I emailed Alamy on Friday and heard back from them today with a similar question.  Here was their reply.  Hope this helps.

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The standard contract you have with Alamy says we will pay you within 30 days. We do a pay run on the 1st UK working day of each month.



So if the payment date is the 1st of the month we have until the 30th of the month to get the money to you.



Let me explain to you the payment process via PayPal:



• We do not keep any large cash balances in our PayPal accounts.

• On the first working day we calculate the amount to pay to all contributors via PayPal.

• On the same day we request PayPal to take money from our bank accounts to fund these transfers. This normally takes 4-5 working days but we have no control over this process as it is run completely independently by PayPal.

• Once the funds are with PayPal we double check the amounts and PayPal addresses, this takes about a day.

• Then the PayPal payments are sent – these are almost instant



However, we do our best to pay you as soon as we can. Typically this means we send the money to arrive with you between the 4th and 7th working days of each month and please be assured that this will soon reach your 'PayPal' account.





Kind regards



Asha

Member Services

Thanks so much! 

I've posted several times now and still can't start a thread, unless the button is not in an obvious place?

Speaking of stolen pictures...I just got the new iPhone 4s and am disgusted to see how they are making image theft even easier...and promoting it as a neat phone feature, even!   

From the iPhone promotional material:  "Save images from the web.  In Safari, touch and hold an image to save it to your Camera Roll or copy it to paste into an MMS or email."

None of my images that are on the Flickr stream have been uploaded by me to Flickr.  I do not post my micro images on Flickr. 

Found about 7 more.  They need to shut this guy down.  I'm pretty sure they got them all from SS so I'm  going to alert them.

I sent a DMCA notice and they removed two of my images but his photo stream is still up, so I'm going to have to go through and search for more of my images.  Grrr.  Hello,

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Thank you for reporting this incident to Yahoo!. We have taken the
appropriate action.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Regards,

Copyright/IP Agent, Yahoo! Inc.

The images of mine posted in the abuser's Flickr account are not on my Flickr account.

Edit to add that I did post something similar as a comment under my images.

I just was able to view one of my images at original size.  Maybe they did purchase them, but how they are re-posting them is wrong.

If you look at the upload dates, they appear to be the same for a certain photo category (with many images uploaded) on a given day.  I wonder if they are trying to get recognized by Getty?

OY..just clicked on the gallery and saw more of my photos.  There is no image credit and there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the Flickr poster is not taking credit.

Just found another image.  I should probably stop looking because what's the use of my blood pressure going up further?  Reported is reported.   

I've been an avid reader at MSG for years but never have registered.  I just found one of my photos (after about a 5 second perusal) at this thief's Flickr account.  I just fired off an email to Yahoo (who handles Flickr image theft).  Thanks for the post!