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Search tips
© Alvey & Towers Picture Library / Alamy
Using the search tool
- The search bar is in the centre of our home page and in the top left hand corner of the screen of most customer facing pages. Enter your search words or phrases and press search. The ordering of your keywords in the search box will affect which images are displayed to you first. Words entered into the search box are not case-sensitive.
- The first page of results will display all images that match your keyword(s). You can change the number of thumbnails that are displayed by using the "Results per page" setting at the top right hand side of the page.
- The search engine will display results in less than a quarter of a second however the time it takes for you to see all the images will depend upon the speed of your internet connection. The following table shows the time (in seconds) it will take to view a page of 10 images on Alamy:
- For best results, we recommend that you use the following browsers for PC or Mac when viewing the Alamy web site:
- Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
- Netscape 7
- Safari
- Mozilla
- Firefox
- AOL 8 and above
- Opera 6 and above
| Corporate | Compressed file size | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-3/DS-3 0.02 |
T-1 0.64 |
DSL 0.50 |
ADSL 1.98 |
ISDN 7.92 |
Modem (56Kbps) 21.13 |
Tips for keyword searches
- Images on Alamy are annotated by our individual contributors. This results in a variety of words being used to describe one subject. For example, the term “woman” could also have the keywords ‘female’, 'girl’ or ’lady’. To make sure you see all relevant images, you will need to use brackets to group similar nouns and adjectives, i.e. (woman OR female OR girl OR lady).
- You can add "OR", "NOT" or "AND" to your keyword(s) to widen or narrow your search. For example - "London NOT bus" will return images with the keywords "London" but not those with the keywords "London, bus".
- To find an exact phrase use single speech marks around the words. For example, 'Victoria Falls' will deliver results only where the words Victoria and Falls are next to each other in the keywords.
- To help you search within a search, your previous keyword(s) are displayed in the search box field on the results page. If you add words to this field, Alamy will respect the previous search and continue using just your additional keyword(s).
- There is a ‘More Search Preferences’ link on the homepage search box to enable you to further narrow down your search filters. There is also an ‘advanced search’ tab within the ‘preferences’ link which will help define your search more specifically using keywords.
- You can also type advanced keyword searches directly into the main search box. You can create several strings to make your search more specific. For example, to look for images of an overweight old man you could use: man (overweight OR fat OR plump OR chubby) (old OR older OR mature OR elderly OR senior OR retired).
- The ‘more’ button under the thumbnail enables you to see more images from a specific photographer.
- You may want to use our lightbox tool to keep your selections together. See our using lightboxes page for more information.
- You may find it useful to read more about our keywording policy (Captions, keywords and descriptions) for contributors and how our search engine works (AlamySearch).
Using filters and adding preferences
You can filter your search results by license type as well as a number of filters available under ‘more search preferences’. You can save your most commonly used search requirements by ticking ‘Always remember my preferences’. You can remove your preferences by pressing ‘clear my preferences’.
There are also other ways to filter our images:
- ‘All of Alamy’ tab – allows you to see the entire collection.
- ‘Commercial’ tab – allows you to see a growing collection including images that are appropriately released for advertising, design and promotion. Alamy recommends that release information is still checked when using an image for commercial purposes.
- ‘Agencies’ tab – enables you to see images containing your keywords by agency.
- ‘VCD’ tab – allows you to look at themed Royalty Free collections which you can purchase as a virtual CD.