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FWIW, the excerpt that you see in All images isn’t ever seen by a customer, so you can leave it alone if you don’t want to copy and paste
sorry about the bogus links. I’ve fixed them (although I can’t be certain they’re the same ones I intended to post before).
If you aren’t seeing ImageMagick in the Process Images tab (at the top left), and if you have tried to use the BlueHost cPanel to enable it, contact BlueHost support to get it straightened out. I once had to do that for a test site (in a subdomain). I thought I’d enabled ImageMagick but the test site was still using GD. I contacted Bluehost and explained; there was an ini file setting somewhere that was overriding the choices I was making and they changed it for me.
Welcome Ken.
Great to see another site to add to the network. If you can add a link to your site to your profile it’ll help other people map your site to your posts.
There is obviously no requirement to have any experience selling through the agencies, but if you are not familiar with the issues of what is and is not OK for selling with a royalty free license, I’d strongly suggest that you use the agency’s training materials to bring yourself up to speed – you don’t want to find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit 🙂
I didn’t write the post with this in mind, but I have a recent blog post that has links to agency training as well as some general (if very brief; it’s an overview) guidance
http://www.digitalbristles.com/fiverr-sellers-top-10-tips-for-stock-image-gigs/
The links to iStock and Shutterstock’s guidance in number 9 are helpful – iStock’s is very thorough.
from the look of your page, it appears you have deleted all your image categories – not even the default ones are there.
You can get the defaults back (including Featured Images as a category) by switching to any other theme and then back to Symbiostock. It will recreate the defaults for you.
In general, you can create categories as you upload images or you can use the Stock Images (ladybird) -> Image Categories panel in the WP admin interface to add some.
It can feel very intimidating at first – and I know Leo had in the past mentioned wanting to offer a hosted solution that would only require the site owner to upload files, just for the person such as you who found the current site building too complex.
There is a project one site owner has to offer a co-op to alleviate a lot of the leg work:
http://cascoly-images.com/pix/symbiostock-installation-service/
As far as the sites looking alike, there would be nothing today – no sites – if that were how things were set up. There is a global search of all sites – which is excellent:
It took me a while to understand the importance of site independence to the growth of the network – it seems at first so obvious there should be one set of prices, one look, once license, etc. Put two stock photographers or illustrators or videographers in a room and they’ll likely agree on almost nothing! Possibly on how badly the agencies are treating contributors but little else.
The freedom to have our own site design, logo, pricing, licensing (and some people have a mix of selling and referral to RM sites like Alamy or Stocksy) is what makes this endeavor possible. I don’t have to like other people’s site design or pricing and they don’t have to like mine either!
It’s certainly an experiment, but for me the big thing is to have an alternative to the agencies as well as somewhere that I can experiment with pricing and packaging if I wish to.
That will be dependent on server settings – I have many 25 MB images that are well over 21 megapixels (panoramas and such). You need memory for ImageMagick. There are some threads here on this:
viewtopic.php?f=60&t=1129&hilit=memory_limit#p10748
http://www.symbiostock.net/increasing-the-memory-for-symbiostock-sites/
I would use the global search
with terms you’re interested in and then pick some sites by their images. Also, Cascoly’s list has the promoted keywords by site
http://cascoly.com/symbio/list.asp?list=31
If a site “promotes” a keyword, it’s likely to be a focus in their portfolio
24 bit png is generally much larger than JPEG, but perhaps you used 8 bit?
At any rate, my 80×80 avatar is only 5K, 100×100 is 7K – just using Save for Web in Photoshop. If you were to save a color profile with the JPG that could bump the size way up – for avatars you want to avoid any metadata to keep the file size small.
I realize it doesn’t matter for the moment, but in case you need a JPEG in the future for something, I’d suggest you look at how you’re saving files to see how to make it smaller.
Most of those sorts of things are done with widgets in various areas on the page – home page above content, home page below, etc.
You remove the widget from the sidebar and you’re all set. Appearance – > Widgets
I put my own logo URL into the field in the WP admin panel Symbiostock (bee) ->Settings tab -> Header logo field
Right now my network’s off, but what I was seeing is that I’d type in search term and there’d be a looong wait before anything showed up, even the results from my own site.
I wouldn’t mind if my results showed fast and other stuff took a bit to load, but the site looks totally unresponsive when you get no results at all for 20 seconds or more
I’m happy to turn the network back on and add back my partners if you want to look at things on my site (I can also give you a login if you need that too)
So my site is slow with the network even after emptying symbiostock_xml_cache
Bluehost
PhP 5.4.26
Symbiostock 3.2.7 (with a few code changes for appearance tweaks)
Dragonfly (with bunches of CSS mods)Plugins:
Anti-Captcha
Version 20140129Contact Form 7
Version 3.7.2Easy FancyBox
Version 1.5.6Gallery Pro
Version 1.3.0Google Analytics for WordPress
Version 4.3.5Jetpack by WordPress.com
Version 2.9.2Page Builder by SiteOrigin
Version 1.4.7Regenerate Thumbnails
Version 2.2.4Related Posts By Taxonomy
Version 0.2.1SiteOrigin Masonry
Version 1.0.3Soliloquy
Version 1.5.7.1SYMBIOSTOCK – Cart Manager
Version 1.1.4SYMBIOSTOCK – Emails and Notifications
Version 1.0.0SYMBIOSTOCK – Image Sitemap
Version 1.1.3SYMBIOSTOCK – Professional
Version 1.5.2UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
Version 1.8.13.1Velvet Blues Update URLs
Version 3.2.2WordPress Backup to Dropbox
Version 1.8.1WordPress SEO
Version 1.5.2.5wp-category-meta
Version 1.2.7When I visited your site I saw a home page (I entered the url for /customer-licence-and-file-management-area/ manually and that page looks different from the home page I started with
Do you only see the wrong page when you’re logged in or all the time? And are you using the home page generator to set your site up?
I had a hard time deleting the files so I renamed the folder as cascoly suggested.
I didn’t time things (were you just checking with a stopwatch or is there some timer function somewhere in wordpress?) but even with only 4 sites added back (two that were fast before and two slow) my searches were noticeably slower – even though after the first search there were only 68 files in the new symbiostock_xml_cache directory
I’ve turned the network off again. Even with the network off, searches are faster using symbiostock.info than they are just searching my own site!
I don’t have any caching stuff on my site (but I never have had). I have added a few more images, but I’m still nowhere near the biggest site on the network.
Around 11pm last night my site went down (while I was editing a blog post). When it didn’t come back up right away I went to twitter to contact Bluehost support. They replied they were doing a cPanel upgrade and the site would be back in a few hours!
I was pretty miffed they hadn’t notified me in advance. This morning (time stamp was 2am PST or thereabouts) I got e-mail that they were going to be taking sites down briefly – not for several hours – but by that time I was in bed and this morning things were fine
Is it possible your issues were related to this upgrade?
