[Gary Bagshawe]

Just got news from Alamy about changes for 2008, the best bit of news is the QC being speeded up to 48 hours.

We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what we have planned for the coming year. Keep an eye on our blog for regular updates on the progress of these projects and announcements regarding new initiatives.

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 memberservices@alamy.com

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.

So, as you can see, there's a lot happening and we intend to maintain this pace throughout the year, we would encourage you all to make use of the blog and particularly the forum where you can discuss, debate and deliberate with your fellow photographers.

Wishing you all a successful and enjoyable 2008.

Best regards.

The Alamy Content team

[sawdust]

Thanks Gary I have just registered and i'm puting together my first disc of 4

[Dave]

About time re QC as still waiting for images loaded on 31/12/07