Alamy only makes you fill in five fields before an image can go on sale: pseudonym, caption, tags, licence type and image type. Everything else in Image Manager is optional. The catch is that those five carry all the search weight, and Alamy's tag model — fifty tags, ten of which can be promoted to supertags — behaves differently from every other agency you deliver to.
The five fields that are actually mandatory
Alamy Image Manager splits metadata across a mandatory tab and an optional tab, and the mandatory tab is short. Your pseudonym is the name buyers credit you under, and it can be your own name or anything you invent. The caption is the descriptive sentence. Tags need a minimum of five. Licence type and image type round out the set. Once those are in, the discoverability bar moves to on sale and the file enters the index when the search engine next refreshes, which happens roughly every twenty-four hours.
Two of the five are set-and-forget. If you sell everything royalty-free under a single name, set the licence and pseudonym defaults from the cog icon in Image Manager and you never touch them again. That leaves caption and tags as the only genuine per-image work, which is precisely the part worth moving upstream into your own workflow.
Captions: English only, accurate, and free of personal data
Alamy wants captions in English and only English. It runs machine translation to serve buyers in other markets, and contributor-supplied translations interfere with that system badly enough that Alamy warns it can demote your images in search. One accurate English sentence is the whole job.
Accuracy carries more weight here than at most agencies because Alamy sells heavily into editorial and news. Wrong names for people, places or animals cause real problems downstream, so research the subject before you caption it rather than after a buyer queries it.
Personal and sensitive data does not belong in captions or tags. Alamy names three exceptions: journalistic and news reporting, cases where the person has given consent such as a signed model release, and situations with a clear public benefit, like naming an architect alongside their building. There is also no reason to add your own name or website, because the credit line already carries it.
Tags and supertags: the fifty and ten rule
Fifty tags is the ceiling. Phrases count as one tag rather than several, so New York City occupies a single slot instead of three, which changes how you budget the field compared with agencies that split everything into single words. Legacy images that came over from the older system carrying more than fifty tags keep them, but they will not accept new tags until you bring the count back under the limit.
Supertags are the interesting part. You can promote up to ten of your existing tags, and the search engine gives those extra priority. They are not an extra field to fill, they are a ranking decision applied to terms you already wrote. The ten that deserve promotion are the ones a buyer would actually type: the main subject, the setting, the emotional or conceptual hook, and the one or two attributes that separate this frame from the twenty near-identical ones around it.
What does not belong in a supertag slot is a broad term you share with a million other files. Photo, image and background will never win a search on their own, and spending a promotion on them is ten per cent of your ranking budget thrown away.
The discoverability bar measures volume, not judgement
Alamy is unusually candid about this. The discoverability bar does not read the quality of your metadata; it simply climbs as you enter more searchable information. A bar sitting at the top proves you typed a lot, not that you typed well. Alamy's own guidance says some images will never need the full quota and that relevance and accuracy matter far more than filling every slot.
Treat the bar as a completeness indicator and nothing else. If you optimise for the bar you will pad tag lists with weak terms, which dilutes the strong ones and moves you closer to the keyword-stuffing behaviour every agency penalises. The same discipline applies everywhere, and we covered the general version of it in how to write metadata for stock photos.
Optional fields that are worth the time
Date taken
For most files this is the day you pressed the shutter. Archival material and flat artwork follow a different rule: if you photographed or scanned a two-dimensional work to show all of it, the date taken is the creation date of the original, or the date the archival image was photographed. If the artwork appears with context, such as gallery visitors looking at a painting, the date reverts to when you shot the scene. One hard constraint applies throughout — date taken can never be later than the upload date. Buyers filter on this field, so an accurate entry genuinely surfaces archival work that would otherwise sit invisible.
Release status
Every person and every recognisable property needs a release before an image can be licensed commercially. Alamy's handling is lighter than most: it does not want the release file uploaded. You mark the image as released and Alamy contacts you if a customer asks. That saves an upload step and shifts the burden onto your own filing — if you cannot produce the document months later when a buyer's legal team asks, the sale is the thing at risk.
Exclusive to Alamy
The optional tab carries an only-available-on-Alamy checkbox, applied in batches of up to five hundred or set as a default for future submissions. Read the terms before you tick it. An image that is for sale on any other stock site is not exclusive, and if Alamy hunts an infringement on your behalf and then finds the file elsewhere, it can charge you an admin fee for the wasted effort. Licensing from your own website does not break exclusivity, and neither does being opted into Alamy's distribution scheme.
The IPTC shortcut that removes the annotation step
This is the single biggest workflow saving Alamy offers and the reason IPTC discipline pays for itself. Alamy extracts caption, keywords and date taken from embedded IPTC on upload. Put that data in the file before it leaves your computer and the image arrives ready for sale — no Image Manager session at all, provided your licence and image type defaults are already set.
The field mapping is simple. The IPTC Description field becomes your Alamy caption, and the Keywords field becomes your tags. Adobe Illustrator behaves the same way for vector metadata. If you are not sure which fields your editor writes to, start with the IPTC and XMP basics before you batch anything at scale.
Vectors need one extra move. Alamy takes EPS files only, and metadata rides in on a companion JPEG with a matching filename sent in the same batch. That JPEG exists purely to carry the IPTC, so its size and quality are not the point. There is also a manual route for large libraries: if your tags already live in a spreadsheet, Alamy's image management team will apply them for you if you send the sheet with your account details.
Batch editing inside Image Manager is the fallback when IPTC is not already in place. Select a shoot, apply the same caption, tags and licence across the whole selection, then refine the outliers. It works, but it is a second pass over data you could have written once.
What Alamy will not take
Alamy does not accept images generated by artificial intelligence programs, and it has published an ethical position explaining that stance rather than leaving it buried in submission rules. That is a genuine divergence from most of the agencies contributors deliver to, and it matters for anyone running a mixed library: the generative half of your catalogue has to be routed away from Alamy entirely, not just labelled differently.
Video from individual contributors is also closed at the moment. Alamy currently represents video through agency partnerships and says it will announce it if the individual route reopens. Vectors must be EPS — AI, SVG and DRW files are rejected — and they need closed filled paths, no locked layers and no stray points.
File and upload specs that gate everything else
Perfect metadata on a file that fails quality control earns nothing, so the technical floor comes first. Alamy wants high-quality RGB JPEGs saved at level eight or above in baseline format, over seventeen megabytes uncompressed — which usually lands somewhere between three and five megabytes once compressed. Cameras must be mirrorless or DSLR, or one of the popular branded smartphones released in 2020 or later. Your first submission is capped at three images; after you pass, there is no limit.
FTP is the practical route once volume grows. Alamy's host is upload.alamy.com on port 21, with your Alamy email as the username and your normal account password. Four destination folders sit behind that connection: Stock, Live News for news, sport and entertainment less than twenty-four hours old, Archive stock for reportage and archival material, and Vectors. Live News and Archive stock both need permission granted from your contributor dashboard before the folders will accept anything.
Panoramic work has its own gate. A 360-degree image needs Photosphere XMP metadata, equirectangular projection, an exact two-to-one aspect ratio and a compressed file under two hundred megabytes, and your first panoramic batch is limited to three files even if you already have stock images on sale.
A checklist to run before every batch
- Caption written in English, factually checked, with no personal data and no photographer credit
- At least five tags, no more than fifty, phrases kept intact rather than split
- Ten supertags chosen deliberately, none of them generic
- Licence type and image type set, ideally as account defaults
- Date taken correct, never later than the upload date, with the archival rule applied where it belongs
- Release status marked for every person and recognisable property, with the documents filed on your side
- Exclusivity box ticked only if the file genuinely sells nowhere else
- JPEG over seventeen megabytes uncompressed, quality level eight or above, baseline
- No AI-generated images anywhere in the batch
Where automation actually helps on Alamy
Because Alamy reads IPTC on arrival, the highest-leverage automation is upstream of the upload rather than inside Image Manager. Write the caption and tags into the file, deliver over FTP, and the annotation step disappears. That principle is the same one behind keywording for Alamy's search behaviour, and it is where a metadata engine earns its place.
Rastock AI was built around that shape of problem. It generates titles, descriptions and keywords, embeds them as IPTC, applies per-agency rules so a tag set that is legal on one platform is not illegal on the next, and then delivers the same batch over FTP or SFTP to 10+ agencies, Alamy among them. You can also hold back banned or mandatory keywords per platform and roll a batch back if a rule changes underneath you.
One distinction is worth stating plainly, given Alamy's position. A metadata engine writes words about a photograph you took; it does not generate the photograph. Nothing about running your captions and tags through one puts a file on the wrong side of Alamy's no-AI-imagery rule. What it does mean is that if you also produce generative work, your pipeline has to know which agencies accept it — which is a routing problem, not a keywording one.
There is no revenue share, no ownership claim over your files, and IPTC and CSV export stay open so you can walk away with your own metadata. If you want to test it against a real Alamy batch, the 14-day free trial does not ask for a card.
The short version worth remembering
Five fields get you on sale, fifty tags is the ceiling, ten supertags carry the ranking weight, and the discoverability bar is counting rather than judging. Everything else is optional in the literal sense that Alamy will publish without it — and not optional at all in the sense that archival dates, release flags and accurate captions are what turn a live file into a licensed one.
Frequently asked questions
How many tags does Alamy require?
Five tags is the minimum needed to get an image on sale, and fifty is the maximum you can enter. Out of those, up to ten can be marked as supertags, which the search engine weights more heavily. Images that carried more than fifty tags from the older system keep them, but you cannot add new tags to those files until you trim the count back under the limit.
What is an Alamy supertag?
A supertag is a tag you have flagged as one of the most relevant terms for that image. Alamy lets you mark up to ten of them in Image Manager and gives them extra priority in search. They are not a separate field, just a promotion applied to tags you have already entered, so the choice is about ranking your own terms rather than adding new ones.
Can I write Alamy captions in a language other than English?
No. Alamy asks for English captions only and runs its own machine translation to serve buyers in other languages. Adding your own translations can confuse that system and Alamy warns it may push your images down in search results. Write one accurate English caption and let the translation layer do the rest.
Do I have to upload model releases to Alamy?
No. You need a release for every person and every recognisable property in an image you want sold commercially, but Alamy does not ask you to send the document. You mark the image as released in Image Manager and Alamy contacts you if a customer needs to see it. That means you have to keep your own releases filed and retrievable.
Does Alamy accept AI-generated images?
No. Alamy does not accept images generated by artificial intelligence programs and has published an ethical position explaining why it champions photography made in the real world. This makes Alamy unusual among the agencies most contributors deliver to, so if part of your library is generative, route those files elsewhere and keep your Alamy submissions camera-made.
Can I skip Alamy Image Manager entirely?
Often, yes. Alamy extracts caption, keywords and date taken from IPTC on upload, so if that data is embedded before the file leaves your computer the image can be ready for sale on arrival with no annotation step. You still need a licence type and image type, but both can be set as account defaults so they apply automatically.