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What success with Alamy?

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myosotis

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Hi Everyone,

I have passed quality control with alamy recently, but was wondering what actual success in terms of hard sales people have had with them.

It just seems it will be tremendously hard to get listed in the first few pages of pictures in order even to have your picture viewed. Eg. Liver Building (thousands of pics) - I am sure buyers won't look furthur than a few screens.

Any experiences and advise most appreciated

Kind Regards

Chris
 
Congratulations on passing Alamy’s QC.

First don’t expect to make a sale for at least a year. The more images you have up the greater the chance for a sale and continuing sales. I rather not mention the exact amount I average a month but it’s worth my free time to work on stock in-between assignments/jobs. Some Alamy photographs pull in 100k a year!

Stock photography is all about filling a need. How much of a need is there for flower shots? (Or shots of the Liver Building?) Compared to the vast amount of flower shots for sale? Are flowers fun to shoot? Sure. Will flower photos make you tons of money? Maybe but most likely you will get lost in the million other flower images, but if you do flowers VERY well you will rise above the rest.

Does every stock photo have to be beautiful? A prize winner? Not at all. You never know what’s going to sell, from the mundane to the sublime, from pretty to ugly. The CEO of Alamy spoke of a photographer who took a quick photo of his broken boiler that happen to sell for the cost of a new boiler and more. He showed the image and it looked like something I would have edited out.

Shoot what you know, shoot what you enjoy, shoot, shoot, shoot and then spend the time to do the mind numbing but all so important work of key wording and captioning.

Alamy has lots of resources to research photo needs and photo need trends. Check out the Alamy measures page to see what potential buyer are looking for. Look at magazines and books for the type of image they use.

Now that you have made it through my ramblings I will tell you THE secret…

Shoot people! Even if you don’t have a release, no worries. Have people in your landscapes. Have people in your travel shots. People in the foreground, people in the background. People like people and people are the ones buying the images… Don’t I need a model release? Not for Editorial use! It is true a model released photo has more VAULE than one without but don’t let that stop you from shooting people.

Hope this helps,

David L. Moore
--
Professional Photographic Services
http://www.moore-photo.com
 
David L. Moore said:
Congratulations on passing Alamy’s QC.

First don’t expect to make a sale for at least a year. The more images you have up the greater the chance for a sale and continuing sales. I rather not mention the exact amount I average a month but it’s worth my free time to work on stock in-between assignments/jobs. Some Alamy photographs pull in 100k a year!

Stock photography is all about filling a need. How much of a need is there for flower shots? (Or shots of the Liver Building?) Compared to the vast amount of flower shots for sale? Are flowers fun to shoot? Sure. Will flower photos make you tons of money? Maybe but most likely you will get lost in the million other flower images, but if you do flowers VERY well you will rise above the rest.

Does every stock photo have to be beautiful? A prize winner? Not at all. You never know what’s going to sell, from the mundane to the sublime, from pretty to ugly. The CEO of Alamy spoke of a photographer who took a quick photo of his broken boiler that happen to sell for the cost of a new boiler and more. He showed the image and it looked like something I would have edited out.

Shoot what you know, shoot what you enjoy, shoot, shoot, shoot and then spend the time to do the mind numbing but all so important work of key wording and captioning.

Alamy has lots of resources to research photo needs and photo need trends. Check out the Alamy measures page to see what potential buyer are looking for. Look at magazines and books for the type of image they use.

Now that you have made it through my ramblings I will tell you THE secret…

Shoot people! Even if you don’t have a release, no worries. Have people in your landscapes. Have people in your travel shots. People in the foreground, people in the background. People like people and people are the ones buying the images… Don’t I need a model release? Not for Editorial use! It is true a model released photo has more VAULE than one without but don’t let that stop you from shooting people.

Hope this helps,

David L. Moore
--
Professional Photographic Services
http://www.moore-photo.com
Click to expand...
David's given you some great advice Chris. As some-one who shoots flowers (because I love to) I can tell you that with hundreds on Alamy for two years I haven't sold one. I've had four sales in those two years with 326 images online and one image has sold three times. It is a grab shot of a stone footbridge over a pond and it was the last shot of a days shooting at a garden. I just turned around, saw the bridge and shot it.

The moral here is that with all of the care that I took photographing flowers, getting the WB, focus, composition etc right, the unplanned shot, the unexpected sold. Photographing for stock is different from your normal photography. Ask yourself what the buyer wants and compose with them in mind.

Do a search of Alamy for local landmarks and features to see if anything is missing or poorly represented and try and shoot them better rather than shooting the Liver Buildings

George
http://www.wirralpix.com
 
Thanks to you both for that useful information, any further views would be most welcome.

Chris
 
I don't know whether that heading was meant to be "some Alamy photographs" or "some Alamy photographers", but I can confirm that the advice given is sound.

Through Alamy I licence an average of 16 pictures a month from 6700 pictures. The average fee is around $100, the lowest has been $12, the highest $9200. My collection is as broad in subject matter as I can possibly make it. Yes, I shoot flowers too. Bearing in mind that the type of books with the most pictures are gardening books, I do a fair amount of gardening photography.

My travel photography does reasonably well, but you don't need to travel to shoot travel pictures. Your location is a travel destination for someone. My best selling pictures have been shot within metres of my keyboard. Last month I sold a shot of the tangle of cables at the back of my computer.

Ordinary subjects shot well, with a keen editorial (story-selling) sense will stand you in good stead. The most delicious sale I've made was a photo of the overdue notice for my council rates:-)
--
Rob Walls
http://robertwalls.wordpress.com
htttp: thisworkinglife.wordpress.com
 
Sorry to take the thread a little off topic, but how difficult is it to pass alamy quality control?
 
A lot easier passing alamy QC than it is to pass iStockphoto's QC. As long as your images are sharp, spot and blemish free viewed at 100%, without colour cast, unsharpened etc. and above 12mp then any subject will be accepted by alamy whereas iStockphoto will reject images that they believe wont sell.

I recently decided to give them a try and submitted my three best sample images and got a rejection because the content wasn't creative enough.

George
http://www.wirralpix.com
 
Wirralpix said:
A lot easier passing alamy QC than it is to pass iStockphoto's QC. As long as your images are sharp, spot and blemish free viewed at 100%, without colour cast, unsharpened etc. and above 12mp then any subject will be accepted by alamy whereas iStockphoto will reject images that they believe wont sell.

I recently decided to give them a try and submitted my three best sample images and got a rejection because the content wasn't creative enough.

George
http://www.wirralpix.com
Click to expand...
Above 12mp? What about crops, original 12mp resolution, but smaller file due to crop?

Sony R1 10mp shots won't qualify no matter how interesting?
 
From memory I have about 10 images uploaded to Alamy then forgot all about them until about a couple months ago I received a payment notification. I sold three usages to a beached whale rescue that I instigated.

Didn't make me a fortune but just enough to cover the cost of updating my website to a ProPhoto wordpress them.

Cheers
 
elliottnewcomb said:
Above 12mp? What about crops, original 12mp resolution, but smaller file due to crop?

Sony R1 10mp shots won't qualify no matter how interesting?
Click to expand...
 
I have just been accepted with Alamy after 8 years of trying. Here's my take on stock photography. At the end of the day it is a numbers game, basically you want to put as much up as soon as you can. Key wording wise there's probably more to it but say what you see. The main thing is having a reasonably good camera, I bought a Nikon D300 secondhand and used it with my test shoot. Don't worry I'm reading this post for advice as well.

Chris
 
I gave up loading images to Alamy. No sales and confusing keywording and contributor interface. I guess I will have to make much less, but enjoy what I do with Fototila and Shutterstock.

Speaking of difficult sites, istock might be the worst to deal with.
 
It's a hard one this. I am with alamy who now have thousands of my pictures. The best of my pictures I keep away from alamy since I know watermarks can be erased and having full res, watermarked images available is therefore asking for trouble. It also seems that not every sale on alamy is paid for. I have two sales ... one hasn't been paid for ... so are people downloading from alamy and just not paying for pics? Are people downloading pics and removing watermarks? Who knows? Are my pictures just rubbish?

It's still early days for me I suppose with alamy but the two sales I made were from some of the very first pictures I uploaded which were very undiscoverable ....

Does anyone else have the experience that a couple of the first photos they make available to alamy sell then no more sales and one of the sales isn't paid for preventing you reaching a threshold where they pay you?
 
Pentax K-1 user said:
It's a hard one this. I am with alamy who now have thousands of my pictures. The best of my pictures I keep away from alamy since I know watermarks can be erased and having full res, watermarked images available is therefore asking for trouble.
Click to expand...
May I ask what do you do with your best images?
Pentax K-1 user said:
It also seems that not every sale on alamy is paid for. I have two sales ... one hasn't been paid for ... so are people downloading from alamy and just not paying for pics? Are people downloading pics and removing watermarks? Who knows? Are my pictures just rubbish?
Click to expand...
Some times it takes awhile to get paid for sure. I have found it takes about 1 year for the images uploaded to start selling, I don't know why just my experience.
Pentax K-1 user said:
It's still early days for me I suppose with alamy but the two sales I made were from some of the very first pictures I uploaded which were very undiscoverable ....
Click to expand...
How did you measure discoverability of your images? The best way for images to be discovered is by writing a descriptive description/caption and using only the applicable tags/keywords.
Pentax K-1 user said:
Does anyone else have the experience that a couple of the first photos they make available to alamy sell then no more sales and one of the sales isn't paid for preventing you reaching a threshold where they pay you?
Click to expand...
The more you sell the better for Alamy so I'm sure they are not working against their own interest.

I'm not a Alamy fanboy, they do somethings that really bug me and at times sell images for ridiculous low fees with very generous usage terms. But I do trust them and I still feel it's a good/fair place to sell rights managed stock images.

https://discussion.alamy.com/

Is a good forum with all things Alamy. gripes and praise.

Hope this helps,

David L. Moore

My images on Alamy
 
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