Image management help page

To help get you started using the Alamy Image Manager, see our walk-through tutorial here.

For more detail on why it's good practice to keep on top of managing your metadata see our step-by-step guide.

 A pseudonym is the name you want to sell your images under; this could be your name or something made up, it can be whatever you want. Just remember it will be used by our buyers to credit you as the photographer. You can create new pseudonyms, delete old ones and set a default under the Defaults and pseudonyms link in Manage Images.

Yes, it’s easy to do, just click on the cog icon in Alamy Image Manager (top right) and edit your license preference.

Our customers are increasingly asking for broader rights so we’d recommend selling your images as RF but the decision is yours. You can choose a different stock photo license for each image you upload, but we suggest not giving the same or very similar looking images different licence types.

If images contain people or property they need to have the right releases to be sold for commercial use.

If you choose to sell all your images under one license type, you can set a default by clicking the cog button in Alamy Image Manager.

See our step-by-step guide for more advice about managing rights and restrictions on your images.

You can change the license type in the mandatory tab while annotating your images in Alamy Image Manager.

You can mark your images as exclusive by ticking the ‘only available on Alamy’ box under the ‘optional’ tab in the image manager. If you have over 500 images, you can do this in batches of 500 at a time by selecting multiple submissions in the left-hand column using the ‘shift’ key and then ticking ‘select all passed’. You can also set a default for all future submissions under the settings cog icon in the image manager.

It's worth reading the guidance here about the benefits of being exclusive to Alamy, and when you can and can't mark your images as exclusive.

Remember, if your images are available for sale anywhere else, they would not be classed as exclusive, and you shouldn’t tick the ‘only available on Alamy’ box. This excludes being available to be licensed on your own site. This does not include being opted into our distribution scheme. If you are opted in, and your images are not for sale elsewhere you can tick this box.

You need a release for all people and recognisable property in the image if you want to sell the image commercially. This blog explaining releases might give you a bit more information as well as our model and property releases page.

We don’t need you to upload your releases to us, all you need to do is mark your images as released and we’ll get in touch with you if the customer needs it.

See our step-by-step guide for more advice about when you'll need a release for your images.

Yes, we can extract information on caption, keyword and date taken. If you have this information in your IPTC the images will be ready for sale as soon as you’ve uploaded, you don’t need to add anything extra in Alamy Image Manager. For more information on what fields to fill in check out our cheat sheets for Photoshop and Lightroom.

If you have lots of images from the same shoot, or a similar subject matter that need the same annotation, you can batch edit in Alamy Image Manager to speed things up. You can add captions, tags, license types etc. to a whole series of images. It’s really easy to do, just select the images in your batch and then use the tool in the same way. To help get you started using the Alamy Image Manager see our walk-through tutorial here.

Yes, no problem. Just send them to our Image Management team at im@alamy.com with your account details and we’ll apply the metadata for you.

No, although we license images with captions in multiple languages you should only caption them in English. We’ll translate them into other languages using a machine translation system. If you add your own translations it could confuse the system and lead to your images being demoted in the search results.

You shouldn’t include anyone’s personal or sensitive data in the captions and tags of your images. There's also no need to add your name (as photographer) or website to the caption, as this will be included in the credit line (if you're not using a pseudonym).

There are a few exceptions to this rule where it’s ok to link relevant information, these are:

If you’re unsure about what you can include then check out our blog for more information.

No, that’s not a service we offer and you know your images better than us. If you have a large amount of images with your keywords on a spreadsheet you can send that to us and we’ll apply the information for you.

There's general guidance on our site here, but for more in-depth insights we recommend Make Search Better, which has lots of great advice and a membership service to help with best-practice captioning and keywording.

Knowing how and when to add relevant and accurate keywords will improve discoverability and help get your images seen by our customers.

The more searchable information you enter the more ‘discoverable’ your image will become. i.e. tags, supertags & completing optional information. The discoverability bar isn’t reading the quality of your metadata, it just increases with the volume of searchable information you enter. You don’t have to optimize all your images, there will be some that don’t require the full quota of tags – it’s much more important to only add information to your caption, tags and metadata that is relevant and accurate.

In most cases ‘Date taken’ refers to the day, month and year when you photographed something.

However, when it comes to archival photos or 2D artworks that are photographed or scanned (to show 100% of the original image) it’s important to use the ‘date taken’ field as the date of creation of the original artwork, or of when the archival image was photographed. But if the artwork is taken ‘with context’ e.g. with people looking at a painting in an art gallery, then ‘date taken’ should refer to when the photo was taken.

Providing accurate information about ‘date taken’ helps customers identify and discover archival images and original artworks more easily improving discoverability on images where ‘date taken’ filters are used in search.

The ‘date taken’ can never be after the date of upload or submission to Alamy.

If you’ve added captions and tags today, they’ll be online tomorrow once the search engine has updated, this usually happens every 24 hours.

Check out our step-by-step guide to getting your images online and everything you need to know from uploading your images to managing your metadata.

Photographer names and pseudonyms aren’t searchable using the main search box. Once you’re on the search results page, click on the filter tab on the left-hand side and use ‘Search by contributor name’ to find images under a specific name.

Select the images you want to delete and you’ll see the delete button at the bottom of the optional tab in the Alamy Image Manager. 

Please note if your images are already on sale, they will be deleted within 180 days. If the image isn’t on sale yet it will be deleted within 24 hours (once the search engine has refreshed).