Tracking Images & Quality Control Policy

Track images

Flow diagram of image processing
Click to see large diagramWe’ll keep you informed by email about how your images are progressing, but you can also track your submissions in My Alamy.

We process your images before entering them in the queue for Quality Control (QC).
We do not edit your images but we do check their technical quality.
We will let you know the outcome of QC within 25 working days.
If your images pass QC, you can annotate them to make them available for sale.
You can track your submissions and manage your images in My Alamy.

When we receive your images they enter the queue to be processed, but can be rejected at this stage for a number of reasons:

Scratches on the media - ensure you use strong, effective packaging and casing. Avoid putting more than one disc in each case.
Images failed to copy due to corruption on the disc or within the file.
Faulty burning process.
Poor CD/DVD quality - we recommend that you use well known brands.
Images are too small.

We fail images which do not meet our submission guidelines. Check the quality of each image before you submit.

For your test submission you need to send in (ONLY) 4 images of varied subject matter.
We check each of the 4 images and they must all pass QC for your submission to be accepted. Do not submit any additional images until your initial test has passed QC.
If your test submission fails we will give you failure reasons for all images which do not meet our QC criteria.
Avoid rejection by checking each of your images at 100% with professional imaging editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.

Once you've passed your QC test we only check a sample of images in subsequent submissions.
A submission is defined as any group of media that are awaiting QC at the same time regardless of the day they were submitted (they will all have the status “Awaiting QC”).
If we fail one image, we will reject all images in all media awaiting QC at that time.
Media grouped together as a submission will be QC’d together and will have the same QC date in “Track submissions”.
We will indicate the media which contains the failed image, with an information icon in Track submissions.
Avoid rejection by always checking each of your images at 100% looking for all possible QC failure reasons.
The average amount of time for a contributor to wait for their QC outcome is 48 hours – please note that we do not undertake any QC at the weekend.
QC waiting time is dependent on your QC history, failing QC successive times harms your QC rank meaning that it will take up to four weeks to receive notification that you have failed QC. Blog post on QC time dependent on your QC history.
Ongoing QC failures can result in your online upload privilege being frozen for six months and in extreme circumstances your account being terminated.