Because of the number of similar images in your portfolio, your actual portfolio is in effect only a few hundred unique images. In this context 19 sales is not bad going at Alamy. However, you would benefit from removing similar images and just retaining two or three at the most, the best of each subject.

Your keywording needs tightening up. I disagree with the previous post, in that having keyword phrases use as "Tiananmen Square" can help your to appear in only those searches where your images is relevant. In this example it would help to reduce the number of times your image appeared in a search for just for 'square'. Reducing false positives in the Alamy search is a good move as, in the long term, it improves your search ranking.

Having lots of keywords with only a passing relationship with the subject can also reduce your ranking. In your images of tulips keywords such as dew, leaf, concept, gardening, petal, water are not really appropriate as a buyer using those keywords is unlikely to be looking for the image you are presenting to them.

My advice would be to join the Alamy forum and read the extensive advice available there. Tighten up on what you submit and how you keyword it. Then create a new pseudonym on your account and put your new uploads in there - that pseudonym will start with a mid ranking and give your new images the best chance of success.

Last time I downloaded Davinci Resolve it arrived as an .exe file totalling 597Mb, so I'm guessing your download has not completed fully and you have only a partial file. I'd retry the download. Also, I know that Davinci Resolve is demanding of hardware, especially graphics hardware so I would check the specs of your laptop against their requirements to make sure it is up to the job.

I'm more interested in this change from a legal standpoint. If it's up to us to mark our work as editorial or not who bears the legal responsibility when a client uses a clip that is marked incorrectly as commercial when shouldn't be? Ultimately it should always be the legal responsibility of the client to determine if their use of a clip is correct or not but I suppose it depends on how the Videoblocks license agreement reads.

At the end of the day it is, or at least should be, the responsibility of the client whether material is used correctly as editorial or commercial. However, the contributor always runs the risk of being drawn into any legal action and is, therefore, wise to at the very least make sure the clip is properly described and the availability or not of  releases is made clear.

I, for one, welcome this move from Videoblocks. I have held back from uploading my editorial clips to VB precisely because until now there was no unambiguous way of distinguishing editorial clips from commercial clips on their site.  Casual or occasional customers may not be fully cognisant of the ways editorial clips can and cannot be used  and anything which the agency does to draw attention to the fact that a particular clip is for editorial use only, and that the use of editorial material  subject to different rules, is a good move.

I would be happier still if VB made the difference between using editorial and commercial material abundantly clear on their customer facing site. My reading of their buyer FAQs suggests to me that an uninformed purchaser could easily come away with the impression that any clip they licensed from VB could be used commercially as long as it is incorporated in a modified form in their own creative work.

Will it include editorial footage?


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I've checked this with Pond5. They say that clips marked as Editorial on Pond5 will not appear in Adobe searches.

Definitely not a  good move to remove the views stats. How can a producer of any item for sale know what to produce if their information on what the customer is interested in is restricted? Sales figures may the the most important thing at end of the day but it is also useful to know which images in our portfolios are and are not attracting some interest.

DaVinci Resolve (free edition) is a powerful, professional, programme which will require much investment in time, especially for a beginner, to learn how to use it.  I use it for my stock clips in preference to Adobe Premiere Elements because of the detailed control it gives over colour control and stabilisation. Premiere Elements offers similar control but the tools are not as good and, in my experience, the resulting output not as good.

Neither offer noise reduction out of the box and that is the only feature I miss.

There is a post from Admin on the iStock/Getty user forum about these problems.

If I understand this correctly - and I've not read everything they have posted about this - in short they are saying that the current live balance on contributor accounts is not available due to the 'Unification' change, which is moving contributor information to the Getty/ESP upload system. The implication seems to be that the user balance and sales statistics will no longer be available through iStock.

Crucially, they confirm that payout for balances which had reached the $100 mark by the end of December will be paid as usual on January 25th.

They also say that user's current iStock balance can be seen if you make use of DeepMeta or the iOS app iLucidata.

Obviously this is far from ideal but I've posted this info in the hope it may shed some light on what is happening there.

It is not wholly accurate to say that the keywording system has not changed.

Alamy used their blog on November 23rd to release some detail on the new image management interface and stated that the rollout was likely to begin that week and take a couple of months to implement.

It is certain from results observed , and Alamy have confirmed this, that in the days following there has been a major change in their search engine. This is tied in with the changes to the keywording system as the three levels of keywords currently implemented are migrated to a system of tags ( 50 maximum).

It would seem that few contributors have yet gained access to the new image management tool, but it is quite clear that significant change is taking place.

They dont like but can do very little about it. Similars are not sister images. Look at Alamy!  they accept just about anything and everything and makes not secret about it either.
Getty used picture-scout for sister images but not similars unless people images with exactly the same product or message.

Look this can be debated for 1000 years.

The point I was making was that when we upload to in this case SS who hardly ever promotes new files the odds are theres many top sellers just vanishing among their 100 million files and pictures that could elsewhere earn quite a bit of money.

Since you highlight Alamy you might like to note this clause in their contributor contract:

You cannot submit identical or similar Images to Alamy as both Royalty Free and Rights
Managed. The licence type on Alamy for an Image must be the same as the licence type
for that Image and similar Images which you have on other agency websites.

I agree with Sharpshot that selling at iStock with their pitiful return to the artist is not a good thing as it may take sales of the same clip away from agencies which pay better. I still have an archive of clips at iStock (mostly old one's which don't meet my standards for uploading nowadays), but it still pains me to get a sale there when I might have got a fairer return elsewhere.

The opposite side of the coin is that I'm not uploading to Videoblocks and most certainly not to Videohive, even though, on the face of things, they bring in more money to the artist. Their pricing strategy of undercutting other agencies will only accelerate the reduction in overall prices at all agencies and in the long term hurt everybody's income.

It is true that Alamy is one of the best places to sell, if you upload the right images. Run-of-the-mill microstock images will sell from time to time but they are not Alamy's strong point. Explore Alamy and see what sells there - they have lots of tools for analysing views and sales. Mostly they excel in editorial, both soft editorial and live news. They are especially strong in the UK but do sell images worldwide.
 
Sharpshot is right to say there are no silly rejections, but that is because most submissions are not inspected - they expect the photographer to be professional in their work and only submit acceptable images. They use a sampling system for their quality control where only one or two images per batch are inspected. However, if you do fall foul of their quality control it can really hurt as they will put your upload queue on hold for a month and then fail all images currently in the queue. Most contributors soon learn to self-inspect their uploads thoroughly before submission.

With 500 images in your portfolio you could hope to sell maybe one every two or three months, assuming you are putting up well composed images and do not have a lot of similars. The royalties for each sale however are likely to be many times greater than microstock. I sill have microstock portfolios but it is several years since I shot new stuff for any of them, as far as still images are concerned I prefer to shoot specifically for Alamy .

Alamy is not microstock (even though their prices are slowly being dragged down by microstock competition). Take the time to learn how Alamy works, don't expect instant results, be professional in your work and uploading there will reward you.

Quote from: Herg on November 18, 2016, 09:33

Ok, they seem to he showing now so I am wondering if there is some delay in the images being picked up after I re-keyworded ? If so, I don't mind at all.

One more thing, is the title or caption or the image description more crucial ? Also, is it important to state time, place and date for better sales ?

If all that has been stopping me getting sales is my keywording I will happlily take back all the criticism I have made.

Thanks.

Yes there is a delay after making changes just like some other agencies like SS the keywords are updated when their server refreshes.

The caption is just a few words or lines to briefly describe the image and the description allows for more detailed information both are searchable. 

Dates and places are useful as it helps narrow down the search though you can add city country district names as keywords too.

Dates are good for historical images i.e. 1950 1900, 1890 etc.

Don't forget the plurals of subjects like cat, cats, sandwich sandwiches, automobile automobiles, men, man, woman, women etc etc.

You should note that the Description field at Alamy is NOT searchable. The Title and Keyword fields are the only ones searched. If the place and date are significant to the image they should be included in the keywords.

Hello, I have the same problem. I've entered title/description/keywords in the fields in StockSubmitter but these are not appearing in the corresponding fields on the various agency websites, though the video itself has uploaded correctly.

Exactly what do I need to do in StockSubmitter to get it to transfer the info in these metadata fields to the agency dashboards?

Thanks