MicrostockGroup Sponsors


Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - gillian vann

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 56
51
Newbie Discussion / Re: Alamy Payments
« on: August 07, 2019, 21:04 »



Ah, nothing to do with disambiguation.

The 'discoverability' thing is a very poorly thought-out  (to put it politely) notion of Alamy (they have them, just like all the rest) which as you suggest leads to spam.
Even if you don't spam, for most images tryng to get to 42 keywords would lead to keywording small features of an image which are pretty irrelevant, meaning your views will increase but not your zooms/sales, which allegedly might knock back your Alamy Rank. Also remember that on Alamy any word from the caption can be merged with any keyword, even one word from a keyword phrase, also giving irrelevant views and hitting your click through rate. I normally get at least one of these search malgorithms daily. Eg today I have a hit for Turkish Tent, which is a Turkish musician performing in a tent. (But in particular, if you have an image of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe, your image will show up on searches for Joe Doe, Jane Bloggs, Joe Jane, etc. Sometimes these mismatches show higher in the search than images of the real Joe Doe / whatever, but it's not so bad at the moment.

The more keywords you have, the most likely these malgorithms are to happen.

FWIW, I have fewer than 5% of my file with 'good discoverability' and these are all files with either a lot of location specific keywords or a lot of subject specific keywords, e.g. if it's a species which has recently had its name or classification changed, I'll put in the old and new terms, as many people don't keep absolutely up to date with these changes, and some regard them as 'dubious'.

In case you're not convinced, at the time when they introduced the current system, Alamy put up a video showing how the system worked, and they only used 16 (sixteen) keywords:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DeGewd73uw

FWIW, ATM and for over a year past, words in captions have ranked highter than in keywords, so make sure all your important keywords are in the caption.

The issues arising from the stupid discoverability thing have been discussed here a few times, and over on the Alamy forum many times. Alamy have never jumped in to explain why it's a good idea - but nor have they removed the feature).

And finally, if it's not a Live News or archival/reportage image, you can't have a 'super long caption': these are limited to 150 characters and have nothing to do with discoverability.
Correction: as mentioned above, your caption has everything to do with real discoverability, but nothing to do with Alamy's stupid 'discoverability' feature.
sorry, alamy call it "annotate". I couldn't think of what other word to use. I wasn't sure what the secret sauce was to get the green "good visibility" status, as I have images with 40 keywords that are green, but others needed 42 or more. If you  add some of the Optional options you get a tiny boost in that orange line, however I don't see having a longer description helping as you pointed out.  I will in the future try to add more kw to my description. The YT tutorial doesn't address this.  I'll search here and see if anyone has more clues.


52
Newbie Discussion / Re: Alamy Payments
« on: August 06, 2019, 04:34 »
I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.
What disambiguation?

that whole "poor discoverability" thing. trying to get the line turn green is pretty challenging, you have to put in so many keywords, or a super long caption, plus other things like location, category, etc. It's tedious and i'm sure leads to heaps of kw spamming by others. I generally don't bother, or I only bother with one out of a set.

53
Newbie Discussion / Re: How much time?
« on: August 05, 2019, 06:18 »
The workflow we use is this:

1) Import and organize all images in Lightroom.  Takes me maybe 5 min for 1000 photos.  LR takes longer, but I am off doing other stuff while it is importing.

2) My wife goes through that 1000 and chooses roughly the best 10%. She also crops those during the pass, and typically marks 30% of so as 'rejected.'  After having been through this cycle 100+ times, I now just accept her reject states and "delete all rejected photos, remove from disk" without reviewing.  Her time is usually an hour or two for those 1000 images.

3) I "delete all rejected" (noted above). I then go through all 100 selected images and edit them to be suitable for blog and stock use.  My time for 100 images is maybe 10 minutes.  (I have created LR presets of my own that fit the various types of photos I create -- many photos are single-click edits. Maybe 20% require slight tweaking for shadows, noise, whatever).

4) <not related to stock> I select the images for my blog, gather into "story blocks," write the text for the story, etc.

5) I title/desc all 100 images. 15 min.

6) I keyword all 100 images.  15-20 min (I use ImStocker, which makes it very fast).

7) I upload all 100 images using FTP program to MicroStock Plus.  My time about 1 min.  (takes longer to upload, but I am doing other things while it does so)

8) In MicroStock Plus, select all agencies and all images, and press "submit".  My time about 1 min.

So, I spend about an hour to edit / keyword / upload / submit 100 images.  Add another hour to get from 1000 initially shot images to the 100 that will be sent to stock.

Note that when we are traveling, this is done almost every single day.  We just returned last week from 6 months covering 8 countries. Shot roughly 75,000 photos. After deleting rejects, came back with 43,823 images and clips.  I still have a backlog of the sending to agencies, because I try to space things out (will probably not have any more for the rest of 2019), but all the work up through editing and titling is done on the photos.  Roughly 800 raw video clips still waiting to be processed (those I hold until home).
impressive!!!!  I have a pretty organised workflow also, that I do all by myself, so can I also share the lament of us females... "I wish I had a wife"!!!!!!  :)  that is an insane amount of work. i've been adding 2K images/vids per year and thinking that was good. clearly need to up my game.
but back to topic, i think it takes about 30secs per image to do tagging. although if you have similars maybe you can speed that up. a set of 10 similars might only take 1 min to keyword, once you are good at it. but don't forget some sites have their annoying peculiarities, like Alamy wanting starred kw, and i can never get the title to UL. Adobe having ordered kw. Getty just refusing words it doesn't like. SS too, deciding that "colour" isn't a word, despite suggesting it. Fun. that's part of the job. But, you can do it whilst watching a movie so it's not all bad.

54
Newbie Discussion / Re: Alamy Payments
« on: August 05, 2019, 06:03 »
I feel a bit trapped at Alamy. I'm waiting for payments to clear, so i keep uploading. trapped in a roundabout with no exit.
I hate their disambiguation process.

55
Nope.

Give it time, you will get better. We were all bad at the beginning.  ;D
BAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(that needed more than a like)
Sean if you need any tips, just reach out....

but srsly, clients don't understand how amazing stock is as a training program for all types of work.  I don't mind sending clients to Stocksy to view my work, they will see some good price points there.

56
Off Topic / Re: A Face in the Crowd
« on: August 01, 2019, 02:38 »

 life isn't just photography.

I'm not sure about that...
no, there is also wine.

57
I do a year long release for my kids, my parents (both mine and in-laws) and my spouse. So far no problems except with Getty. Getty still make me do a unique MR for each shoot, and it's a bit of a pain, especially as they are hit and miss on even accepting an Easy Release MR (even though they state it's approved by them). But, really,  it's not really that much work to make a new one each time if you're using an app that pre-fills all the info in.

58
Off Topic / Re: A Face in the Crowd
« on: July 28, 2019, 20:31 »
This forum is like a haven,
ha, a haven implies some type of utopia. this forum is pretty tough at times. i've no problem with Off Topic discussions, that's their purpose, to perhaps find people who share one thing (ie photography) and discuss other things outside of that.

59
Adobe Stock / Re: No sales 700+ photo
« on: July 26, 2019, 21:11 »
I think you are on the right track...


Not even close.

She was trying to offer encouragement.

Martha... I completely understand that. Sometimes the truth needs to be said even if it is a bitter pill to swallow. There is a clear reason why none of their 700+ images sell.
haha, what's funny is that usually it's me being brutally honest. I was indeed trying to be encouraging, cos I remember what it like to be a newbie. We all started out shooting the easy, dumb stuff, it's part of the process.

60
Dreamstime.com / Re: Closing account caution
« on: July 26, 2019, 20:24 »
and to update, I still haven't managed to get payout approved, it's been 6 months now.

61
iStockPhoto.com / Re: June Royalties are in
« on: July 26, 2019, 06:41 »
sold 2 videos to Foxtel (Australia's #1 cableTV company) for .... 78c each. meh.

Yikes! is that 78c as in $0.78 each?
yes. 2 drone videos, 78c per video. I am very unimpressed.   the videos aren't spectacularly original, except they are of the beautiful coastal area I live in (northern sydney), and i flew my drone from my balcony so effort was low.... but 78c!! effyuu getty.

78cents is insulting. I lament the old days when prices were much higher.
when were "those days" ??? supposedly video is still the only place to make money. Getty has closed the gap on that very quickly.

62
iStockPhoto.com / Re: June Royalties are in
« on: July 25, 2019, 03:54 »
sold 2 videos to Foxtel (Australia's #1 cableTV company) for .... 78c each. meh.

Yikes! is that 78c as in $0.78 each?
yes. 2 drone videos, 78c per video. I am very unimpressed.   the videos aren't spectacularly original, except they are of the beautiful coastal area I live in (northern sydney), and i flew my drone from my balcony so effort was low.... but 78c!! effyuu getty.

63
Off Topic / Re: A Face in the Crowd
« on: July 25, 2019, 03:44 »
you know people only see Trump in this, and not Hillary Clinton. she hid this side of her nature, but the public knew she was toxic and chose the less toxic option, the one that didn't hide his ugliness. I don't think the lesson has been learned yet, we might see a repeat.

64
Off Topic / Re: Which Agency will buy this collection?
« on: July 25, 2019, 03:39 »
amazing chunk of history. sadly, you buy it and put it online and everyone "steals" it for their own use.

65
Off Topic / Re: What is your dream car?
« on: July 25, 2019, 03:36 »
I've been blessed to always be driving my dream car. I've loved every car i've ever owned, from Mazda to the Land Rover Defender to the Porsche. We love cars.  Currently have the pocket rocket VW Golf R. but, dream car would be one of those 1950s convertible jags, or porsche, not fussy. :)

66
iStockPhoto.com / Re: June Royalties are in
« on: July 24, 2019, 00:48 »
sold 2 videos to Foxtel (Australia's #1 cableTV company) for .... 78c each. meh.

67
Pond5 / Re: Why is it so painful to upload to Pond5?
« on: July 02, 2019, 20:41 »
?? i just drag and drop. no ftp at all. easy.
although the rest of the process is a bit painful, sure.

68
any update on this webinar being rescheduled?

69
Adobe Stock / Re: No sales 700+ photo
« on: July 02, 2019, 19:23 »
I think you are on the right track, you just need to start shooting unique topics. flowers and fruits are a waste of time, you must have hundreds of those. Don't worry, we all started out doing that too. :) I literally have the same files in my portfolio from the early days: lollies, nuts, flowers, etc, they rarely sell cos you need to be in the top line of the search and those areas are oversaturated. Also when I first started out my editing was a bit poor so even if the shot was good the editing isn't. A lot of of your studio stuff seems to be back lit or side lit, needs a touch of light in the foreground to really pop and be a clean isolated image. when you shoot fruit in studio be sure to remove spots etc. random cats won't sell. You have many similars, you have 100 photos of shampoo bottles?  How many actual "shoots" do you think you have? Other general things like white balance, crooked horizon, dull landscapes, poor lighting...  I'm not seeing anything that stands out. I saw a nice tulip shot, but i'll bet there are 10K plus photos of tulips on Adobe, that are nicer than yours. I'm sure wherever you live you can find something unique and shoot it in a beautiful way. and no, that doesn't mean you go and shoot coffee in your local cafe, also been done to death, find something new to shoot. good luck.

70
Dreamstime.com / Re: Closing account caution
« on: July 02, 2019, 19:06 »


i've been trying for months to get them to pay me, that whole ID thing is ridiculous. I wasn't going to close my account but I think I will after I get my money.

Didn't SS and IS (or the rest) require a photo ID to create an account? What kind of extra ID is DT asking for that's upsetting people. I don't get it? I'm pretty sure that the IRS requires accountability, but what's the issue?

I'm sure I had to show ID when I joined (a million years ago). They want ID to pay me. I don't recall having to do that ever before. I sent through my ID but perhaps because it's changed from the original one? they declined it. Ridiculous. It's just an excuse to not pay me.

71
General Stock Discussion / Re: Cavan Images
« on: June 27, 2019, 22:13 »


Glad it's working for you, Gillian,

One note though, when I click on any Stocksy portfolio link from here, it either takes forever to load or simply hangs and doesn't load at all. Totally off-putting in the 21st century.

no idea, works fine for me. they are constantly tinkering and optimizing their display, they are more 21st century than anywhere else.  Agencies like Shutterstock/Offset openly copy them.  I was a bit worried they'd fallen into a data driven geek nirvana for a while, and there was so much focus on optimizing the site, but it seems to have settled down now.

72
Dreamstime.com / Re: Closing account caution
« on: June 27, 2019, 21:58 »
i've been trying for months to get them to pay me, that whole ID thing is ridiculous. I wasn't going to close my account but I think I will after I get my money.

73
Stocksy / Re: How are things going...?
« on: June 27, 2019, 21:54 »
Based on the two people who have rated Stocksy in the survey and gave it a 500 I assume it must be going very well - that is the highest by far of any agency listed.
sorry, what survey?

I am presuming they mean the "Microstock Poll Results" top right of this page.
yes I assumed that, how would anyone know the entries made?  how can we see that "2 people gave it a 500"?

74
Stocksy / Re: How are things going...?
« on: June 26, 2019, 06:05 »
Based on the two people who have rated Stocksy in the survey and gave it a 500 I assume it must be going very well - that is the highest by far of any agency listed.
sorry, what survey?

75
General Stock Discussion / Re: Microstock vs. Unsplash
« on: June 04, 2019, 00:55 »
Now that there is advertising on the Unsplash site do the photographers realise they've been taken for fools? I'd laugh, but it's not funny.

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 56

Sponsors

Mega Bundle of 5,900+ Professional Lightroom Presets

Microstock Poll Results

Sponsors