[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I stopped by to see what was new here and I’m not sure I’m caught up, but I think so.
I am interested in keeping a site where I can sell my work and theoretically interested in migrating to the plugin version of Symbiostock. Timing is everything – I won’t have much time to devote to this over the next 3 months or so. I’d like to participate in the beta but I can’t because of time constraints.
There were a number of things Symbiostock did that most WP themes and plugins didn’t do but which are critical for a photographer licensing their work. Not sure if it’s helpful as you work on the new plugin, but here’s a list of must haves (not nice to haves) before using a plugin to license stock images.

1. Original unwatermarked images are stored somewhere reasonably secure and not publicly accessible
2. Uploading images reads IPTC metadata embedded in the file
3. Watermarked previews and thumbnails automatically generated on upload
4. Choice of sizes for the buyer and delivery of an unwatermarked image, generated on the fly at sale time, to the buyer, but not publicly visible/searchable
5. Quality of buyer JPEGs must be high (as good as Image Magick)
6. Original size, particularly for panoramas, can be very large . Constraints, either in megapixels, longest edge size or total MB should be clearly stated (and preferably very big sizes are OK)
7. Must support JPEG and PNG (it’d be nice to have EPS, PSD and other formats as well)
8. Global price changes must be possible without individually editing each image

Some things it’d be nice to know
1. How does search work? Does it support phrases – e.g. if I keyword a file with the two word phrase baby boomer, will a search for baby ignore this file? Will titles and descriptions be searched as well as keywords?
2. Will buyers have to register/log in to purchase and if so can they see a list of their prior purchases? Can they download again?
3. Any support for marking a file as model released or property released? This was a customization I made to my site and is pretty important to assure buyers about the legal safety of their license. Support for marking Editorial Use Only on images that may not be licensed for commercial use?

thanks,

Edited to add that the part of our profiles that had a link to our sites doesn’t appear here, so my Symbiostock site is http://www.digitalbristles.com/

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by  JoAnnSnover.

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Some of those are (IMO) unratable – strong future for contributors for example. Also not sure how that differs from contributor best interest. Customer goodwill is another one (although whatever it means I don’t think iStock has any left!)

In addition to a +1 on many of the previous additions (particularly the opt outs for partner deals, preferably individually by partner):

-Ability to delete your own images
-Length of commitment for approved images
-Payment threshold
-Payment choices
-Detailed, downloadable sales reporting
-Marketing program/budget
-Buyer tools – list of licensed images, lightboxes, search ordering, payment options (buy one image vs. credits vs. subs)
-Sane default (best match) search algorithm (some time for new images to be seen; some weighting for keyword relevance; tracking of searches to improve search results)
-Referral program
-File types supported (image, audio, video, vector) and searchable – e.g. illustrations (raster or vector), 3d renders separately from photographs
-License options – commercial & editorial, RF only vs. RF& RM, extended licenses. Options for contributor to pick which

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Given that Fotolia has now returned to closing accounts to bully contributors, folks who want to stay Fotolia contributors should tread carefully when complaining and contacting people about DPC

http://www.digitalbristles.com/first-and-last-warning/

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I didn’t answer the poll because I think the difficulty is in the many definitions of beautiful 🙂

I have some very strong opinions about sites I like the look of and those I really detest, and I would love not to have to invest any time and effort in the look of my site. If I had a choice of a few stunning (to me) designs, that would be great.

I was another Clean Theme purchaser. I took a different route from Martha though. I didn’t want to be on an unsupported platform so I switched to Dragonfly and made bazillions of changes (mostly CSS but a few code) to get to something close to the old Clean Theme appearance.

I’ve tried to get rid of borders and boxes and random icons and other elements that I see as clutter – but possibly are the things of beauty in someone else’s view.

I think when you’re selling something visual, having a great looking site is very important.

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

The Empire buys back (with apologies for the bad pun) 🙂

Congrats

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Right now, if you make your square watermark anything but tiny, you can’t design it in such a way as not to get cut off with a panorama – because of the pixel dimensions of the preview. So for this preview, at 590 x 213 pixels you get

http://www.digitalbristles.com/image/boston-waterfront-in-early-morning-sun/

I plunked my logo dead center so at least that does mostly do OK for a horizontal panorama, but look at a vertical one whose preview is 307 x 590, where the logo is cut off

http://www.digitalbristles.com/image/sunny-dandelions-in-a-meadow/

Standard ratio for out of the camera on a DSLR is 3:2; the micro 4/3 cameras are 4:3

The problem with designing a watermark for any image shape is that you don’t know what the minimum is. Right now the max is 590 on the long edge and the other edge is scaled proportionally.

I think that if you approached the watermark placement differently – possibly requiring one more png from site owners to do it – you might not have to care about ratios.

Suppose you scaled the watermark to fit the short dimension and then filled anything left over on the other edges with a background file? In my watermark, I have a very faint very small “digital bristles” that’s scattered around the edges and then the core of the logo with business name, my copyright and the brush logo.

The “background” watermark could be an X or small Xs or little symbiostock Ss by default – something simple.

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

@leo wrote:

First off, just a quick thank you to JoAnnSnover for donating her cat for animal testing (Attached). Its for the greater good of humanity.

This isn’t my cat – I’m donating a friend’s cat for medical experiments!! I think that means an eternity in torment 🙂 His name is Orion and he’s a bit imperious but very photogenic

I sent you e-mail with links to a very wide pano and a tall and skinny one (no animals to be harmed in either) 🙂

Larger minipics are good – if you didn’t take a look at a Shutterstock search lately (not the other agencies which don’t look as good) have a look on a widescreen monitor – it’s gorgeous. Here’s an example from an earlier post on MSG.

I would like to control the text for the copyright tag on the minipic and do like the option to have my own watermark on the preview size (I incorporate the Symbiostock logo with my own branding).

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I have used the contact form on most of the larger sites – that weren’t already opted out. Some responses, but very few.

I can share a Google Drive spreadsheet with anyone who wants to send out e-mails – three of us are keeping track to avoid bombarding people multiple times. There’s also a template message (in English) for anyone who wants to use it.

I won’t post a link to it because it has e-mail addresses in it and there was a concern about posting a link to that on MSG (even though the e-mails were obtained from the web, not private sources).

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Congrats on the sale!

I think the fees depend on your location. I pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, so I’d pay 59 cents on a $10 sale, not $1+. I seem to remember other site owners talking about higher fees – although I don’t think they were over 10%…

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I don’t know why I’d submit to a co-op unless I dropped my own site. And I have agencies like Shutterstock if I’m looking for broader exposure for smaller share of the proceeds.

I like the notion of being able to search the whole symbiostock network easily – so if anything new can be searched along with the existing sites as if it were one network, I’d be happy.

It depends on whether I believed the “old” Symbiostock sites were viable or not in the “new” setting.

That’s a great big “it depends” 🙂

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Justin called me today to let me know that he has temporarily had to turn off the connection for Symbiostock sites to PicturEngine. He is currently planning for marketing to start in July.

He’s going to CEPIC next week (panelist and for discussions) and expects to be able to turn Symbiostock back on some time after he gets back.

I asked if he wanted me to post the status here and he said yes – just in case anyone wondered about the shut-off.

He is still very full of enthusiasm for the project and the various things he’s working on patenting for image search, but clearly it’s a longer road than he first envisioned.

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I don’t know what happened in Feb or March, but I saw Googles webmaster tools stop increasing the indexed image count. But my images are getting indexed. If I search Google for Cottage Pond North Caicos (in images; it’s there but further back in a web search) my newly uploaded image is in the top row. I have no idea what changed that stopped the Webmaster Tools counts from increasing

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I believe FB terms of service prohibit using a false name/identity – one wonders why someone would use a stock photo (even if legitimately purchased) for a real FB account. They may just remove the image and consider the problem solved.

Good for the person who contacted you that they took the trouble to find you though

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I saw something new the other day – a single price for a single use (versus royalty free)

http://www.sangostock.com/

We have some sites experimenting with lower prices and some much higher. I think it’s not bad to have a range and for people to try things out to see what flies. If I had a bunch of simple isolated on white shots, I might make the prices of those much cheaper than of most of my portfolio (I have some, but not a ton, so for me, right now, everything’s priced the same).

At the moment, I don’t think any of us has the volume of buyers you’d need to test pricing the way big sites like amazon do. Even smaller sites – CanStock, for example – test pricing changes. I saw prices go up there and asked if contributor royalties would go up too. The reply was that it was just a test – some areas some of the time – so during the test royalties wouldn’t change.

My gut says that right now, getting noticed is more important than price (and that very low prices won’t get you noticed).

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

I did have that problem (not because my host wouldn’t permit it but because of how my site was set up at the time.

The workaround is to make a subdomain for the directory you install wordpresss into. My site is actually in stock.snovers.com (the subdomain) and my URL – digitalbristles.com is mapped to that subdomain.

With Bluehost, you set up subdomains and associate domain names with them via the cPanel interface. You can do almost everything yourself – if I had not had some existing stuff to undo that involved the top level domain name I wouldn’t have had to contact Bluehost support at all.

You don’t need the extra domain name, but I didn’t want the site to have the form stock.(site name).com. That works as you can see from this site

http://stock.tdahlphotography.com/

(and it was Tim who pointed out this workaround when I was bemoaning the problems with the subdirectory install)

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