Alamy and their new contributor contract

Alamy contributor pie chart showing 20% for the contributor and 80% for Alamy
Alamy contributor pie chart
As the Secretary of The BPPA I have today written to Lira Mendonca, Managing Director of Alamy, to express our concerns at the latest changes to the way that they pay their contributors, of which I have been one. Most of us have been receiving 40% or less of the already low licensing fees that they have been obtaining for our copyright material. Their latest changes, due to take effect on the 1st of September, reduce the share of the licensing fees that all but a few of us will make to either 20% or even 15%. With the number of $0.39 sales that they are generating most of us will earn very little having spent a long time adding our carefully keyworded images to their library – that’s less than £0.07 per image after the beginning of next month. Here is what I wrote:


Dear Lira

Re: Changes to Contributor Commission Structure – Effective 1 September 2026

I am writing to you as the Secretary of The British Press Photographers’ Association who also happens to be a contributor to Alamy as part of my day job as an editorial and news photographer with forty years of experience in the industry.

Within hours of Alamy’s email to contributors inviting them to look at the new structure and to read your blog we had received a number of messages from members who were asking the association to have a look at what it would mean for them and their large number of colleagues who have collections of images available for licensing through yourselves. We have taken some time and investigated what it would mean for our members and used a few members of our Board who, like me, license images through Alamy as examples of what it would mean.

Having to go between three different pieces of information to calculate where each contributor sat in your new payment structure was unnecessarily painful. Once we had overcome that hurdle it became clear that the vast majority of those who have pictures and who are making sales will have their percentage of those sales halved or worse.

Being paid twenty or even fifteen percent of the total amount of money achieved for already low licensing deals was, when we reported back, totally unacceptable to the vast majority of those we were working with. Many of us stuck with Alamy when the percentage paid to the copyright owner went down to forty percent but to have that halved, and more than halved, in many cases is unacceptable.

We are aware that Alamy needs to invest in technology constantly to remain competitive in a difficult marketplace. What we cannot accept is that contributors who have been loyal to your platform and who do not cause you any problems should bear the cost of it.

We would ask you, therefore, to do the following:

  1. Rethink your proposals and keep the contributors’ minimum share at 40%
  2. Introduce a way for those who wish to withdraw their copyright material to do so without the current six month plus period and unacceptable bureaucracy

The BPPA raised questions about, and objections to, the Getty Images and Shutterstock deal. We did it because of the harm it could have done to the market for news and archive photographs. Alamy’s latest move does nothing to help with that battle and many of our members who are contributors won’t want to have their work licensed for a percentage deal that makes it not worth their time or energy.

Thank you for your time and kind regards

Neil Turner
Secretary, The BPPA