Quote from: dragonblade on September 27, 2021, 22:15

I did some random video searches on Alamy today and I was surprised to find some of my videos on there. By the way, I was not contributing to Alamy in the days when they accepted video.

I clicked on a few videos of mine and under 'contributor', it says: "Pond 5 / Alamy Stock Video." And yes, I also have these same videos on Pond 5.

Actually, I vaguely recall some deal between Pond 5 and Adobe Stock where your editorial videos on Pond 5 could be sold through AS. But I wasn't aware of any deal between Pond 5 and Alamy.

Interestingly, only some of my Pond 5 videos are available on Alamy - not all of them. I wonder if there's some kind of selection process or I guess it could be random.

Though it does seem odd that some of my videos on Alamy are also on my Pond 5 exclusive account. Since they're exclusive, I would have assumed they could only be sold through P5. And there are also non exclusive P5 videos of mine on Alamy.

I did check the details of a few of my videos and I notice my Pond 5 account name on them (on the Alamy website.)

Instead of a random search, you can go to Advanced search and type in your username, to see all your videos.

That doesn't work for our Pond5 videos on Alamy because the assigned contributor is Pond5. They have included the name of clip creator in a Photographer field, but that is non-searchable.

I don't know, until now, with distributor sales you alway got 30% of total gross, not 40% of what is left. For example, 100$ gross, distributor gets 40$, me and alamy get 30$.

What bothers me is, I finally get some nice sales, and then I get this lowlife comissions.

EDIT: Maybe it was some kind of discount, because all 3 sales showed up at once, so I'm pretty sure, they're from the sam customer.

As I say in my earlier post, the only way to get an authorititive explanation is to email  Alamy contributor relations. However, the calculations I have set out seem to me to accord with the relevant clause in the contributor contract:

11.4 You agree that in respect of all sales made via Distributors, the Alamy Commission after deducting the Distributor�s commission or fee will reflect that of the applicable commission model as specified in the Alamy Commission Table.

I don't have many distributor sales on my account, but the few I have have all been calculated in this way: 40% to the distributor, the balance split between Alamy and contributor according to the commission model in force at the time.

I don't say it's a good thing. Indeed, part of my response to the recent contract changes at Alamy has been to opt out of personal use licence and distributor sales.

I've checked this with Pond5 support. Alamy take their cut of the price they set for each video, but Pond5 won't say how large that slice is. The Pond5 contributor then gets 60% (exclusive), 40% (non-exclusive) of whatever is left after Alamy have their slice. The deal with Alamy works in the same way as all other Global Partnership Programme deals

Quote from: cathyslife on July 18, 2019, 10:58

It never matters what has been approved before. That said, unless Disney now has the legal right to forbid all licensing, you likely just got a bad reviewer. Have you tried resubmitting? It�s possible Disney has changed the legalities.

No haven�t tried resubmitting. Testing the waters on Disney shots. SS is the only one that rejected. Passed on Alamy, DT, ESP


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I can't comment on DT or ESP, but I can say that Alamy do not inspect images on upload for possible intellectual property issues. They only inspect for technical quality and regard other aspects of the upload (captions, keywords, releases) as the responsibility of the contributor. Microstockers who are used to having their hands held by inspectors at other agencies should beware when uploading to Alamy and take care to ensure that they are not infringing model or property rights.

Issue is now resolved and I can connect to Shutterstock FTP. Initial contact from support was with their 'Shutterstock Expert User' scheme, which was of no use whatsoever as the error was clearly a technical issue with the FTP server. Their proper technical support contacted me about eight hours after I first raised the issue. I explained the issue in detail. About two hours after than I was able to login again using the same credentials which had been rejected throughout the day, and I have successfully uploaded several video clips. I've not actually had a response from tech support to say what the problem was, but they've clearly been able to fix it.

I don't know how much the Shutterstock Expert user scheme is a help to contributors - it may be that they are able to field a lot of simple queries and stop the support system from being clogged up. It just seems to me that when I do need support, I need people who have access to Shutterstock's backend systems, who can see what is going wrong and take steps to fix it. In this respect the 'expert user' us just an obstacle I have to get past to get access to the actual support I need.

Hmm. Normal service has been restored for me at Shutterstock FTP and I can now login, without any apparent change to what I was doing previously.Puzzled.

Suddenly I am unable to login at Shutterstock FTP to upload videos.  I am using Filezilla 3.43.0. My Shutterstock login username and password are unchanged since I last used FTP there ( a month ago) and I can still log in to the main contributor site using the same credentials.  FTP logins to other stock sites are working perfectly.

Anyone else got this problem? I've opened a support ticket but don't expect a super quick response.

Quote from: whosvegas on June 25, 2019, 00:54

What fields make sense to fill in?
What are the important field to fill?

I upload my images ad for editorial images, I mark the editorial checkbox

Fill in all of the fields even the location (it is searchable too)

Though you can skip the field containing extra information about the image "Additional info" as it is not searchable though it might be useful if you want to include more detail about the image.

The location field isn't searchable anymore. It brought up too many irrelevant results in searches, so they disabled it for search purposes. If the location is important it needs to go in the caption and the keywords. If the location would be useful but not essential for the buyer to know, put it in the additional info field. Don't include the location in either caption or keywords unless it IS important. I've lost count of the number of close-up shots of wildfowl I've seen captioned as 'a duck in xxxxx town', which then shows up in a search for xxxxx town, even though the image is totally useless in that context.

Well, you see PZF.....not only are you supposed to buy the equipment, find the location, take the perfect shot, download it onto your computer, spend the time with that expensive equipment to re-touch and perfect your image, upload to Alamy, fill in all the important keywords and data....but they also want you to do the majority of promotional work as well while they fill their pockets providing "window dressing"... and you get your $0.31 for your measly efforts. "Poor visibility"? How 'bout "Poor agency"?

As others have pointed out, the discoverability bar is something of an aberration by Alamy. A well-captioned and keyworded image will only rarely reach 'green' discoverability, and the impact on the findability of the image is not affected by it.  Seasoned contributors are well aware that 'discoverability' can be safely ignored if all the metadata is completed thoughtfully.

Most of the rest of the process you describe, from buying the equipment through to uploading and filling in the important keywords and data, is basic to being a stock photographer and little different from other stock agencies. Alamy requires a little more on metadata, but time invested in filling in that information is usually well spent.

The comments about them wanting the contributor to do the majority of the promotional work has no basis in fact that I know of. I have never needed to do any promotional work for my own images on Alamy, they do everything to achieve sales for me and themselves, which is what I would expect. There is nothing stopping a contributor promoting their own work on social media etc, but it's not essential.

The $0.31 you mention is a figure which is rare (even under the price-depressing onslaught of microstock), and certainly not typical, as you seem to be suggesting. In my eight years there I have never netted less than ten times that amount for a sale and typically each sale is much more likely to bring me 50 to 100 times that $0.31. Many contributors do considerably better than I do.  Having said that, I don't put my Alamy images on microstock, so I'm never undercutting myself.

Your comment in another post about Alamy selling 'social' information to other businesses would imply that they are breaching European data protection regulations as they don't to the best of my knowledge, have permission to sell our data to third party companies, other than making our images available through their distributor network.

Far from being a poor agency, they are probably, even with their known shortcomings which are regularly acknowledged on the Alamy forum, one of the best agencies for a stock contributor to deal with.

I can't see enough detail on that screenshot to comment properly, but I wonder if all three entries in the sales ledger refer to the same image, in which case you may be looking at a refund and re-sale (possibly at a different price).  Have a lok to see if all the sales amounts are positive figures, or if one of them has a minus sign in front of it.

My first thought is that it is a knee jerk reaction to Pond5 introducing exclusive accounts, which is leading a (significant?) number of contributors to request that all or part of their video portfolio on Adobe is suspended or deleted. Could be a coincidence, but it seems strange that this unannounced change should suddenly appear. I'm not going to accept the change until I see some feedback on here to clarify what is going on.

I do only video, and to be honest SS is the only agency where I get rejections.
The way it works is that generally they reject one third of each batch.
Reviewers are paid peanuts and certainly they don't have the time to actually look at each individual file (with video), but they are scared to death that if they accept a whole bunch they will be considered lazy, so they simply reject a few random one just to pretend that they have had a look at them.
Of course you resubmit them and the get all accepted, because they know that if they refuse them a second time, the artist might argue with whatever quality control service and reviewers will get in trouble.
Bottom line, every time you upload videos to SS, you know that one third will be rejected and you have to upload it again. A bit of an idiotic way to work, but after all you end up with everything accepted.
The only question is: Why SS keep paying useless reviewers? they could save the money and give it to contributors, or give discount to customers

This isn't my experience. I generally submit small batches of videos and have a rejection rate of less than 10%. Almost always I agree with the rejections when I look closely. Only once in seven years of submitting to SS have I felt that a reviewer has lazily or mistakenly pushed the reject button on a batch of videos and rejected the whole lot. SS support eventually agreed with me that the rejection was an error but I didn't bother resubmitting as P5 provided a perfectly acceptable home for the same batch anyway. i think to say that their reviewers reject a third of every batch is too sweeping a statement.