Symbiostock 2.0: It’s here

Launched only a few months ago, Symbiostock has grown dramatically in just a short while. Based on the WordPress platform, Symbiostock has evolved into a feature rich media management and sales system that does so much more than just offer you a storefront for your images.

By being streamlined and  non-intrusive, it has proven to be highly compatible with just about any theme, allowing an eclectic mix of different looking sites power themselves with its code. In fact, there are so many different variations that aside from a few unique elements, even our developers sometimes have a hard time knowing if the Symbiostock engine is running in the background.

Initially conceived and developed years ago, Legacy Symbiostock was a dramatic idea – provide independent artists a way to monetize their images so that any reliance on third party corporations was minimized. It was embraced by the community. And though it ultimately did not achieve the throughput intended, the simple drive towards independence is still alive and strong in the microstock community.

By improving nearly every single aspect of the plugin, from the processor to watermarks to licensing and security, it most importantly introduces us to the Symzio Network Widget. Now, users can integrate beautiful and seamless search results from across the network on their WordPress pages. The key to this system is immediate and relevant results; each Symbiostock site will now operate as a node, contributing a portion of its traffic every day to the whole network. It is through the well integrated implementation of the Symzio widget that we can now operate as a cohesive collective while still maintaining an absolutely independent and fully controlled distribution system for our own images.

The grandiose number of features, fixes and upgrades that are coming with Symbiostock 2.0 is nothing to sneeze at; we now have really relevant related products (probably superior, even, to the built in WordPress search system). We have complete video support on our PLUS servers – just upload any video, and within a couple of minutes it’s available for sale, fully protected with a watermark and secured downloads for your customers. You can even submit your uploaded videos to agencies like Shutterstock and Fotolia, absolutely free with our PLUS service. We have tonnes of localization upgrades – change the way licenses show up on your storefront and even translate some of the phrases that show up throughout the customer experience.

We have quick editing for professional stock photographers who want to upload hundreds of images and keyword them quickly and efficiently (title, tab, description, tab, keywords, tab, enter – saved, including metadata writing!). We have geodata parsing – customers can now see a beautiful Google map on the product page relating to the image itself.

There are too many things to list. And though you will certainly want to familiarize yourself with the upgrades and new features, the real purpose of all of this is to make it easier for you to get your images up there, ready to be sold, and to maximize the number of sales you get for all your hard work.

We truly believe this is a big step in that direction.

Documentation relating to the new features will begin to be populated in the next few weeks, so be aware that some guides may be slightly different than the way Symbiostock now works.

If you’re already a Symbiostock user, you should go and sign up for Symzio before even upgrading so that your account is activated sooner rather than later. This way you can join the network along with everyone else at the same time. Once we get an influx of signups, it will take more time to process them, and accordingly, delays will ensue.

As always, post any queries and comments in our forum. Take care Symbiostockers!