My collection is now deleted from Alamy

Please note that anyone trying to access my archive of stock images on Alamy.com will no longer be able to do so, as they were deleted without a clear explanation by Alan Capel – the Head of Content at Alamy seemingly through sheer spite. No official reason was given and this came about after I resigned from their News Feed.

It is rather sad – in my opinion – that someone like Alan Capel can ruin a year’s work of tagging and uploading by a hard-working contributor and loose Alamy a small fortune in future sales.

After talking with Alan Capel, I got the distinct impression he has a very limited understanding of photojournalists and editorial stock photographers and seems to be more interested in commercial stock imagery. Surprising that an outfit like Alamy.com would put someone with this attitude into a position of power where he can delete collections on a whim. Even more surprising that they let him out of his commercial stock play pit to deal with serious photographers who document the real world.

But hey-ho, that is Alamy. I would advise any potential or existing contributors to Alamy to avoid entering into a contract with them. And personally, I think that their actions are despicable, completely unfair and totally unwarranted.

I have since established a new database and if you are a picture researcher or photo editor whom was licensing my work via Alamy, please visit www.atlasphotoarchive.com – where you can search and request images from my collection that were previously housed on Alamy.

Falling foul of the spoilt posh-boys mafia at Alamy.com

Last week, after a conversation with the hapless Jes at Alamy Live News, I decided to resign from supplying live news images to Alamy, but as they are sadly one of the only outlets for stock images, I was aiming to keep uploading reportage stock (my commercial stock always being rejected by a Prince of Dweebs, Alan Capel, the ‘Head of Content’).

Having worked one year on and off with Alamy Live News, my experience was that they are not a good outfit to work with, have poor sales and like many other agencies treat photographers quite badly. The crunch came when I was told by Jes – who is seemingly employed as to make James Hall appear competent – that I was not sent any diary information as “sent direct to the nationals”. I explained that any diary information from Alamy Live News would get sent to them. But I was just talking to a scratched record by then, repeating the same old nonsense.

I was soon to find out the content of the head (Capel), so to speak, which would perhaps be an insult to feces…As on Monday, the charming and talented Mr Capel informed me that the entire collection of around 4,000 images I had worked very hard to upload and tag – were to be deleted! As they are now scheduled to be in 44 days.

Mr Capel and I go back to the dawn of Alamy when he berated me for shock – swearing in an email. I subsequently resigned from the agency after he deleted all my files under 28MB without any warning (surprised they have any files with his penchant for arbitrary file deletion). Once again, Capel, came across with his sanctimonious gibberish as the justification for deleting my entire collection from their damned servers.

Needless to say, this has done irreparable damage to my career and destroyed any possibility of continuing as a photojournalist.

One amazing comment in the email from Alan Capel was: “We gave you a second chance after you were rude and abusive before, it seems you haven’t changed…You leave us no option but to terminate your contract with Alamy.”

The mind does boggle…All I did was write quite legitimate complaints about the Live News service being rubbish. However, all this bullying on the part of Alan Capel  says volumes about Alamy…i) The let a lunatic like this manage their ‘QC’ ii) They do not understand or care about photographers, just money.

In short, I’m a victim of this horrible company which is mostly run by sad, spoilt rich kids from Oxfordshire. I would therefore recommend that any photographer who reads this would be sensible to steer well-clear of these vicious corporate robots (nevermind their weird moral judgements), because as this sorry tale clearly shows, they are ruthless…