[Leica] stock agencies

[images at comporium.net (Tina Manley)]

At 05:38 PM 6/6/2007, you wrote:
>Tina,
>
>Are you pretty happy with Almay?  I'm looking for a stock agency and would
>like any words of wisdom you may have....
>
>Thanks
>
>Leo


Hi, Leo -  Happy is certainly relative ;-)  Alamy has almost 10 
million photos so getting your's noticed in the millions of others is 
the problem. Alamy has been working and reworking a ranking system to 
make the best photos show up first in any searches.  The main 
problems I have with Alamy are that they have a lot of royalty free 
images that show up first in most searches ( they have arranged it so 
RF is first and then every third photo until they run out), agencies 
are bad about keyword spamming so their photos show up in every 
search, and Alamy, in order to compete with the microstock agencies, 
offers huge discounts to buyers.

Other than that, Alamy is the easiest agency to submit to and they 
are about to make it much easier with online uploading of 
photos.  I've always had an FTP account since I signed up when they 
first started, but most Alamy contributors have to send CDs or DVDs 
of their images to England and wait weeks for approval. Quality 
control has gotten really, really strict and whole submissions are 
rejected if they find any dust or retouching or interpolation 
artifacts.  On the other hand, you get to keep 65% and most other 
agencies are now well below 50%.  You do all of your own keywording, 
but I'd rather do that anyway.  I still don't understand how someone 
else could keyword my photos when only I know where, what, why, when, 
who, and how!

Alamy doesn't do a great job with licensing and I'm now in a dispute 
with National Geographic and Alamy over one of my rights-managed 
photos that was used by NG as a free download on their website.  It 
seems that Alamy sold them those rights without realizing that it was 
a RM photo. With all of that said, I sell more through Alamy than any 
other agency and wouldn't hesitate to send them more photos (which 
I'm doing at the rate of 100 a week)!

Hope this helps!

Tina

Tina Manley
ASMP, NPPA, EP, PI
http://www.tinamanley.com