Stirring it at Alamy
Stirring the image order that is.
The Alamy images presented to buyers are ordered by a programme called "Alamyrank". Every so often its algorithm changes - at the last change it boosted more of my images than ever to the top of the pecking order. This coincided more or less with a 50% reduction in my monthly sales that has continued for the last four months.
Now there has been a reordering again and my images have been pushed down again somewhere into the bunch. Let's see what happens to sales...
Alamyrank seems like an unregulated see saw. The boards even report images that have sold being pushed to the bottom of searches.
Meanwhile over at QC....
Alamy Quality Control continues to reject images from my Canon EOS 5D ("interpolation artefacts") while my images from a Ricoh GX100 tiny digicam continue to pass with flying colours.
Hey guys, those 'artifacts' are actually Christmas lights scattered amid the branches of the trees on Oxford Street!
Labels: Alamy
posted by Scott Hortop @ 8:54 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Ah well you are lucky, I had my "initial QC submission" rejected! These were Nikon D40x images and also two 35mm scans from a Nikon 4000 dpi scanner.
QC is the new censorship, some faceless moron rejecting pictures willy-nilly on spurious grounds.
Alamy in general are an awful company who are more interested in money than photography or photographers.
They pretty much ruined my business in 2003 by deleting all my files under 24MB. They did not delete files from other photojournalists and gave no explanation.
I have a new account, though will not bother trying another QC submission, as it is obvious that while they may earn money, the agency is very difficult to work with and lacks any clear editing policy and is badly managed on the photographer side of things, particularly with those bast**ds in QC!
I am sure that part of what they do is aimed at putting off the willy nilly submission of images. I now submit one quarter of the images that I did - self censorship if you will - I submit so few because it is economically unviable to do more. Unfortunately there are many photographers who will spend weeks preparing and submitting 500 or more images of over-subscribed subject matter with no likely return - perhaps ever!
The casualty of the Alamy QC vaguaries can be perfectly good images getting rejected. I tend to be philosophical about it, shrug the shoulders and move on to the next submission. Should Alamy not be a fit then photographers should move on, as you have.
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