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Turnaround time for image submissions

Permalink Comments (13)14 August 2007 at 11:41 by James Allsworth
Posted under News

A queue of people - Image A3XDDP © INTERFOTO Pressebildagentur
© INTERFOTO PressebildagenturIt has always been a priority of ours to make sure there is a quick turnaround between receiving your images and getting them online for sale. Rather frustratingly recent times have not been as fast as we would have liked - but we are working on it.

Our published target turnaround time for submissions is 25 working days, and the majority of submissions still fall within this timeframe. Some of you however will have recently experienced times longer than this. A number of contributor facing projects, particularly the roll out of AlamyUpload, have either recently gone live or are at the point of release, and this has had an unpredictable impact on our turnaround time for submissions.

Confusion can also raise its head when some photographer submissions get processed faster than others. Why is this? Well, we have a number of processing machines that handle the upload of images. Different machines have different sized queues and unfortunately this means that some are quicker than others. We appreciate this is not ideal and will be taking steps to improve the situation.

At this point, we would like to thank you for your continued patience. Rather than rest on our laurels, once our current crop of projects go live we will be dedicating time and resources into drastically reducing the time it takes to process your images through our system. The Alamy collection is still growing at a fantastic rate and we intend to keep it that way!

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Add your own commentComments (13)

  1. 14 August 2007 at 12:03 Ian Murray

    "The Alamy collection is still growing at a fantastic rate and we intend to keep it that way!"

    Why?

  2. 14 August 2007 at 15:12 Chuck Eckert

    Thank you James for the clarification.

  3. 14 August 2007 at 16:05 dave jepson

    Ian,

    With the recent search and QC changes I guess more images will improve the balance the good and bad, and ensure that the best floats to the top?

    Dave

  4. 14 August 2007 at 16:30 Ian murray

    I didn't mean to sound offhand. But given that contributors are being encouraged to take a 'less is more' attitude I don't understand Alamy's insistence that it is a business essential to continue to grow at ever increasing 'fantastic' pace.

    Will 20 million images mean twice as many sales? No way.

    James West has reported a slow down in sales. In economics there is a law of diminishing returns.

    Supply and demand appear to be getting out of kilter. I keep hoping for some news about initiatives to boost demand.

    In many areas there seems to be far too much content already. What is the point of just adding more and more and more?

  5. 15 August 2007 at 09:33 Dennis

    In my experience, Alamy does meet its 25 day target over 95% of the time.

  6. 15 August 2007 at 15:01 Michael belardo

    Too many images means less sales.
    The stock business is not healthy!
    Also the 25 day target is too slow.
    14 days should be the rule.
    Thank You!

  7. 15 August 2007 at 19:26 Dennis

    Because of ZT, the average wait time can be much short than 25 day.

    eg.

    If you submit one image per day. After 25 days, when they are QC'ed, the average wait time betwen those 25 images will be about 13 days. (i.e the earliest have waited 25 days, and the latested only waited one day).

  8. 15 August 2007 at 20:45 Ian murray

    Dennis,

    And what does that gain apart from 365 images a year( you are allowed two on holidays)uploaded and some geeky graphs?

    Ian Murray

  9. 15 August 2007 at 21:44 Dennis

    Ian,

    The new ZT process bunches submissions into one QC basket. Within each basket some submissions would have waited nearly one month while others may have been queued for only a few days.

    Of course, the prolific contributors can submit more than one image a day :-)


  10. 17 August 2007 at 23:08 Jeff greenberg

    My 1st AlamyUpload experience a success:

    1,088 over 48+ hours -->
    ~10 days to all pass QC!

    regards jg

  11. 18 August 2007 at 14:06 Andrew jankunas

    Would just like to say that after waiting quite a while for the upload service to be approved to me, I tried loading some images on the 7th August as a trial and today the 17th - only 10 days later - they are in my account ready for keywording. That is excellent and lets hope it continues for everybody. Well done all concerned at Alamy. My last DVD was a while back and it took over 30 days to get them online.

  12. 20 August 2007 at 16:30 Jacques Jangoux

    to Michael belardo (comment 6)

    Also the 25 day target is too slow.

    Try the other agencies! 3 to 6 months is the norm - of course most of them edit the pictures, which takes time (I don´t know about the microstock agencies).

  13. 24 August 2007 at 11:31 Andrew

    My upload facility was enabled a couple of days ago, l uploaded some images for QC and now they are online for sale in 3 days. This works for me, it may well be that it is not always going to be that quick but one has to admit that the end to end process is so much more efficient and simplified.

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