Features
Alamy CEO James West outlines plan for the future
Alamy has posted a few videos from a contributor event held in November outlining the agency's plans for the future.
Part 1: James West, CEO
The presentation covers the following topics
Quality Control. Our QC process could be better. In Q1 of 2008 we are launching a new process that will mean your images will only take 48hrs to move through our system from upload to being available to keyword.This will make things quicker and also reduce the likelihood of us rejecting very large batches of images sent in over a period of time. We hope to further reduce this time to 24 hours at a later date.
Contributor tools. We are aware that the new annotation screens place a large burden on the photographer. We are working on tools to make this work easier. This will include being able to annotate a large group of images at once.
Search engine. We have built and manage our own search engine. We are now asking for contributors help in making improvements .One example is making changes to how words are associated with one another, the scenario where 'ski' and 'skies' return the same images will disappear. We are also making changes that will give greater exposure in searches to images from specialists in various subjects.
Alamy Measures. The first version has been released. Future enhancements will include making data available on what all our customers are searching for.
Newspaper billing. We have tightened up our billing procedures and we now check all the UK national newspapers including supplements. We continue to encourage contributors to alert us if images aren't reported within three months. Send a scan or a photo of the image use to
Watermarking. We are reintroducing watermarking on our zoom images. In the future only account customers will see unwatermarked images. This will be live in Q1 of 2008.
Part 2: Q&A
Part 3: Alan Capel, Head of Content
Part 4: Q&A
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