Permalink23 July 2008 at 12:35 by Patrick Ashby - QC team
Posted under News
© Blend ImagesAlamy has always welcomed diversity of content so we’re happy to accept all types of imagery. It’s for this reason we don’t edit. We do have to check that our clients are going to be happy with the technical quality of the images they buy. The “open-door” policy at Alamy means that we have a broad base of contributors whose work is assessed by Alamy Quality Control (QC) staff.
Once your ‘test’ submission has passed (in which all four images that are submitted must pass) you are able to send in as many images as you like. Of these further submissions we only check a sample of images and if we find a problem we fail everything that is awaiting QC at that time. We expect our contributors to understand our QC requirements and submit only images that meet these standards.
Recently, we have noticed that there is a small percentage of contributors who are submitting images that have frequent quality issues. Some are consistently submitting images that contain gross technical errors. We can also see that some are removing the one failed image and not re-checking the rest of the submission prior to submitting and others are simply re-submitting images that have previously failed QC.
Assessing images from these contributors is very time consuming. The result is that our QC staff are
effectively checking images more than once and assigning the same QC failure reason each time. This is neither cost-effective or efficient.
We are keen to ensure that this small percentage of contributors does not impact on our ability to continue with our 48 hour turnaround. This would be detrimental to our contributors and customers alike. For this reason we are introducing a policy of freezing a problematic contributor’s online upload privileges for a period of 30 days. The decision to introduce this policy has not been taken lightly and certain parameters will be set to ensure that the system is both consistent and flexible.
The decision to freeze a contributor’s account will only be applied in extreme cases e.g. consistently failing the QC test submission process, re-sending unchanged failed images or repeatedly providing images that contain gross technical errors. If we find that a contributor is repeatedly failing QC for these reasons, an email will be sent forewarning them that their work is not up to standard and if they continue to send in work of this quality their online upload privileges will be removed. The decision to remove a contributor’s online upload privileges will not be made by one QC staff member but will be a decision that is reached by at least two members of QC staff.
If you are a contributor encountering problems passing QC you will find these links very useful.
We hope this blog will encourage all contributors to take the utmost care with their submissions. Ideally we won’t even have to freeze anyone’s account.
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