Fixes iStock and Alamy login and hopefully makes Alamy bulk upload work

... and ProStockMaster v1.6.4 follows these changes. This release also fixes Alamy login, and, hopefully, also fixes the upload of multiple files to Alamy in a single batch.

The new version will be released on this weekend. If you see any weird problem after the auto-upgrade - re-install by downloading the full archive from our web.

Alamy uploads in PSM are capable to deliver 1 file only, all the rest of Alamy uploads is dropped by their server.
A small investigation shows that the same problem persists if you upload more than 1 file on Alamy web.
This way it looks with Alamy's ActiveX control (MS IE)

And this way it looks when using Alamy Java applet uploader (FireFox and others):

Not too much difference though. The connection is just fine and we can upload tons of images to to other agencies without any problem, so it seems to be a pure server issue at Alamy.
(Well, who else but Alamy uses Microsoft IIS? )
Once they'll fix their web-based multi-file uploads PSM batch uploads to Alamy should also start working again.

1. Alamy: While v1.6.2 indeed brought back Alamy uploads, we found that there is still an issue there: only the first image in the batch is uploaded to Alamy. All the rest are not actually land in Alamy.

2. EXIF: EXIF data is not displayed in v1.6.2 due to the issue in Java binaries post-processing.

3. Metadata copying: we were reported that there is an issue with metadata copying between images through Manage Metadata window. We are checking this issue.

Some of these problems are external (Alamy changes) while some of them (#2,3) are caused by internal reasons - changes in our development environment and in the release packaging procedures.

We are going to fix this stuff in the upcoming PSM release.

Version 1.6.2 is a minor release which fixes Alamy uploads.

If you can login to Alamy web, but for some reason you can not login with the same user name and password into Alamy account through ProStockMaster application, take a look at the length of your password.

It seems that in the past Alamy allowed long passwords, but one day their developers decided that they do not want anything longer than 12 letters. So, what these guys did?
Instead of asking you to replace your old long password with some shorter characters sequence, Alamy web developers just decided to cut off your old long password to fit their new 12-letters standard, simple like that.

Do you think you log into Alamy web site with your old trusted "myAlamyVerySecurePassword"?
Wrong! Actually, you login there with just "myAlamyVeryS" - exactly the first 12 characters, while all the rest of the password is cut off on your login and ignored by Alamy.

That's why if you try "myAlamyVerySecurePassword" in ProStockMaster you are unable to login into your Alamy account. Instead, you should use just the first 12 characters of your long password. Well, at least until Alamy do anything about that.

An email sent today by Alamy Member Services reminds us Alamy contributors that Alamy has changed their contributors contract on November 26, 2008. And (guess what?) - starting at January 10, 2009 there is a 5% increase in all Alamy' commissions for all contribution plans. Additionally, Alamy reduces the Contributor's Agreement termination period from 6 month to 45 days.

All these changes look like a sign for a very difficult time for Alamy, which is facing strong competition from successful microstock brands. In one of my previous posts I reviewed the Alamy's initiative to go microstock. At that time many Alamy contributors disliked that idea, mostly because they saw Alamy as a traditional but not a 'microstock' agency.

With the fantastic success of microstock agencies in the last few years Novel Use is a native Alamy's attempt to follow this trend and open an additional revenue stream from microstock. Just look around - virtually everyone sell microstock subscriptions, why Alamy should not?

Particularly knowing that the competition is tight and a major microstock site made $70 mln revenues last year, followed by others tens-of-mlns-dollars microstocks, does not it make a perfect sense for Alamy trying to follow their success?

Well, I am not sure. At least not with NU idea.

Let me state: we do not speak about content. This is my point: content does not matter here. Content is similar. I can hear your strong "NO!", but, - com'on, forget for a sec all these technical "TIFF+scale-up+keywording" content preparation tricks "for a really HQ content" and just look what micros sell. Would you agree now? - they sell the same, particularly from the buyers point of view. I know that content people will never agree to this statement, but buyers just made their votes with their bucks, so it is better to hear the market. You can find content at microstock prices for at least 90% of your industrial buyers' needs. Buyers can choose buying content through Alamy or through a microstock. And - surprise - buyers are already subscribed to 2-4 microstock agencies (more info: InfoTrends marketing research).

So where is the Alamy's difference on this saturated microstock market? Well, it's not about the content, it's about the community. It's Alamy's Pros vs microstock Amateurs. Can you sell your community to a buyer? Not sure. Can you sell quite similar content for non-micro prices? Sure you can not, Alamy already knows this answer and therefore NU came out.

However, NU does not takes in account the most important - psychological - factor: for many pros Alamy was an alternative to microstock. NU completely destroys this vision. The last shelter for a pro who keeps screaming "I am not going to sell my images for a buck or two! Never ever!", this last shelter fails with the NU introduction. Well, probably it should not be so dramatic, but the feeling of many pros as they express themselves in Alamy blog and in other places on the Internet is quite similar to that.

That's why Alamy community strongly disagree to license their images under NU. Their vision is an opposite to microstock amateurs who say "I can get 30 cents per download or nothing if my images will continue sitting on my HD. Obviously, I go microstock!"

In my understanding, NU, which attempts to sell existing "non-micro" content to "microstock-like" buyers is an unnecessarily hard try. Not because Alamy has to educate the market that Alamy sells microstock too, but mostly because Alamy has to educate its own community that Alamy went microstock. And such community education could be a long and not necessarily successful process.

A reasonable alternative to this community education process could be... getting another community that is willing to sell micro. Change the community, because for the micro- market you need a micro- community. And forget your existing content! Keep selling it with "macro-" prices. For the micro market, Alamy brand, the team and agency's market knowledge supported by the right selling community can make the difference, while NU, propagating similar content with pro-community behind, which is unwilling to support micro-sales can kill the initiative at the very beginning.

New v1.4.0 is here!
It brings you two new agencies:
1. Alamy, the first non-micro agency which we decided to include. Meanwhile we have implmented uploading only, however we plan to extend Alamy support in further releases.

2. The long-awaited (and millions times requested) Stockxpert! Many thanks to Steve Kapsinow from Stockxpert for his valued help.

Upload issues with Dreamstime and 123rf reported in my previous post are also fixed in this version.

Our list of supported stock sites reaches for the first time a two-digits number: there are 10 supported agencies on the list now. It's a nice milestone.

ProStockMaster expands to "macro-" stock territory adding Alamy support in its next version.
Coming soon!