Hengshan, Taiwan
With almost 20 million photographs on file represented 20 000 photographers and 500 other agencies, Alamy is one of the larger stock photo agencies in existence. For a lot of photographers, particularly ones who don’t want to go the microstock route, Alamy is often the first place they look to when trying to make a start in stock photography. Alamy doesn’t ask for exclusivity, they accept both editorial and commercial photographs and offers rights managed and royalty free licensing.
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The first step to listing your photographs at Alamy is to read through the contract. A lot of photographers who are taking their first steps into the world of licensing may think they can gloss over this. On Flickr or Facebook or some other photo sharing site, glossing over the legalese may not be a big deal, but you’re essentially entering into a business arrangement now, so make sure you read this and understand what it says. Assuming you accept what it says, continue on and register with Alamy.
The next step is to prepare an initial submission according to Alamy’s submission guidelines. Your first submission is a test submission and will consist of four images. Each of these images will be assessed by a quality control team to ensure your photographs are of sufficient technical quality. There is a long list of things that will cause an image to be rejected including blemishes, out of focus images, noise, artifacts and more. It’s important to make sure your photos are free of these before you submit – inspect every part of your image at 100%. If one image is rejected, the whole batch will be. If the four images all pass, you’ll be accepted as an Alamy contributor and future submissions will only have a sample checked for technical quality. You’ll also be able to upload as many photographs as you like in each batch, but remember, if one is rejected, the whole lot will be.
After you’re accepted as a contributor, you need to manage your images. This includes choosing what you want them licensed under, adding any restrictions, adding keywords and captions and so forth. It’s important to remember that any image marked as royalty free can not later be changed to rights managed so choose carefully. Accurate keywording and caption information will increase your chances of sales. A lot of the information that you can enter here can be done in a batch editing tool which is a real time saver. It used to require individually entering the data which was very time consuming.
Once you’ve got this last bit of preparation done, you can make them live for sale. You are able to return to change keywords and so on in the future if need be but try to get as much done as possible before making them live. Alamy has a few different options for increasing your sales potential such as international distribution and novel use. These are opt-in features so if they sound useful to you, tick the box the opt in.
Unless you’re lucky, you won’t see a sale on Alamy for awhile. I had almost 400 photographs listed before I got my first sale and some anecdotal evidence I’ve heard suggest 400-500 is about average. I now only use Alamy for some of my older images and have about 700-800 listed. This is enough to get the occasional license. It’s been a couple of year since I’ve added to my collection on there but these images can keep being relicensed for as long as I leave them listed. When I was actively adding new work regularly my sales were much more regular. If you continually create and upload strong images, you’ll soon find yourself getting regular sales through Alamy.
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