Permalink 7 December 2010 at 16:29 by Alan Capel - Head of Content
Posted under Advice and tips, News
When selecting an image to use, customers will consider a number of factors aside from the subject matter and composition of the image.
Depending on how they are going to use the image, whether releases are required and whether they exist may be very important.
Customers will also be understandably frustrated by incorrect information, whether it’s something basic such as the number of people or something more fundamental such as the name of a building or the species of wildlife.
There have been legal cases in our industry where customers have used images in good faith only to find that the information was incorrect.
Alamy terminated a contributor’s contract in 2008 when we felt they had knowingly provided false information.
Our annotation requirements are comprehensive for a reason, it is all information that our customers have asked for, information which will inform their decision as to whether their chosen image is suitable for their particular project or not.
The introduction of new filters alongside our search results has been well received by our customers and we must all ensure the data supplied is accurate and hence the search results are relevant.
We wanted to make our contributors aware that we regularly review the information attached to images and have introduced a number of new processes to detect errors.
We will step up our sweeps for wrongly annotated images in two weeks time. Please ensure your images are correctly annotated and avoid having your images temporarily suspended or in extreme situations deleted. We appreciate that you may have made some mistakes so we are giving you time to double check.
Some important points to consider when annotating:
- All elements in an image that require a property release must have a release for the answer to the question “does this image contain a property that needs a release for commercial purposes?” to be YES.
- Property can be physical property such as cars, houses etc or intellectual property such as logos, trademarks, products, labels and copyrighted designs.
- All people in the image must be released for the answer to the question ‘do you have model releases’ to be YES.
- When asked to list the number of people, this should be all real people in the image (not statues/illustrations etc)
- ‘People’ should not be limited to identifiable people, it should also include silhouettes, body parts and blurred figures.
- One final critical point to consider is that your AlamyRank will suffer if your images are ignored by customers because they are irrelevant. It would be a shame for good images to suffer through poor annotation.
© Mark Dyball - In this image, there are two properties, the house and the truck with the BP logo. Both the properties would require property releases if you answer the question. “does this image contain a property that needs a release for commercial purposes?” as YES.
© Kevin Foy - Intellectual property such as logos and trademarks also count as 'property' The question "does this image contain a property that needs a release for commercial purposes?" should be answered as YES.
© Larry Lilac - In this image if the answer to the question ‘do you have model releases’? Is YES you should have releases for ALL of the people in the shot.
© Arco Images - Body parts, however unidentifiable, still count as being 'people'. This image should be annotated as number of people = 1.
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