Hi everyone!
First post!

Firstly, i'd like to thank everybody here for the amount of Information and good advice they share!!

My question, as per the title suggests, is with regards to Shooting Editorial - newsworthy Editorial as opposed to product shots etc (apologies for random capitalised words - im using a German Version of Windows!).

I'm new to stock, and in the last couple of weeks, applied and was accepted to Alamy, SS, IS and Fotolia.
I've always been interested in the idea of 'what if i had the right photo in the right place at the right time' - how would i distribute it.

Seeing that many of the agents accept Editorial Images, i thought i would test the System out to see what happens.

...aaaaanyway - on Saturday we had quite a large Festival here (perfect Editorial shoot oportunity), not a particularly news-worthy Event outside the area, but a good exercise for me nonetheless to test the Editorial workflow!

I spent a couple of hours Shooting, then at around 15:00 retired to a cafe, hit lightroom for half an hour and started uploading.

Alamy (via live News) approved my Images within an hour (!) - but they're still not searchable or available for sale!
SS approved the Pictures around 21:00, they became available for sale last night (so 24 hours later).
iStock were also quick to approve, around 19:00 on Saturday, those Pics only went live this morning!

As far as Fotolia is concerned, I couldnt find an Option to upload Editorial Images.


So - my question - whats the Point???

Would agencies have photos available quicker if they were of Gerorge Clooney falling drunk out of a Revue Club (obviously wouldn't be sending a Picture like that to SS!)?

Should there be any small time photo Editor from a local paper/Magazine/Website etc looking for photos of my Event - then he would only find them for Publishing today! Far too late, no longer News worthy, and not even really any interest any more to anyone who was there.

Am i missing something, or is that just the way it is? I was expecting that as soon as i hit the Editorial button, things would move quickly - espcially in the case of Alamy calling their Service 'Live News'!!



Many many thanks for reading!!!

Hi Sharpshot,

thanks for the reply.

I didn't realise Alamy was only RM. Should I remove what i've sent to shutterstock? Or only upload newsworthy to Alamy in the future?
I don't expect to sell anything i've uploaded this Weekend, but the info is certainly very helpful indeed.

Your agreement with Alamy specifically says you cannot offer the same files with Alamy RM as you have RF anywhere else. For the moment you must choose on submission. (However, they are about to introduce RF editorial, so it may well be that you' ll be able to submit to multiple sites RF in future, according to their conditions.

As always, it's something you have to work out for yourself. 
FWIW, I've never been on SS. Historically, I did much better selling secondary editorial on iS, but now iS is basically a subs site site and even so my number of sales has fallen rapidly.
 I absolutely wouldn't sell hot news via iS - I wouldn't  expect buyers of such to look there. I have a secondary editorial image of a vehicle on iStock which was later involved in a major incident (reported in national media, not just local). I couldn't  find it on any other site, not even the macros, and indeed the early reports were published without a photo. Later editions had pics of a 'similar', leading me to think they hadn't checked iS. My pic was accepted under the old high quality standards and featured the serial number and correct livery, so presumably would have been preferable.

Alamy pushes news feed pics to relevant publications, but I've  at last worked out that hereabouts local newspapers either send someone out to cover events or they publish free pics sent in by phone from the public.  I haven't sold anything via live feed and having worked out the reason, I don't  bother with it now. I have always found their live feed very dodgy anyway, taking many resubmits to get a batch through. I believe you can submit via ftp now. I have sold pics submitted as news subsequently, as secondary editorial. I'm more interested in secondary editorial in any case.

But your images will be totally different from mine, so your experience could be totally different. It's a leap in the  dark. Good luck!

My experience is that Alamy is light years ahead of the others in speed and professionalism: they had someone answering emails in the wee small hours of a Sunday morning when the upload process was broken and got it fixed pretty quickly.  Usually news photos are approved in minutes and available on the news feed for 48 hours from then.  After that they will be searchable in the main body of Alamy but will be flagged as �on sale requiring more detail� and you will have to move the keywords as you would do with a normal submission and fill in the details on the licence page.  However, as your image has been submitted as news it will always be categorised as Rights Managed (you cannot change that) and, when it is found in the search, will carry a quality warning that it may not be as of as high a technical standard as stock images as it is reportage.

Much as I love how Alamy works, I have not sold anything through the news feed.  Their feed to newspapers seems to be heavily UK-weighted (most of my news pictures have been from Romania) and from the few I have sent in the UK they have been of local interest and, as Sue says, these are covered by the local papers� own photographers.

From my experience in SS:

- I have 10.52% of my port with editorial images
- They make 6.82% of my total earnings

So, for me at least, they sell as almost well as the not editorial  RF (specially if I exclude my best sellers non editorial).

Quote from: Graphs80 on May 23, 2016, 10:28

From my experience in SS:

- I have 10.52% of my port with editorial images
- They make 6.82% of my total earnings

So, for me at least, they sell as almost well as the RF (specially if I exclude my best sellers RF).

I thought SS only sold RF, whether editorial or general. Have I missed something?

When I wrote RF, please read not editorial 

Thanks for all the great replies!

@cjh

Editorial/news-worthy is something that really appeals to me. Although finding those news-worthy subjects and situations is something that I wouldn't know where to start with. Despite living in an area with a population of over 11 million (1.2 in my immediate area), I still wouldn't know where to start. Needle and haystack spring to mind.


From a personal point of view, I'm coming back into photography after a very very long break. I studied photography in the late 90s and held a football league license for 2 seasons. After that period, and the difficulty of trying to work sports as a teenage freelance, I slipped away from the whole thing.

I'm a little overwhelmed by returning to it and trying to make a few quid, more so surprised by the fact a bunch of rustily produced sub standard 'tinkering with a camera for the first time in years' shots got accepted first time by everywhere I applied.

It's left me somewhat bewildered lol.


Thanks again for the great input everyone! 

Thanks jodijacobson,

from what i gather, Alamy is the place for hot Editorial, and secondary Editorial has a better home on iStock. Would that be fair? Or does SS come in to Play here too?

Owing to the loooooong pending time for normal stock on iStock i uploaded some secondary Editorial (20 or so Images), all screened and available pretty quick, but after a week not even any views. I know they're a drop in the vast ocean, but my Images on fotolia have several views recorded.
I obviously Need to up my game drastically 

yeah, seems so.
Because i was taken by surprise by being accepted to all four at once, i was a Little confused as to who took what - which led me to waste half an hour searching fotolia for the 'Editorial only' button. 

I'm coming back into photography after a very very long break. I studied photography in the late 90s...

Almost every modern photocamera allows you to shoot decent videos too. Don't restrict yourself with photos only, try to make videos as well, just check the number of clips and photos on Shutterstock. It will cost you almost nothing but light monopod and some simple video editing software.

Weather in the UK pictures (taken within the last day) sell quite well on Alamy Live News. The Times, for example, features one or more such images in its print edition pretty well every day - not always sourced from Alamy . I can't comment on weather pictures elsewhere in the world. Local or regional events sometimes sell even to the national press if you catch the picture editor's eye with an amusing or diverting space filler. If your regional event becomes national news due to some incident, you could be in pole position.

The Alamy Live News desk will let you  know if an image is not suitable for the Live News stream and remove it (and small local events are a  prime candidate for this), along with anything which is not genuinely currently newsworthy. The only problem then is that the image reverts to the normal quality control process, and if it fails the usual Alamy rules apply and any other images you have in the submission queue will fail as well. So you need to carefully judge the quality versus newsworthiness of an image submitted to Alamy Live News before going ahead.

One thing you probably might as well not do is submit your images direct to local media, because all they are interested in  nowadays is free pictures - the chances of you getting paid by a local news outlet are slim, unless your picture is absolutely unique and compelling. They are too busy sacking their professional photogs and replacing them with 'citizen journalism'

I have RM editorial pix on Alamy - both Live News and other editorial - haven't sold through Live News but they have licensed them for me as secondary editorial. They've also helped me get press passes when I wasn't shooting for a local outlet. And I also upload outtakes from assignments.

I also have different RF editorial pix on SS, a handful  of which I uploaded years ago from a local NYC event via their (now defunct I think) "On the Red Carpet" program where they helped me get a press pass. The event was far less interesting than I'd anticipated but I needed to get them a certain number of images and nearly all of them have been licensed at least once - a few several times - over several years - for various uses including a few books. Some of my Alamy images have also ended up in books. SS licenses a lot of my editorial images - Alamy fewer but for better prices.

I've also licensed some via iStock and DT. Some several times - I try to capture the news but sometimes an image can be used to illustrate a concept in a more generic way - lots of my old images that I thought would need to sell right away to be successful ended up having life even years after the event. These are mostly festivals, the marathon, local parades with and without famous figures, interesting events with lots of people.

I've freelanced as a local photojournalist for years, so I usually try to license images to local outlets, but they have less money as years go by, so it's nice to know there's a secondary market for some of this work.