the subsections, etc.
I'm confused about the results you're getting.
Do you mean that you see your pictures being returned for irrelevant searches? If so, that's because of them 1. not allowing keyword phrases and 2. taking random words from any field (except description) and combining them in searches. So for example if your name happened to be Joe London, and had a photo of the River Nile, your photo would come up in a search for 'River, London' (Just an example, I realise someone would likely search on River Thames.). Theoretically, these should come way down in a search, as the search should favour keywords the higher up they come. But some Alamy searchers look at literally thousands of images, so I've had searches like "Elizabeth House" because my pseudo includes Elizabeth and there was a house in the photo, 'mulberry' because the location field had Mulberry Street (I bet they wanted the fruit or maybe the brand), and most famously 'office party' because I have a photo of the Head Office of a political party. Today I had one for "Bedford Village", because I have a photo of Bedford Street in Dean Village (which is an area of Edinburgh).
It's frustrating, and must annoy the h*ck out of buyers, but there it is. The examples you gave were of a surprisingly clean search, at least on the first page.
But yes, Alamy is a lot of work for relatively little return, but while some of the micros are falling, Alamy is at least steady (I have nothing there this month, but so far on iS May has also been disastrous).
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I am amazed at the way Alamy has put the search terms , eg-under gum tree a picture of a lake emerges! Under betting a pic of a horse in a field. :-[ No wonder no sales for me when there is such discrepancy.
The problem is that Alamy does not "inspect" keywords, like most agencies and they don't inspect a good chunck of the images either. There is a lot more junk on Alamy for that reason, both in terms of keywords and images.
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I am amazed at the way Alamy has put the search terms , eg-under gum tree a picture of a lake emerges! Under betting a pic of a horse in a field. :-[ No wonder no sales for me when there is such discrepancy.
I know, why not a system that asks you to verify each a every keyword for ambiguity?