Uploading news images
Why does Alamy have separate upload paths for news?
Alamy recognises that news photographers have different needs from stock photographers, that is why we have different quality control and captioning criteria for news images (see here). To help you get your images to us and up on to our news feed as quickly as possible, we have provided two dedicated news upload paths:
- News web upload
- News FTP upload
News web upload
The upload tool is almost identical to our regular stock upload tool and enables images to be uploaded speedily to the Alamy news feed.
Contributors who have access to news web upload should read our News Picture Guidelines here before their first file. Then just follow the instructions on the news web upload page here.
Please remember that our uploader groups images around IPTC Headline field. If you are in any doubt about what this means and what we require please read this bit of our News Picture Guidelines here.
News FTP upload
We give news FTP to dedicated news, sport and entertainment photographers.
You can apply for news FTP upload here. We will ask you to demonstrate that you have taken news, sport or entertainment images in the past and that you intend to become a significant provider of such images in the future.
If you are successful, you will receive a confirmation email with all the details you need for your FTP client.
If you are unsure how to FTP images please read the instructions below.
I have applied and received my news FTP confirmation email: what do I do now?
If you have been successful in your application you will be provided with your own dedicated login details to access Alamy's FTP server.
The details you will be sent will be the following:
- Hostname: <hostname>
- Username: <username>
- Password: <password>
Please keep these details secure at all times. Once you have these, you are able to upload your images to Alamy's news feed on its website.
How do I upload my images?
There are three simple stages:
- Download an FTP client for your computer.
- Check that your images meet our criteria for news upload.
- Upload.
Purchase or download a free FTP client
You will need a computer program called an FTP client to send your images to Alamy.
We have tested our system against a number of FTP clients such as Filezilla, FirefTP, WinSCP, Cyberduck and ClassicFTP but it should work with most clients.
Check your images
Before you upload your files please check that your images:
- Are newsworthy. Please check if you are at all unsure.
- Are RGB jpeg files.
- Are greater than 5MB (uncompressed) in size and less than 25MB (compressed).
- Have been taken in the past 48 hours but ideally much, much sooner [in exceptional circumstances, Alamy will waive this condition].
- Have alphanumeric filenames ending in .jpg.
- Have the caption in the correct IPTC Description field (many image editors call this field the "caption field" and this is where you should enter the caption information).
PLEASE NOTE: CAPTIONS MUST BE ADDED TO IMAGES BEFORE UPLOAD. - Have captions which conform to Alamy's caption guidelines for style and length. Please check our News Picture Guidelines if you are at all unsure.
- Have headlines in the IPTC headline field which Alamy will use to group images together. Please read this if you are at all unsure.
PLEASE NOTE: HEADLINES MUST BE ADDED TO IMAGES BEFORE UPLOAD.
Upload your images
Start your FTP client:
The first thing you will need to do is to open your FTP client by double clicking on the program's icon.
Most FTP clients have a split pane setup looking like the following:
Your computer file system appears in the left hand pane.
Add Alamy’s FTP details to the FTP client’s sites
You need to enter Alamy’s FTP details into your client. In Filezilla, for instance, you do this by opening the file menu and clicking on site manager.Enter the details that Alamy sent to you (host, username, password).
Connect
Connect to Alamy’s FTP server site by clicking “connect” after entering the details. Once connected, your FTP client should look something like this:
Notice: the right hand pane of your client contains three directories: News, Sport and Entertainment. These correspond to the three panels in Alamy´s news feed on our website.
Copy files from your computer to Alamy´s folders
Click through the file tree of your computer in the left hand pane until you find the images you want to copy. Then simply drag the image files from your computer to the appropriate Alamy folder.
Copy as many files over as you like
You should see the progress of your transfer in another window in your client, like this:
The files that you have copied will not stay in Alamy´s news, sport and entertainment folders. They will be removed by our image processing software and uploaded to the feed.
Disconnect
Once you have uploaded your files, disconnect your client. The images will shortly appear in the news feed.