Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I think what they mean by this is labeled for commercial reuse without paying. Look at the way the rights are spelled out in the drop down list on the advanced search page
http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en
I don’t want my images labeled as free to use 🙂
Welcome – and I agree, you have some gorgeous images. There are some stunners from Catalonia, but the astronomy images are probably the biggest eyecatchers – like this one:
I also loved the Andromeda image.
On the editorial images, the couple I checked said “N/A” for model and property releases. What I have done is to put “No” there for editorial images (as applicable; if there are no people, then N/A for model release) to make it unambiguous to buyers.
On the question of who to have as network partners, I figured that it should be sites similar to mine but offering more or different content – something that might help a buyer out if I didn’t have what they needed. So, for example, my landscapes are very bright and colorful and I wouldn’t partner with a site that offered only black and white; I do some people images, but typically very down to earth, so I wouldn’t partner with someone doing glamor or boudoir shots.
I have been happy with Anti-Captcha – doesn’t bother real users and has cut out spam registrations
He paid $250,000 for it in December…
Thanks for posting that annotated chart. I’m not sure what the takeaway from it should be for us – this isn’t my field.
I do know that when I search, I never search google for stock images without other keywords. In general what I do is search for keywords that describe what I’m looking for and then add stock photos to the end if the first page or two is flooded with family pictures or selfies and isn’t useful to me.
So if I search (images) for palm beach aruba docks right up on the top row are two of my images (from Shutterstock). Wouldn’t I do better to get my images (from my site) up there with Shutterstock, if I was going to spend money on words?
Taking a less likely example (but one which I used in test searches to see how agencies were doing versus my images), if I search picnic rolling dandelion meadow my site’s images (some) are in the first row, so I don’t think I’d want to pay for anything there. You can see some more examples in this blog post on authorship and the agencies
I’m not even sure how big a factor google search position is for the purchase of stock imagery – do buyers look there or do they go to whichever agency is their “preferred site” and just search there.
It may be irrelevant to our symbiostock sites, but if we assume some buyers try to find us by our name on the agency sites, the images that show up if I search for jsnover stock images are dominated in the first few rows by the agencies that sell the least – stockfresh and iStock (where I have 100 images left). That suggests that they puchased that position and it isn’t doing them any good.
As an aside, a while ago another site owner suggested that we have our agency name (jsnover in my case) buried somehwere in our symbiostock pages to help search engines find our Symbiostock sites. I did that (in the footer in the same color as the background so you can’t see it) and I notice one of my Symbiostock site images shows up in the jsnover stock images results
I’m certainly interested in any suggestions about ways to help people who buy to find our sites – and thanks again for those who know more about this area for helping educate us.
Sorry! I should have been more specific. You can see if there are any abandoned cats – I have it enabled, but I’ve not seen any abandoned carts yet
Possibly it was going to get more features in the future?
In practice, I doubt you’ll notice it being deactivated.
It’s a bug, and a workaround is to disable the Symbiostock cart manager. You should then see 24 per page.
You can change that number (I use 48) by changing some code if you want to go that route
I’m not 100% certain of this, but I think you need to be at 5.4 or have a fix that ajt provided to another site that will make things work OK on 5.3.
I’m not sure if 5.2 will work with the current version
I think the model that works for me is to upload to Symbiostock first and then in time – perhaps 6 months, perhaps longer – upload to those agencies that generate a lot of sales.
I cannot imagine going completely exclusive, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I think for high volume buyers, particularly those at larger companies which want to establish a fixed budget, it’s useful to have agencies like Shutterstock. I wouldn’t mind my older work going there after it had a time to sell here first.
Unless there is some really unique imagery, the thing we all need to face is that there are lots of reasonable alternatives to our work, so making things exclusive here may mean losing out on sales to other artists.
Last month I got a lovely note from someone – who hasn’t bought yet, so take that for what it’s worth – saying that he loved my work and had bought it via Shutterstock, but now he knew about my own site he’d buy from here in the future! I thanked him profusely for the compliment and the intent. I do think that the agencies can be a marketing agent for our work if we want to use them that way.
Look at how Sean Locke has set things up – exclusive new work at Stocksy and some of his “back catalog” here and at Shutterstock and a few other sites.
When WarmPicture was around, it was great to have a site where you could direct a buyer who wanted something that was not on an agency site – and I had a couple of those requests. One was a designer who wanted a vertical version of something I had uploaded only as horizontal. I had taken both and processed and uploaded the vertical shot to all the agencies. I wrote back that it was available now at WarmPicture and in a week or two would be elsewhere, depending on reviewer mood and speed. He bought that day from WarmPicture.
Today, I might not do the upload to the agencies right away, but could do the same thing – offer great customer service when they buy from me directly, but still have my portfolio at the agencies as a lead generator (of sorts).
I don’t know what to think about advertising, or how it would best be done (google searches or display ads somewhere or…). Dan Padavona, who started WarmPicture and did some advertising may have some thoughts on that topic. I’m not against it, but I think it can easily waste a huge sum of money if you don’t know how to target it well.
@leo wrote:
…Why don’t you start with 300 or so, and see how that integrates with PE, before you take the time for all of your images.
So I added 1350 images yesterday evening by selecting categories in the batch editor.
I checked PicturEngine this morning and nothing showed up in searches. I logged in to the photographer account and about 60 of my images show up there. I have no idea why only a fraction, and even though their interface has a checkbox for “Searchable” and it is checked, those images are not searchable (I picked a set of keywords to make it easier to see if my images were there).
I’ll check again tomorrow and see if it’s just a delay in things showing up
It’s available in regular Symbiostock, but it just doesn’t work 🙂
If it isn’t supposed to be there, then that interface should be changed to remove the item for generating promo previews.
I used the batch editor to process 1350 of my images and 60 of them now show up in the account section of PicturEngine, but none of them show up in searches (and the check box that says searchable is checked).
I have no idea why so few or why search can’t find them. I take it your files show up? Is there a lag between the time they show up in the photographer’s account UI and in searches?
Leo, without some sort of undo, why would I want to remove a keyword from all images? That’s a big ask.
I’d do it on my test site (which doesn’t have any images but I could easily upload a handful) with your permission to use the premium plugin there (it’s not live). That way it’d be easier to track with some obvious bogus keywords on images just to see if they get zapped.
I’m not going to repeat myself from the last two re-invention threads, but didn’t want to just ignore this one.
I think that there’s a lot wrong with a lot of things in microstock, but energy can be easily dissipated if you (a) define the problem too broadly or (b) keep moving the goalposts.
It may not be as much fun to fix the bugs, finish the missing features, polish the “fit and finish” of what’s there, etc., but I think that’s the approach to take.
I don’t think we’ll magically acquire buyers if we have a shinier, slicker infrastructure, and IMO that’s the big challenge ahead to keep the project moving forward
Aah – much clearer now!
Perhaps you want to tell Justin that what PictureEngine is sending out to Symbiostock site owners who sign up (Christine’s tutorial) is out of date and needs to be changed?
Or Christine, perhaps you can update what you wrote to reflect what Leo just said and pass it on (I assume he obtained the tutorial from you)?
After looking around for the words you mentioned for deleting promo images and not finding them in bulk editing, I checked the batch editor.
So I should be clear – I used bulk image editing to generate the promo previews yesterday – Christine’s tutorial said you could do that or use the batch editor.
I thought I’d do an experiment. I didn’t delete anything but I went to publish two uploaded images that I hadn’t to try one with the bulk editing tools and one with the batch editor to see what happened.
The batch editor added one image to the XML file but the image I tried to add using the bulk editing “Make Promo Preview” did not appear in the XML file.
So I guess that’s why my 1,700 images never made it to the XML file – at least on my site, the Bulk actions option for making promo previews doesn’t work (it generates the images just fine but doesn’t put them into the XML).
I don’t know if anyone else has tried this – Christine left me with the impression that she’d used the bulk editor, not the batch editor to make her file, but has anyone else?
The problem with using the batch editor to go through my portfolio is how do I systematically do that? I can’t select the whole portfolio. I may have images that aren’t in any category and they’d get left out.
I’d prefer a one-button or automatic solution (like the nightly site map update) but if it has to be manual, the page by page in the bulk actions is easier to control.
I’ll use the batch editor to do a few best sellers and worry about the rest later.
I don’t think I have to delete anything as I tested with two images already in the XML file and processed them again. They didn’t get added a second time.
And if I did decide to wipe the slate clean, is there any reason not to just delete the files on the server using Fetch?
