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.”

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