Glossary of stock photography related terms

Alamy stock photo company was founded in 1999 and has been trying to follow the line of macrostock (traditional) photo agencies ever since with its higher prices as well as its huge amount of editorial photos.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamy

The Alamy stock photography company's image upload and management interface for photographers.

Image search measures of the Alamy stock photo company. It's a great way to find out with what keywords, how many searches took place in a given time period, and which and how many times our certain image appeared during searches.
It has two parts: Your images and All of Alamy.

Demonstration of customer searches by the stock photography company Alamy. It tells you which keywords were triggered and how many purchases were made in a given time period. The numbers are for reference only, as they do not include all searches, but only those customers who have already purchased images before.

If the price of a licensed (purchased) photo has been paid by the buyer, the item will be labeled cleared. This is irrelevant for most stock photo companies because payment is made immediately, however, it may take several months for Alamy to settle the invoice. This practice stems from Alamy’s traditional stock agency roots.

The number of zooms divided by the number of views multiplied by 100. The higher this value, the more relevant photos of yours appear in searches. If you have a lot of irrelevant keywords in your photo, your CTR will be very low. The CTR value is part of the AlamyRank definition.
Also see: zoom, view

Purchasing the right to use a photo that does not contain persons / property or that has a model and / or property release for commercial or advertising purposes.
See also: editorial license.

The photographers' interface. The Alamy stock photography company provides its photographers with many settings and services that can be turned on or off here.

In the Alamy Image Manager interface, each photo has a so-called discoverability bar, which changes color depending on how many keywords and other data an image has. The senior photographers of the Alamy Forum agree that it is advisable to ignore this indicator because it can result in keyword accumulation (keyword spamming) if we strive to be green.

Companies that sell photos managed by Alamy around the world with varying proportions. Photographers can determine in which countries they want to use this service.

Abbreviation for Digital Single-Lens Reflex. The best known rival manufacturers are Canon and Nikon. Many other companies also manufacture such machines. The abbreviation SLR refers to traditional 35mm film Single-Lens Reflex cameras.

Purchasing the right to use a photo that contains people / property but without a model and / or property release. Origin of the name: Newspaper editors prefer to use such images as illustrations.
See also: commercial license.

Uploading a photo to only one single stock photo agency website. In this case, the same photo cannot be uploaded to other sites for sale, but can be used to print out or illustrate your own website. Some companies (such as Dreamstime) also use the concept of an exclusive photographer when a photographer agrees to upload images exclusively to that company’s portfolio.

A photographer who is not a professional photographer or does not intend to make a serious income from selling their photos.

The title of a stock photo that is a meaningful sentence that does not exceed a specified number of characters (e.g. 150). Its purpose is to clearly inform buyers about the content of the image. Search engines (such as Google) enter the title in the image results list as a description of the image.

To make your photos searchable, you can enter keywords to describe the content of your image. Keyword spamming (or keyword stuffing) is when you enter irrelevant terms to appear on as many search pages as possible. This practice should definitely be avoided!

The buyers of stock photos 'license' the images, meaning they don’t buy the image itself, they just get the right to use it. In my articles I usually use the term 'buy' or 'purchase' just to be more simple.

Macrostock (or midstock) companies are closer to traditional image agencies because they sell photos at a much higher price than microstock companies (Alamy licenses photos for an average of $30) and have more restriction options to sell their largely unique portfolio. The RM (see: rights managed) license type is only available here.
See also: microstock.

A stock photo agency that sells royalty-free photos cheaply on a subscription (or occasionally paid per download) system. The price per image ranges from a few cents to a few dollars. The very first microstock company was iStockphoto in 2000.
Read more in Wikipedia.

Abbreviation for Mirrorless Interchangeable-Lens Camera.
See also: DSLR camera.