Alamy is due to launch a new look for its home page and a new format for search results on Monday, April 26.
The new site features a creative imagery section that currently consists of about 2 million of the more than 18 million images in Alamy’s entire collection. Creative images are designed to meet the needs of the advertising and design markets and have been produced by some of the world’s top commercial stock photographers who have a good understanding of releases.
Since April of this year, all images sent to Alamy must have all the relevant releases uploaded with them if the photographer has stated that the images are released. The vast majority of the creative collection will meet the demands of most commercial licenses. The Alamy customer service teams in London and New York are available to help customers with any release-related questions.
There is also a one-click search tool that will quickly filter results by region, ethnicity, age and more. Alamy has a patent pending on this search technology.
Chief executive officer James West said: “We’ve listened carefully to what our customers have been telling us. They want the best of both worlds—millions of images to choose from and blazingly fast search tools to help them narrow down the search.”
The company has tested its new search engine in datacenters in London and New York to determine the time in seconds it takes corporate customers with high-speed Internet access, during normal office hours, to render a complete page in a browser. The company said that in London, it took 2.2 seconds to render the Alamy home page, in contrast to 5.5 seconds for iStockphoto and 6.6 seconds for Getty Images. In New York, the Alamy page loaded in 0.9 seconds, while it took 4.5 seconds for the Getty page.
West continued: “Our competitors are struggling with bloated and unsustainable organizational structures in a contracting economy. We see a real opportunity to leverage our efficiency and technical know-how to open up some exciting new opportunities.”
Last year, Alamy opened a U.S. sales office in Brooklyn. With a sales staff of 15 local employees, the company is dedicated to further increasing its presence in the U.S. market.
During the London press conference, the company also stressed that it pays the largest photographer royalties in the industry, and that since 2006, it has donated 89% of its operating profit to a non-profit, community interest, medical research laboratory set up by Alamy’s inventor and chairman, Mike Fischer.