Alamy Reviews 313

Fraud in capital letters.
Cheaters 1st class. They give you the idea that you book a tour. After payment you bought an image of the tour you wanted to make.
Why doesn't the United Kindom take any action against this criminals?

i have 3 submissions (with 3 pictures each) that has been in quality control for over a week. It used to take one day at most, but after 3 succesful submissions it seems like they're not checking my submissions anymore.
I'm a beginner photographer who thought selling stock images could be a fun hobby, but after this experience, and after reading some other rewievs i will be changing the website i upload my images to.

Alamy had a very good sales person who arranged good prices and was very friendly, always approachable and very nice to work with. Suddenly contacting her was no longer possible and the arranged prices changed without notice. The fees have more than doubled. Neither sales nor creditcontrol nor any of the given phone numbers work... no one answers or after a wainting loop the line is suddenly dead.

As a contributor they used to be decent. Now they just steal your images for their own gain. Last sale I had they took over 80% of! And they do 'deals' which you get virtually nothing for, yet the lowest way of buying on their site is vastly more than the the tiny percentage they give you. Obviously they are struggling to survive and using the hard work of photographers to stay afloat. Avoid!

I just bought a photo from the website. The photo could be downloaded in HR, 28.8Mb. The photo cost me 15.72 euros. The download contains a photo of only 1,871 Kb. Much smaller than promised and too small for what I want to do with it. The other lower resolutions that can be downloaded are also much smaller than stated on the website. Worthless!

Our local Charity received an email from fairlicensing@alamy demanding payment for unlicensed image use on our website. The associated screenshot showed images which are not, and have never been, used on our website nor elsewhere. There is, deliberately, no way of contacting the email sender.
Is this a scam? As we cannot contact any part of Alamy other than Sales, should we just ignore this?

14 JULY UPDATE Things have become a little clearer. Alamy objected to our Charity website posting a link to a July 2017 Guardian newspaper article...an article which included an image which had not been licensed for us to use (although presumably had been for the Guardian). If a tenth of the 27,000 UK parks and open spaces had posted this very relevant link, as they might well have done, Alamy would be seeking over £1 million in unlicensed use fees...

21 JULY UPDATE nearly three weeks after first emailing all available (of not many) Alamy email addresses about this issue we received no response. Nor to a subsequent request seeking "fair use" permission to post another image on our Charity's FB site's 1,200 followers.

Scammers. Selling photos of products not the actual product.
Refusing to refund.

Although if you are lucky once in a while you may sell for a decent price, the biggest issue is turn around time. Some of their customers have turn around billing time of 3 months. So they start using and publishing your materials but it will not even show up on your Dashboard as sold. Worse, once the customer send the billing, it will show up as sold and you will have to wait for another 2-3 months to get your BALANCE cleared. This is worst among all the stock photography platforms.

Opted out of novel use and the other extras, yet a photo sold for $13 despite the actual use (Editorial Website) being listed for £30- Alamy stole my photo and sold it for less than was advertised, and gave £5 in return, despite my having opted out of other options that would allow such a sale.

Don't sell stock with them, or in general- it's an entire scam. Not the first time I've been done over by stock, but it will be the last- hobbyists avoid Alamy and other stock sites, and know your worth- these ones certainly don't.

I was a contributor for years with thousans of images. I did work a lot. Hours and hours uploading. After all those years I ask them a question "Why I did only 45$ after all that work?" And they said it not their style of images. They deleted my account and all my work. I don't recommed you to be a contributor or buying from this site. What they did to me is unforgivable.

Do not buy anything from this company shocking to deal with and an absolute rip off

Two images were sold for£0.10 each (How that happens is a mystery when the cheapest images on the screen are £9.99)
After Alamy commission and a distributors commission there was a payment to me of zero.
Photographers, beware you are being ripped off.

A couple of months ago we received a copyright strike that seemingly came from Alamy. It looked a bit suspicious as (a) we were contacted by email and (b) the person only used her first name to identify herself. She went by the name of Michaela. She used Alamy’s Abingdon HQ address in her email signature, and indeed the email appeared to have come from an Alamy domain, however we later found evidence that suggested it originated from a third party site called fairlicensing.com, which is essentially a playground for independent copyright trolls endorsed by Alamy. We immediately removed the offending image as requested (which was only a thumbnail from a reposted educational news article on a partner site). We pleaded fair use of the image but there was no sympathy, even though we are a non-profit organisation. "Michaela" still insisted that we had to pay hundreds of pounds in damages, a large part of which she would have received herself as commission no doubt. On further investigation, we proved that the image in question had been in circulation in the public domain years before it was copyrighted on Alamy! At this point the Alamy agent/troll disappeared and we haven’t heard from her since.

These guys would get a zero if possible, stay away terrible company to deal with.

Money left account, service paid for, no product, no download no nothing. Apparently you don't have an account either.

24hours later still no resolution after speaking to 3 people via email???

Honestly you might as well just throw you money down the drain. Least you would know where it went!!!

24 hours later...

British newspaper editorial rooms laugh at this company's naivety. Negotiating ever decreasing fees and frequently not notifying use or sending payment, even the august times of Lordon. With no staff or checking of use the paltry fees negotiated by their agents sees little incentive for contributors to report a misuse. Said contributors now sell from their own sites direct to papers for eye opening full rates with no avoidance of payment.

I closed my contributor account with Alamy a year or so ago as I was unhappy with changes to their Contributor Agreement. At least one "legacy" sale took place, of which I was notified December 2022, with a request for up to date bank details so the small payment could be made.

I provided these the same day and here we are 21st March 2023 and I still have no payment.

From correspondence I doubt payment would ever have been made, so sent a written complaint to Alamy CEO - no acknowledgement even as yet. Incidentally - when requesting his contact details they refused to give them and suggested I get them and communicate with him on LinkedIn! Is this really a serious company you have to ask?

I was today told "Our team has now reinputted the funds for you and you will receive the outstanding payment next month."

That would make five months, so well overdue by any business standards.

I have told them that in view of their gross incompetence they should be making an immediate manual payment today, which any accounts department can do, but Alamy clearly can't be bothered.

Small amount or not, my next step will be to sue under the Fast Track procedure. I somehow doubt the embarrassment factor would bother Alamy one bit, but you never know! Word gets around and it may save others the time and effort trying to get payment from them.

Life is tough enough for professional photographic contributors as it is, but Alamy have really gone the extra mile to trash their once good reputation and make it even tougher. Avoid like the plague.

Very bad operators - DO NOT USE.

These people are scammers!

I purchased an image for newsletter use and then used the image for a website, I changed the licensing to upgrade as the use had changed to website.

I was then contacted by their lawyers saying that I had misused the image and thus broke their rules, even though I had purchased the upgraded licences.

A case with their lawyer was then created and myself and the client were hounded to pay extremely high fees for the late change in licensing the image.

Don't buy classical painting photos from this company! They upload tiny-sized JPEG files and charge you an enormous amount! I actually checked Wikipedia and saw exactly the same size and type of images. And Wikipedia is completely free. It's a rip-off company, I wrote them and they replied, that they have written a note near the paintings, that they are old and can have imperfections. That usually means high-resolution photos, but visible stains or painting cracks. But no, I got a blurry image for 13 euros, that I could download from Instagram and it would probably look the same.
Do not recommend this to anyone!

What a joke
They refuse to refund my money because it has passed the 14 day period and no delivery
Cowboys and rogues
Money stealing gits, robbers

The people managing this website are completely stupid and racist, like everyone else in this hell of a country called England. Country of pirates and thieves!