Search tips
© Alvey & Towers Picture Library / Alamy
Tips for keyword searches
- You can add or and not to widen or narrow your search. For example: "London not bus" will return images with the keyword "London" but not those with the keywords “London” and “bus”.
- Images on Alamy are annotated by our individual contributors. This results in a variety of keywords being used to describe one subject. For example, an image of a woman could have the keywords “woman”, “female”, “girl” or “lady”.
- To find an exact phrase use single speech marks around the words. For example, 'Victoria Falls' will deliver results only where the words “Victoria” and “Falls” are next to each other in the keywords.
- You can type a string of words within brackets separated by the word OR in order to dig through the collection. For example, to look for images of an overweight old man you can use "man (overweight OR 'over weight' OR fat OR heavy OR large OR big OR plump OR chubby) (mature OR old OR elderly OR senior OR retired OR aged)".
- You can extend your search preferences by clicking “More” under the search bar on the home page.
- For a more advanced search, the left hand side bar filters on the search results page also allow you to refine your results by ethnicity, age, image size and other criteria.
