Alamy’s content collection is growing at a rate of over 2M images a month. We’ve never been more popular and as a result our imagery is deeply varied in style, subject matter and in execution. But where does this content come from? If you think it’s just from professional stock shooters, think again. At Alamy we mine every avenue in pursuit of great imagery – diversity and originality is important to us and our customers. We look for communities, organisations and individuals who have saleable work. We started as a destination for anyone who had an image to sell and we’ve continued to follow that ethos.
Here’s five places where we source our content from, some that maybe you weren’t aware of.
Mobile Photo communities
We’ve recently partnered with photo community giant EyeEm. Their platform is the home for more than 15 million photographers and creatives to share their photos, improve their skills, and get their work published, exhibited and sold. While community is crucial, like Alamy, EyeEm aims to enable photographers to be rewarded for producing real, authentic images which is why they are working with companies like us. The EyeEm collection on Alamy is growing all the time, bringing a mixture of cutting edge creative shots with spontaneous moments caught on mobiles. Other photo communities and mobile collections already on Alamy include Snapwire, RooM and our own mobile collection, Stockimo.
Students
We want student photographers to study their craft with their eyes open to the possibilities and the pitfalls in front of them. For the last 5 years we’ve been running an initiative for students where we pay 100% of any sales they make for two years. But we don’t just invest in these future stock shooters financially, we partner with colleges and universities and give talks and provide support. We want to banish the days when students would graduate with little or no knowledge of the stock world.
Other Picture agencies and collections
What other industry is incestuous as ours? At Alamy we represent over 600 of the worlds picture agencies and archives, the largest number on one single site. We sell the work of established names, dedicated specialists and small start ups. We don’t tend to single out collections – we prefer to promote Alamy as a rich and deep resource.
Specialists
We love new opportunities to tap into undiscovered sources of specialist imagery. One recent example is our collaboration with Doctors.net.uk the UK’s largest professional network of doctors with over 200,000 members. Medical imagery is not easy to find and with the correct permissions doctors can gain access to highly specialist equipment and medical scenarios that may have otherwise remained behind closed doors.
Photo contests
At Alamy we love to support photo competitions, either simply promoting them or being more involved through judging and /or providing prizes. We’ve recently judged competitions for Photocrowd and The Bird Photographer of the Year – this gives us first hand exposure to brilliant photographers and we offer portfolio reviews and 100% commission deals as prizes to incentivise the entrants.
In future blogs we’ll look in more detail at the make-up of our contributor base. We are blessed with award winning photographers, genius amateur photographers selling images for the first time, extraordinary illustrators and vector artists. We’ll look at where they originate from, who sells on Alamy and where tomorrow’s contributors will come from.