Get copies of your sales records, a list of the images and their metadata

1. Ask Member Services for an Excel spreadsheet of your images in case of issues after you leave. You then have all your metadata and the Alamy references as well as your own filenames.

2. Build a sales report of all sales from day one from your page at "View your sales history" in "My Alamy". You can view "All Sales" (you may need to reload this page several times if there is a lot of data) and copy and paste it into an Excel to save it.

3. If you save the web page for these sales from day one as full web page archive this will have all the thumbnails as separate files and you can do a Google image search later on to track infringements if you wish.

4. Download or copy your sales dates and amounts from the "build a downloadable sales report" link above the graph. This shows each sale with the sale date, amount, image reference and payment date.

5. Get information for DACS submission by following the Alamy guide, this page has been removed from Alamy's website. We link to a copy here. As it's a screen grab from the Alamy page the embedded links won't work.

6. Make sure you make it clear that you want to "terminate" your account in communications. If you have images on a Stockimo account tell them you want to close that account too.

7. Consider synching your metadata in Alamy to your own files using this Lightroom plugin. You can use a 30 day LR trial to do this. Best to make a single new catalogue so it's all embedded for future use in your images. The plugin only works with files having identical formats so if your own copies of any files sent to Alamy are .tif format (Alamy used to specify 'only submit .tif files') then you'll need to convert them to .jpg before you apply the Alamy metadata with the plugin.

The plugin will store your data but you'll need a full version of Lightroom to actually embed it into an image file. You'll have that same data separately in a spreadsheet anyway from step 1.

Note added March 20, 2015

One possible solution for Alamy contributors who simply cannot afford to lose their Alamy income would be to terminate their account before 1st April having secured (and backed up!) all their Alamy metadata.

They could then open a new account with Alamy while withholding their best selling images, ask Member Services to re-apply the metadata and place just those top earning photographs with another agent offering more acceptable terms.

With proven money making pictures to offer, many agencies would be very happy to take them on board and could probably license them at higher rates than Alamy does.