AD5804 - Alamy - How does is work?

Alamy is one of the leading stock photo agencies on the market and when you contribute as a photographer you retain the copyright of your images. Alamy licenses your stock images for customers to use and there are two image license types you can choose from:

Rights Managed - The customer only pays for what they’re using the image for. Rights Managed licenses can define how, where, when or for how long an image is being used.

Royalty Free - Customers pay a one-off fee to use the image with no restrictions on how they use it, or how long they use it for. Images covered by this licence can be used across multiple projects, without any time restrictions.

Alamy is free to register and Students get 100% of the money from any sales they make for two years from the day they sign up (doesn’t matter if they have finished their degree in the meantime). All the other contributors receive 50% of all direct sales (with images Exclusive with Alamy) and 40% of all direct sales (with Non-Exclusive images).

This is the summary of their contract:

• You are signing up to submit images and have them sold by Alamy

• You also have the option to sell through our network of distributors

• You are responsible for the content you upload, and you must be the copyright holder or have their permission

• The information you supply must be correct, particularly when talking about model or property releases

• You will caption and keyword your images

• Prices are determined by Alamy

• Alamy’s customers cannot use photos for pornographic, defamatory or any other unlawful purposes

• We will pay you 50% of a direct sale made by Alamy for images Exclusive to Alamy

• We will pay you 40% of a direct sale made by Alamy for images not Exclusive to Alamy

• We report sales to you as soon as we know about them

• We’ll pay you every month if your balance is over $50

• You can quit with just 45 days notice

The average image license fee on Alamy is $90, obviously, the fee really depends on the destination of the picture, for example, licenses for editorial uses generally achieve lower average prices than commercial uses.

On their website, they provide these average examples:

• Advert $500

• Book cover $150

• Online $20

Another section in Alamy, is the Live News Feed.

The images uploaded must have been taken within the previous 24 hours, otherwise, they will be rejected. It is crucial to include headlines, captions, date and adding them in the correct metadata fields. Obviously, the images cannot be manipulated and they must be high-quality.

The images are uploaded through an FTP client (such as FileZilla), the Alamy online upload tool, or Stockimo, which is the Alamy app dedicated to iPhone photography.

Prices for Live News images are quite often more than double the rate they would be for stock.

After 48 hours of being taken, the images automatically go into the stock collection where they can still be sold.

Tips for making money through Alamy:

• Upload regularly

• Add tags/keywords it allows buyers to find your photos, include also less obvious keyword like concepts, moods and dominant colour. Tools like Photo Mechanic are really helpful for saving time.

• Include exhaustive captions

• Keep up-to-date on the latest trends and current affairs

• Check your thumbnails