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London, UK. 5th July, 2024. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer makes his initial speech in downing Street

SELL NEWS, SPORT AND ENTERTAINMENT IMAGES

Contributor homepage / Sell News Images

Become an Alamy Live News Contributor

We work directly with media outlets across the world and have a dedicated team working round the clock to help you get your images online and out to our customers within minutes. Below is how you get involved.

Take photos of any newsworthy event

Then make your selection of images.

License your photos to customers worldwide

Alamy distributes your photos to international news and media outlets.

Get paid every time your photos are used

We pay you whenever your photos are licensed and sell your photos as stock after 48 hours.

Sign up as a live news contributor

If you are already an Alamy contributor, then all you need to do is fill out the application form under the ‘additional revenue options’ section of your contributor dashboard. If not, then you just need to create an account first and then you can apply.

Sign upFill out the application

What images can I send to Alamy Live News?

If you want to sell news photos you need to recognise what makes a good news, sport or entertainment picture. A good news picture should stop you in your tracks and stand out of the page.

A news image could be a shot of a momentous event, an arresting image of a politician at an otherwise boring press conference, a celebrity in a marathon or of a beautiful sunrise. The images all need to be of the moment and submitted to us within minutes of the event taking place.

For more inspiration, see our Editorial homepage or take a look at what’s on the Alamy Live News Feed right now.

Explore editorial

Captions, headlines and dates for Live News images

Your image tells a story but no one will understand it unless you caption it correctly – and we can’t sell it without full, accurate captions and headlines. It’s essential that before you upload your image, you add a caption to the IPTC description field, a headline to the IPTC headline field and the date the image was taken (not the date of upload). If your image doesn’t have this, our team might reject it from the News Feed.

If you’re still not sure which IPTC fields to use then email us on news@alamy.com and we’ll send you an example image. You can open this in your editing software where you’ll see which IPTC fields you need to fill out and some helpful guidelines about what to write.

See our captions guide

Quality Control for Live News

We know that photojournalistic images captured under difficult circumstances might not always be free from technical faults, but they need to be of the highest quality possible.

Due to the ‘of the moment’ nature of News images, they don’t need to pass the same Quality Control checks as stock images, however they will be spot-checked in the News Feed.

If the Live News team decide the quality makes the image unsellable, or doesn’t adhere to our live news policies, then its likely your images will be removed from the news feed. For further guidance around editorial post-production editing, relevancy and accuracy, please see our live news policies.

See our Live News Policies

Frequently asked questions

What is the technical criteria for live news images?

We need:

  1. JPEG images uploaded as soon as possible

    Images older than 24 hours will be rejected (except in exceptional circumstances).

  2. IPTC headline, caption and date added before you upload

    You need to add these in the correct IPTC metadata fields of the images before you upload.

  3. A true representation of what you saw

    Nothing should be added, removed or altered (e.g. the image should not be lightened/darkened in a way that changes sunny clouds into thunderous clouds).

  4. Images of the highest quality possible

    We understand that there are some occasions where they won’t be technically perfect.

For more information you should check out our Live News Policies.

What are the rules for adding headlines to live news images?

When you have two or more images from one event, all the images need exactly the same IPTC Headline to keep them together in the news feed. The headline needs to be in this format: General description of event, town/city, country (e.g. Grammy Awards red carpet, Los Angeles, USA).

Headlines, captions and tags should always be written in English.

What are the rules for adding captions to live news images?

It’s your image so you know what it’s about, but a picture editor seeing it for the first time will be completely lost unless you help them out with accurate captions which answer the basic questions:

  • Where did it take place?

  • When did it take place?

  • Who is in the image?

  • What is going on?

  • Why is it happening / why is it newsworthy?

The caption needs to be in this format: town/city, country, date (in format 1st Dec, 2024.), description, credit.

For example: Liverpool, UK, 1st Dec, 2024. Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah celebrates scoring his side’s second goal during the Premier League match v Manchester City at Anfield, Liverpool. Credit: Sportimage Ltd/Alamy Live News

For more info, download our helpful PDF guide on captions and headlines for Alamy Live News.

What is the difference between headlines and captions?

Headlines and captions are different. Headlines apply to all the images in a set from an event. The caption is specific to the individual image and describes what’s happening.

How do I upload to the Alamy Live News Feed via an FTP?

Once you've applied for access to upload to the live news feed, you can upload your images via an FTP. We recommend using FTP as it’s a quick and easy way to send us your images. You’ll need an FTP client, we recommend Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, Filezilla, WinSCP or Transmit.

Enter Alamy’s FTP details into your FTP Client:

  • Host name: newsupload.alamy.com

  • Login/username: Your Alamy email

  • Your password is the same as your Alamy login

  • Port: 21

Destination Path/Folder: (depending on if you are uploading news, sport or entertainment):

  • Live_News/News

  • Live_News/Sports

  • Live_News/Entertainment

How do I upload to the live news feed online?

Access to Live News also enables you to upload to the Live News feed via the Alamy dashboard in your contributor account:

  1. Select Upload and choose the correct category under the ‘Live News’ route (News, Sport, Entertainment)

  2. Select your JPEGs to upload, then click ‘Submit’

When and how do I get paid for selling Live News images?

You can keep track of your sales, view your account balance and download a sales report from your contributor dashboard.

Newspaper customers can take longer to report, so you might see your image used in a newspaper before the sale is added to your account. Your sale should appear in your account within 90 days.

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:

  • Funds transfer to your bank account

  • By PayPal

And which currency you get paid in:

  • £ – UK Pounds Sterling (GBP)

  • $ – US Dollars (USD)

  • € – Euros (EUR)

All your payment details are stored securely and you can change them in My Alamy under the Account Settings tab.

View more

Useful resources

Be inspired

Editorial homepage

Explore the home of News, Sport and Entertainment imagery.

Be in the know

Code of Practice

Ensure your images meet the highest professional standards with the Independent Press Standard Organisation (IPSO) guidelines.

Join the discussions

Contributor forum

Join our friendly community of contributors in an open forum where you can get guidance from those who have been there and done it.