Captions and tags for vectors on Alamy

Uploading is just one part of selling your vectors on Alamy; in order for customers to find your work you need to add a caption, some tags and some additional information about your vector.

When you’re tagging your vectors you need to think about how our customers will be searching for them. Vectors are often popular with commercial customers so you should add literal tags but also conceptual tags. The more accurately you describe your vector, the more visible it will be in customer searches, which will increase your chance of making a sale.

There are two ways you can add captions and tags to your vectors:

1. Upload a JEPG with IPTC (at the same time you upload your EPS file)
2. Use Alamy Image Manager in My Alamy (after we’ve processed your submission)

Uploading a JPEG with IPTC

When you upload your vectors (as EPS files), at the same time you can also upload a matching JPEG file with metadata completed in the IPTC fields. Make sure the JPEG file name is exactly the same as the EPS file name so we can match the metadata to the right vector.

The JPEG you send is only used to extract the metadata, so don’t worry too much about size or quality. We process a separate JPEG from your EPS files that we make available to customers along with your vector.

We can export the caption, tags and date. In Illustrator, the IPTC Description field maps to our caption and the keywords field maps to our tags field.

Once processing has completed, we’ll match your metadata to your vectors and they’ll be on sale within 24 hours.

If you want to increase the discoverability of your vectors then there’s additional (optional) info you can complete in Alamy Image Manager. You don’t have to complete the additional info but if you want to check out page 21 of our handy Alamy Image Manager instruction PDF.