SELL VECTORS

Uploading is just one part of selling your vectors on Alamy; in order for customers to find your work you need to add a caption, some tags and some additional information about your vector.

When you’re tagging your vectors you need to think about how our customers will be searching for them. Vectors are often popular with commercial customers so you should add literal tags but also conceptual tags. The more accurately you describe your vector, the more visible it will be in customer searches, which will increase your chance of making a sale.

There are two ways you can add captions and tags to your vectors:

When you upload your vectors (as EPS files), at the same time you can also upload a matching JPEG file with metadata completed in the IPTC fields. Make sure the JPEG file name is exactly the same as the EPS file name so we can match the metadata to the right vector.

The JPEG you send is only used to extract the metadata, so don’t worry too much about size or quality. We process a separate JPEG from your EPS files that we make available to customers along with your vector.

We can export the caption, tags and date. In Illustrator, the IPTC Description field maps to our caption and the keywords field maps to our tags field.

Once processing has completed, we’ll match your metadata to your vectors and they’ll be on sale within 24 hours.

If you want to increase the discoverability of your vectors then there’s additional (optional) info you can complete in Alamy Image Manager. You don’t have to complete the additional info but if you want to check out page 21 of our handy Alamy Image Manager instruction PDF.

We report sales to you as they happen on the site. You can review all your sales, in Sales History in My Alamy.

You’ll get paid when the customer pays us. Payment processing varies from customer to customer. You can see your cleared funds (which means we’ve received the money from the customer) in your account balance.

We’ll pay you at the start of each month if your total cleared balance is over $50.

You can choose how you get paid from the following:

And which currency you get paid in:

All your payment details are stored securely and you can change them under the ‘Account Settings’ tab on your contributor dashboard.

You can make even more money from your vectors by taking part in our additional revenue options.

Sell stock vectors though our global distribution network

We sell vectors globally through our website and sales teams. We also have a large network of specialist stock photo agencies who distribute your vectors in countries and regions that we don’t work with directly. Opt in and you’ll get either 20% or 40% commission on the money we receive (after the distributor commission has been deducted) depending on what commission model you’re on. The commission split is different because there’s a third party involved.

Our distribution network brings in 15% of Alamy’s annual revenue so we definitely think it’s worth considering if you want to increase the potential for your vectors to make more money.

You can sign up to distribution at any time and you can choose the territories that you’d like to sign up for.

Sell your vectors under unique and novel schemes

We’re always looking for new ways to grow our business, whether that’s with the next big idea or a tailored solution for a key client. The vectors in the novel use pool give us the freedom to explore these schemes, prototypes and trials, with a variety of prices and licenses. The commission split is the same as you would receive for a direct sale.

For more info and to sign up, click here or go to the ‘Additional revenue options’ section of your contributor dashboard.