Interesting you mention AS for your best shots. I only got an EL at Adobe when I pursued it myself (because some commercial company bought at low rates and I discovered my photos in their commercial website). And an EL gives you only so much money at Adobe. Why choose them while on SS or IS or Alamy (apparently) you could get so much more?

Good question. AS gives me consistent RPD over 1 and EL's most every month.  But large part for me is respecting the work  On IS 15% or fraction of a penny just doesn't feel right when you know you have good shot & invest almost an hour post-processing in Photoshop every detail.  Similar with SS not even because of 10 cents, but because of AI rejections of perfectly well exposed and technically sound images which made me stop uploading there completely.   

Again everyone must find what works best for them and this is not related just to $$ amount.

Congratulations! That's awesome!
Fingers crossed that the customer doesn't request a refund in 5 months. That's always my greatest worry with bigger Alamy sales, especially when you already had payout and spent the money.

Thank you.  Thought has crossed my mind & even if not pessimist by nature I am inclined to think this will not stick.  4 digit figure for single frame on 20.2 megapixel sensor  won't yield large print.  We shall see. Will post an update here

Nobody (human person) reviewed your image.  This is all AI.  Same as SS, but DT threshold is very low so 99.99% of images pass, while SS threshold is quite high so lots of perfectly exposed and technically sound images get rejected.   Write-up is generic text someone composed & AI software then just dumps it in email message.

My only DT rejection this year is:


AI figured it was recognizable person and rejected.  I didn't bother to submit as editorial as AS accepted it as RF & I think image has sale potential as such.

It's all getting quite ridiculous with AI these days;  we are playing the game to outsmart the software which is all wrong IMHO

DT has this round-robin portfolio promoting scheme.   You can go couple of weeks without single 35 cents download, then next day have 4 or 5, then again nothing for over a week.

As experiment last month I contributed couple of photos for their "Vertical" assignment.   Shots have to be exclusive, and in return they promote it to level five.  I was curious if this will mean something - not a sniff.   Winner (extraordinary image btw) has 3 downloads so far

Pete - this is conclusion I made based on Alamy Measures when photo gets returned in search for search term I had in title, but not in keywords.  Since keywords are obviously 2 level (10 super then rest) it is logical to assume title might have the heaviest weight for search engine.  It also fits overall Alamy model where phrases are not supported, in other words title string is parsed and indexed as array of individual words 

It is interesting to note how different agencies treat indexing;   IS does not index title/description at all, neither does AS.  DT on the other level puts by far the heaviest weight on Title, then Description.  I believe SS indexes title and supports phrases, but does not have "super" tags like AS (first 10) and Alamy.  IS on the other hand has this "managed dictionary" which is IMHO as wrong as it gets.  But IS will index tag that is not recognized, at least this is what their support told me once. So for instance if "landscape" is not recognized and they want you to pick "landscape - scenery" instead - don't bother.  Just "landscape" will get indexed fine.

February RPD

SS: 0.253
IS: expect 0.25 - 0.35 range
DT  0.533
AS: 1.247
AL: 15.829 (net)

These numbers are probably self explanatory.  Yesterday had SS On Demand for 0.23 (!)  AS and AL are only 2 agencies worth contributing to at the moment IMHO

And 7th sale of Feb popped in on last day,  $75 gross



Which brings monthly total to $277 gross;  39.57 RPD gross, or 15.83 net.  Might be anomaly that will be hard to repeat, but for the first time in over a year someone has beaten AS in terms of monthly earnings

I got two more sales on Alamy today, $32 each ("Poland, calendar") which brings February to $182 (gross) on rather modest port size of ~2000 images.  Everyone naturally needs to make their own decisions, but I'm happy to stay with Alamy & keep uploading.

"figha" = high five?

AS is respectful to contributors.  Yes, UI is lacking, promotion of new content could probably be higher, yes this or that could be improved,  but overall AS is now leading by a mile compared to others.  I stopped uploading to SS, not so much because of 10 cents, but because of senseless AI rejections that just make your work feel devalued.  Most people just look for fairness and transparency, and AS gives that at least for now.  (And yes, sales are great, but these 2 things are interconnected).

Some of these low sales are subscriptions ("750 Bilder per Monat").   It would mean 0.2 x 750 = 150$ per month for 750 downloads.   Did Alamy offer subscriptions before?

2nd best month of the year on IS, and first time IS and SS are virtually even for the year.  This is not due to IS rise, but SS decline.   AS, with smaller port, more than IS and SS combined for the year

In January so far first 8 days my Adobe port, 30% smaller than SS port, earned 7x more.  For calendar 2021 Adobe earned 2.5 times more compared to SS.  This is not coincidence.  The difference between Adobe and others is that Adobe has intellectual approach in how they structured this side of company business.  They also respect contributors;  Matt comes here and says what is going on, QA is fair and most DLs, for me at least, are 0.99 or more.  Compare that to 0.00001 DL's on Getty,  endless 10 cents SS Stream and now Alamy.   And I won't even go into senseless AI rejections of perfectly well composed and technically sound stills, which is right down disrespectful.