T-mount is the name of the game.
If (tele)scope model has T-mount adapter available for you DSLR/mirrorless mount than it is possible to take good quality images with it.
T-mount adapter is usually selling as a separate accessory from manufacturer or 3rd party and it is not expensive.
Is some cases it already comes with a scope.
Read scope specs for T-mount adapter.

I don't want your attention because I'm giving up of Alamy.
But if you want to help just to check all those irregularities in clearings and help contributors to get their money.
There are people who have uncleared balance for a lot of time, some of them for years and that is not hard to check.
Summarize those amounts, think about it and do something.

Cases like mine are more rare than that but I'm sure that I'm not alone:
I had enough cleared amount >50$ for payment almost 6 months ago.
And then I had relatively big sale which was refunded at the last day of that month.
Despite the sale was never cleared REFUND WAS CLEARED IMMEDIATELY and that lowered my previously cleared balance well below 50$.
That is not legal in my opinion but in addition to that all further sales stays uncleared. Five months of sales.
That also doesn't look legal to me and I want you to investigate all those cases.
Again it's not hard to find, just search in 2020 for all refunds which lowered previously cleared balance below 50$.
Repeat the same search for 2019.

That's all I have to say.

Thanks for your email, please read the following important information.


Temporarily, we're unlikely to be able to answer your email due to a reduction in team size whilst we respond to the global Covid-19 pandemic.


For any legal or copyright issues you need to email [email protected].


Quality Control wait times will be much longer than normal. Please bear with us and we will review your submission as soon as we can. Wait time for initial submissions will take around 3 to 4 weeks.



For all other questions, we encourage you to ask your question to knowledgeable fellow photographers over on the Alamy forum:


https://discussion.alamy.com/forum/19-community-support-ask-the-forum/.   


You can also find the answers to most questions here:


·       Our help pages: https://www.alamy.com/contributor

·       Our FAQs: https://www.alamy.com/contributor/faqs


Here are some common questions and answers that may help:


Want to sign up to sell your images?


·      That's great! At Alamy we don't edit pictures on content; we accept images as long as they meet our technical quality standards, so it's up to you to send us what you like. If you've not visited our website we suggest the first step will be to have a read of our contributor help pages including our submission guidelines. Once you're ready to make a start you can create your account here.


Can't find your 'on sale' images?


·         When you've annotated your images and they are showing as "on sale" in Alamy Image Manager, they won't show as 'on sale' on your dashboard or be visible to our customers until the search engine has updated. This happens approx. every 24 hrs.


Have you had a batch of images fail Quality Control?


·      We see a large number of images each day and it's not possible for us to check every image so we take a random sample of images and if all images in that sample are fine then we pass all images awaiting QC. If we find one failure then all images awaiting QC will fail. All images submitted should meet our QC standards so when we look at a random sample this should represent the quality of all images submitted.

How do I upload to the Alamy Live News feed?

    You'll need to apply for access to the Live News upload route. You can do this under the 'additional revenue options' section of your contributor dashboard. If you have any queries, you can email our news team at [email protected].

Mistakenly uploaded images?


·         Our system doesn't let us delete images during processing or quality control. If they pass QC you can delete them under the 'optional' tab in the Alamy Image Manager.


Looking to upload a release?


·         We've removed the upload function for releases as we don't need you to upload them. All you need to do is annotate your images saying that there is one available and then we will get in touch with you if the customer needs it.


Want to mark your images as exclusive to Alamy?


·         You can mark your images as exclusive by ticking the 'only available on Alamy' box under the 'optional' tab in the Alamy Image Manager. You can do this in batches of 500 at a time by selecting multiple submissions in the left hand column using the 'shift' key and then ticking 'select all passed'. You can also set a default for all future submissions under the settings cog icon in the image manager. You'll find more info about what classifies an image as exclusive here.


Question about payment?


·         You can enter your payment details under the 'account settings' section on your contributor dashboard.

·         You'll be included in our payment run and sent funds when your cleared balance is over $50.

·         The amount shown on your contributor dashboard is the gross amount and doesn't include commission deductions.

·         During the payment run it can take up to 9 working days for the payment to reach your account.



Seen your image being used but the sale is not listed yet?


·         Some customers report usages to us over a set period of time. If you've seen your images being used it can take up to 3 months to appear as a sale in your account. If you have a sale that remains unpaid beyond this timeframe please be aware that our credit control team will have a record of this and will be chasing the client for payment accordingly.


Looking to upload video?


·         Thanks for your interest but unfortunately, we've closed our video application process to focus on the stills side of our business.



Thanks for your patience at this difficult time.

1. REFUND IS NOT A PROBLEM
2. SINGLE SALE IS NOT A PROBLEM (LIKE BEFORE) - EVERY SALE IS A PROBLEM
First of all refund is not a problem, it is too small.  Also you obviously didn't read my previous comment from the month of May.  Also I didn't mentioned later that temporary cleared amount of 171$ was back to 49$ again and that pi$$ed me off for real. Since that they are not answering at all. I don't have many refunds so they are easy to trace. For the last 365 days (from July 1st 2019.) there was ONLY ONE refund, and it is visible on my Alamy account balance . Refund was back in February, customer bought an image and a few days later it was refunded and immediately both again for the lower price. Refund in total (sale price) was just 21$. I really don't understand how they get from 81$ of cleared balance to 32$ with that refund. After that every sale except one in last 4 months wasn't cleared. Without any public statement and/or personal answer what is going on it looks absolutely like a GANG job.

KEEP AWAY FROM ALAMY GANG!!!
Looks like a bunch of gangsters took over Alamy in 2020.
I had cleared amount of 81$ back in february and then it somehow 1 day before the end of month became uncleared, and it was lowered to 32$ without any reason.
Next month cleared amount stuck at 49$ !
1$ below payment threshold.
And it stays like that 3 months more, despite dozens of sales every month, none of them was cleared.
Now it is July and I have 10 times more as an uncleared amount and cleared amount is still on 49$.
I am an Alamy contributor for almost 10 years and never experienced something like this before.
There were some single sales that were stuck for a couple of months but never like this.
For me this is by now an obvious criminal activity but I don't know how to handle this situation.
I sent dozen of emails to them from polite to mad, requesting escalation, even mentioning the police but they just doesn't care.
I've got 1 generic answer in total for 5 months.
Any good advice what to do would be appreciated in this situation.
They are acting like a criminal organization and I think that they need some sort of external investigation.
If anybody knows which institutions are responsible for that based on their location I would appreciate that info.
Some contact link/email of those institutions would be nice.
Thank you.

3rd day in a row one single image (with highest price) sold on Adobe stock is more valuable than total daily amount of sale at Shutterstock.
My Shutterstock portfolio of 6000+ images was just disabled indefinitely.

Quote from: ShadySue on May 08, 2020, 13:47

Quote from: Android Marvin (formerly mb) on May 08, 2020, 10:00
You are lucky, they actually robbed me in February and since than all my later sales are still uncleared.
Current amount is still not enough for a lawsuit, but if this continue for a few months or more I will probably go in that direction.

Here is the story:
2 days before end of February I had 81$ cleared so I expected my payment to be initiated at the beginning of March.
At that moment I had one bigger sale but off course that amount was uncleared and I didn't expect be payed at the beginning of March.
A few days later I was checking my balance for a payment when I saw that last sale was refunded.
There was no doubt about which sale was  refunded because there was a notice "Original sales on 27th of February".
But that refund WAS IMMEDIATELY CLEARED unlike original sale and that lowered my cleared amount from 81$ before 27th of February to 32$ !!!
All later sales from 5th of March until today 8th of May are still uncleared including that one from 27th of February so I am still on 32$ cleared.
I wrote them dozen of times, first to general support and than to legal department but didn't get any explanation for that.
I send them very specific questions but didn't get any single answer to them, just general comments.
At least they didn't mentioned Covid-19 as an excuse.

I am not a lawyer, but the fact that they lowered my previously cleared amount with refund to sales which came after that is very illegal.

It happens  , and not only on Alamy.

Why it is so hard to say "Sorry we made a mistake".

2 agencies, 2 examples both from april 2020.:

Alamy: I finally got the answer on my 6th email which looks like somebody actually read my complaints. Unfortunately the answer was "no problems there, business as usual you could wait up to 4 months for amounts to be cleared and bla bla"... but the very next day my sales from february and march were all cleared and suddenly I have 171$ cleared and ready for payout.

123rf: At the end of April I send them complaint that I didn't sell any single image during the whole month of April. That didn't happened since I sell my 1st image there 10 years ago. Typically I'm selling around 100 photos per month which is around 20-30$, and never had a month with 0 sales since 2010, also I have portfolio of 7000+ images there. I asked them is there any reason for that, as example blocked portfolio/profile but the answer was "account is fine and business is as usual, could be my personal sales drop because of covid-19" with usual advices how to boost my sales. 1 day after that answer my sales suddenly returned back to normal with 4 images sold and now after 15 days I have 47 images sold during this month which is finally "business as usual" for me.

You are lucky, they actually robbed me in February and since than all my later sales are still uncleared.
Current amount is still not enough for a lawsuit, but if this continue for a few months or more I will probably go into that direction.

Here is the story:
2 days before end of February I had 81$ cleared so I expected my payment to be initiated at the beginning of March.
At that moment I had one bigger sale but off course that amount was uncleared and I didn't expect be payed at the beginning of March.
A few days later I was checking my balance for a payment when I saw that last sale was refunded.
There was no doubt about which sale was  refunded because there was a notice "Original sales on 27th of February".
But that refund WAS IMMEDIATELY CLEARED unlike original sale and that lowered my cleared amount from 81$ before 27th of February to 32$ !!!
All later sales from 5th of March until today 8th of May are still uncleared including that one from 27th of February so I am still on 32$ cleared.
I wrote them dozen of times, first to general support and than to legal department but didn't get any explanation for that.
I send them very specific questions but didn't get any single answer to them, just general comments.
At least they didn't mentioned Covid-19 as an excuse.

I am not a lawyer, but the fact that they lowered my previously cleared amount with refund to sales which came after that looks illegal to me.

Yes but in Firefox only, probably damaged cookies or something like that, you should make cleaning of your browser. Chrome works just fine, but could be opposite for you, depending on which is your default browser.

What is obvious can't be denied, but too much trolls here.
Se ya next year.

Quote from: Zero Talent on June 05, 2018, 19:47
The explanation is not "random" at all. It is simple and logical.
A big sale = a spike.
A spike is a spike only when it stands out of the normal trend, being preceded and followed by normal and obviously lower sales.

By theory of probability big sale is not related anyhow to your other sales unless they come from the same buyer which is rarely the case for a people with a lot of sales every day. So big sale is actually a random event (so true by any means) and there is no reason for unrelated sales to decline immediately after the big sale. Unfortunately that is the case which is important proof that revenue is controlled for most of the contributors.

Quote from: Zero Talent on June 05, 2018, 19:06

Quote from: Ssx123 on June 05, 2018, 11:34
Every time I had bigger sales, next day onwards sales have drastically declined. I believe, they are controlling our revenues.

What you are saying is that your next day sales are normal and, from time to time, you have a big sale (which is also part of the "normal").

Type of licence can't be controlled by machine in advance. Buyer is first searching for an image and when he or she find the right one he will decide will it be 30+ cents or 100+ dollars. If it is a big sale from the algorithm point of view that sale is a deviation in revenue and it will be averaged by low sales in the following period.

Friendly advice: Zero IQ is a better nickname.

Quote from: namussi on June 05, 2018, 12:13

There's a much simpler explanation: Poisson clumping.

How about the Theory of uncertainty?

Quote from: imagesbykenny on June 05, 2018, 03:09
It actually started out as a joint venture with the CIA several years ago to undermine the stock market. After the CIA realized they had the wrong stock market they backed out but failed to remove the infrastructure for the devious plan.

Trivia: Do you know that Hollywood's biggest problem is finding a good scriptwriter?

Quote from: qwerty on June 04, 2018, 06:36
Revenue is so closely linked to position in search.

Actually it's opposite.

Quote from: qwerty on June 04, 2018, 06:36
Open separate accounts in your dogs name ?

I'm tired of doing that but yes it works.
I was so good, that I could give you perfect newbie strategy for maximizing your sales by recycling your existing portfolio and an information how long your newbie "honeymoon" will last.

As I already said before:
"All of you are probably interested in an answer is it possible to beat their machine to get more income with less work instead opposite?
From everything I learned so far the answer is Yes but a) it is not legal, b) it can't be done permanently, c) it is complicated/time consuming
If you want to play legal I think you will have better chances in a casino."

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on June 04, 2018, 02:16
So we've got one person saying they use controlled revenue because their sales are gradually decreasing, we've got one person saying they use controlled revenue because their sales are gradually increasing, we've got one person saying they use controlled revenue because their sales are wildly inconsistent, and in the majority of previous posts on the subject... we have people saying that they use controlled revenue because their sales are extremely consistent.

Very compelling evidence.

Exactly and unfortunately all of them as a hundred other behaviours have very logical explanation in specific conditions.
1) Sales are gradually decreasing for the same amount of work per year (not per month because of market fluctuations) 99% of established contributors will confirm you that
2) Off course in a long term MUCH more work/images per month will result in gradually increasing sales
3) Sales are extremely consistent (with slightly noticable decrease) for contributors that sells hundreds/thousands of images per month for 30+ cents
4) Sales are starting to be extremely inconsistent when when you get a buyer for (unexpected) high value licences. After that you will wait a lot for a new sales from different buyers because engine is trying to make your sales consistent on monthly/yearly basis.

I think I covered everything you said.

Good photographs are usually good in visual recognition but only few of them are also good in abstract recognition.

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on June 02, 2018, 05:46

Quote from: Sky on May 29, 2018, 17:29
Could it be using a Shutterstock controlled revenue system?

The short answer is that it's possible, but it's highly unlikely. Nobody has yet produced any compelling evidence to support the theory.

For compelling evidence you need FBI but for some of us which are experts in that kind of software, patterns, behaviours and high probability is just enough for the right conclusion.

Quote from: unnonimus on May 29, 2018, 21:31
it is important for new users to have sales so they remain committed to contributing in the long run.

How noble!

But I'm afraid it's going like this:

"How can we reduce costs?"
"By favouring new users?"
"Approved!"

Quote from: Android Marvin (formerly mb) on June 06, 2018, 21:36

Quote from: Sky on May 29, 2018, 17:29
Hello
Could it be using a Shutterstock controlled revenue system?
I have asked this question before
In short, you can specify your thoughts.

You don't have to be insider to prove that, there are patterns and behaviours and based on them you have very high probability that search engine is controlled to achieve certain goals that are absolutely not in interest of established contributors. 
In short yes they are doing that for sure, initial software implementation in production environment was in september 2016 with a a few minor changes later.
As a Shutterstock contributor and as an independent Business Intelignece Systems expert I tried to explain a few things in a couple of discussions like here:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/are-new-images-selling/

Also here:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/please-tell-me-this-makes-sense!/

and here:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/june-algorithm-change/

Quote from: Sky on May 29, 2018, 17:29
Hello
Could it be using a Shutterstock controlled revenue system?
I have asked this question before
In short, you can specify your thoughts.

You don't have to be insider to prove that, there are patterns and behaviours and based on them you have very high probability that search engine is controlled to achieve certain goals that are absolutely not in interest of established contributors. 
In short yes they are doing that for sure, initial software implementation in production environment was in september 2016 with a a few minor changes later.
As a Shutterstock contributor and as an independent Business Intelignece Systems expert I tried to explain a few things in a couple of discussions like here:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/are-new-images-selling/

Quote from: Uber Images on August 22, 2017, 18:38
We upload 80-150 images a week, and it usually sells right away.

For 25c per image?

Quote from: derek on August 17, 2017, 07:12
mistake! dont know what happened here but all text disappeared!

anyway answer to sharpshots post: of course they do!  been doing for a long time now. You can test it! upload 5 shots and then ask somebody on 0.25c to upload at the very same time. You wont believe it youre shots are basically nowhere to be seen. Done it a few times just to be sure. Never fails and just to point out for the usual non believers. This is NOT a conspiracy theory its been going on since last X-mas. Sure there are exceptions but on the whole thats their strategy. Its business if they can earn more agency revenue that way why not?  I would do the same.

100% true.
One of my "experiments" was exactly like that, one old 0.35c account and one newbie 0.25c account with the "very similar" files.
Time period is also accurate, and yes, I would also do the same.

Quote from: Android Marvin (formerly mb) on August 16, 2017, 15:28
In short: NEW IMAGES ARE NOT SELLING BECAUSE SS SEARCH ENGINE IS CONFIGURED LIKE THAT.
Explanation: It was a part of SS fight against spam, there are exceptions from that rule like new contributors not older than 6 months.

In addition: they are testing new anti-spam strategy called "similar images" since previous month.
It is a half automatic process: when you send new files to review, software places tahm side-by-side with most similar images from the same contributor.
After that reviewer could easily selects which images will be rejected for "similar images" reason and which not.
If it is obvious that the whole batch is a spam he could mark them all as "similar images" with one click.

Selling of a new images probably depends on a success rate of that anti-spam strategy.
If that goes well than selling of a new images could return back to normal.

Quote from: DallasP on August 16, 2017, 22:33
Paypal doesn't ... and Paypal has a debit card ... Payoneer Doesn't

Exactly opposite. Payoneer has it and If I remember well Paypal has a debit card for US Citizens only, so it doesn't exists for major number of contributors.

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on August 16, 2017, 06:34
Well, that was fast. They only tested one month o_0

This is not marketing, just my IT expirience:
Payoneer has very good API which could be integrated easy and fast with almost any internet platform.
That is probably the main reason why SS tested it only one month.
Contributors with IT background who will accept Payoneer will have a little sense how integration works during registration of a new payment method.
Payoneer module is simply embedded into SS software and when you select Payoneer as an option you got Payoneer interface inside SS configuration page which will create link to your existing Payoneer account. Easy, simple and secure from my point of view. There is possibility to create new account directly even if you don't have one but I prefer to create and configure Payoneer account first and then link to an existing account from SS configuration page.