During the Covid 19 lockdowns of 2020 I spent a lot of time scanning, captioning and cataloguing a lot of my old photographs. Batch-by-batch I uploaded them to my newly created Alamy account and watched as I made a few pounds here and there when two or three sold. The figures weren’t big but it became a promising trickle of sales and the amount of time and effort that I’d put in over those months started to feel like it might turn into a reasonable investment.

Three years later I was getting upset about the perceived value of photographers’ images when I wrote a blog post “Pile it high and sell it cheap? Please Don’t” where I said the following:

“Selling a license to a photograph taken many years ago should result in the library and the creator receiving fair recompense but it rarely does. Relying on my back-catalogue to be a substantial part of my pension is looking more and more like a pipe-dream.”

Fast forward to the summer just gone and Alamy’s announcements about how little they were preparing to offer copyright owners when licensing their work through them and their many distributors. The best that I could hope for was 40% but my calculations told me that I would be dropping to their basic 20% level pretty soon. I’m a level-headed chap and the thought that 20% of something is better than 100% of nothing went through my head many, many times. When you factor in that more and more of my limited sales were coming through at US$0.39 each and that I was actually only going to receive 8 US cents or around 6.5 British pennies for each of them, the final straw was well within reach.

On the 1st of September, when Alamy’s new contract was due to come into play, I cancelled my deal with them. I had to wait 45 days whilst they and their distributors removed all of my images from their websites so, as of the 16th of October, I am somewhere between relieved and happy to say that I am no longer an Alamy contributor.

They still owe me money for sales made immediately before and in the 45 days after I cancelled and apparently they give themselves up to two years to collect sales from customers who had downloaded my work before it was withdrawn from their catalogues. Colleagues have told me that leaving Alamy is a long-term project and that I will still be exchanging emails with them for the next couple of years – something that I’m really not looking forward to.

Alamy are not the only stock library that fails to do right by their contributors but they are the one that has made it impossible for me to remain with them.

So what am I going to do with all of those carefully scanned and captioned pictures? For now, I’m going to set up an archive on my own Photoshelter site and hope to make the odd (fairly priced) sale here and there. No more $0.39 licenses. No more waiting months for payments to clear and certainly no more agents taking the lion’s share of my sales.