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I’d love to see the New posts link at the bottom as well as the top of each page.
If you come to the forum and read a new thread to the end, you have to scroll back up to the top of the page to click New posts to get to the next thing to read. (Leaf had added “Home” to the bottom as well as the top at MSG and I think that worked really well).
I’d also like a like button 🙂 For things like the sales threads, I want to join in the congratulations, but it’s hard to find the sales amidst the many posts saying “Well done” and “Congrats”. I have never liked the minus button/down arrow at MSG, but I do think the Heart/plus/like is great for a situation where you agree but have nothing to add.
I updated to this and have gone back to 1.9.8 (and I have exchanged messages with plrang about what happened).
I love the square thumbnails and the hover preview, so those are the only features I have used on my site – none of the layout stuff is enabled.
I’ll just summarize what my setup is and what happened so anyone else in the same boat can consider whether this upgrade is for them.
I have CleanTheme 2.0 as my child theme and the Soliloquy slider on my home page. Symbiostock 2.6.5 and Premium plugin 1.1.9
After I updated the SYXtra plugin to 1.9.9, most of my headers – including those in the overlays on the Soliloquy slider images – changed color.
The white headers in the slider became black; the gray headers on the sections on my home page became blue and headers on the image pages went from blue to black.
I experimented with the three thumbnail types in the new version of SYXtra – Square and Entitled – and decided that Standard (what’s in 1.9.8) worked best for my home page. At that point the block of thumbnails center bottom went from a grid of 2 x 3 to a long vertical list.
At this point my home page looked awful, so I went back to version 1.9.8 of the plugin (I had the earlier zip file on my system; I’ll definitely remember to keep earlier versions always to make rolling back easier).
plrang pointed out that I could probably change header styles/colors with his controls, but I want to control appearance with CleanTheme, so that really doesn’t seem like a long term approach for me.
I would love to have the thumbnails and hover previews separate from the layout options so there was less chance of this sort of coloring outside the lines happening.
Perhaps fees vary by country of origin – I’m in the US.
My fees are 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction. The “worst case” scenario for me is that they take 14.9% on a $2.50 sale
I wish I could just “Like” your post about the sale – don’t want to ignore good news, but the threads get a bit unwieldy with the congrats posts.
Anyone know what this forum can do in terms of that sort of customization?
I don’t use either of those widgets, but I stuck them into the footer on my page and they showed up. I have the same versions of things as you do.
@shelma1 wrote:
There’s no lightbox option…people can’t save images anywhere?
I don’t think so. Last night I was hunting around to see if there was a WordPress plugin that might do the job – not helped by the fact that what the WordPress community calls a Lightbox is a slideshow viewer of sorts, not a container for a collection of links that you want to save.
I think there are a couple of important things to have for buyers – one is an image magnifier (like kTools has) and the other is a lightbox. All that needs to happen is giving a name to a collection of links and displaying the thumbnail sizes for each one, so I have to hope we can do something about that.
This doesn’t answer your question exactly, but I added a blog post explaining my view of Symbiostock as a fair trade answer to our various agency woes
I’ve had one sale so far – no idea who the person is or how they found me though.
Welcome.
Most of us have come to Symbiostock after a while with the agencies (in my case since September 2004). There’s a ton wrong with them (why are we here after all) but I would say that it was the most amazing training ground for me – I was new to stock photography when I started with iStockphoto in 2004
Rejections suck, but you learn a lot from them at the beginning. Keywording is another big skill to learn, and I’m a ton better at it than I was at the beginning.
You might consider getting accepted at one or two agencies just to get a feel for what their standards for acceptance are (in terms of technical quality in almost all cases and in the case of Shutterstock from their view of what has commercial value). It is a big learning curve but it might help you in getting your own site to appeal to image buyers in the long run
Costs – contributor
It depends!
If you already have a website and are paying for hosting, the incremental costs will be just your time plus any WordPress plugins you care to purchase (but you don’t have to purchase any).
If you know absolutely nothing about setting up a web site or WordPress and aren’t inclined to learn then you’ll have to pay someone to set the site up for you, and that’s going to vary in cost.
You can buy shared hosting (Bluehost for example) for about $5 per month if you sign up for a year:
http://bluehost.com/cgi/info/hosting_features
Time to upload your images and get the SEO optimal on them is substantial, but varies with portfolio size and how well you already prepared (keywords, title, description) the images in the first place.
Some of the time I’ve spent has been because I wanted my site to look a certain way and am not (yet) well versed enough with WordPress to do that quickly. I figure it’s worth my while to invest the time to learn, but obviously some potential contributors will be put off by this.
Costs for buyers
Another it depends answer!. The biggy is that there isn’t a single pricing structure for Symbiostock sites, so you can’t really compare to existing agencies.
You can say that they get to buy only what they need (no credit packs or subscriptions) and they have the joy of knowing that the money goes to the artist rather than to pay for the agencies’ huge overhead. Particularly small design businesses may like the idea of supporting other small businesses.
As an example, if you use iStock’s cash pricing, an XXXL image costs $31 but I sell that size for $20. You can get it cheaper at iStock but only if you buy credit packs (where you have to spend a minimum of $50).
If you buy single images at Shutterstock 2 images for $29 is the cheapest option, which isn’t much of a bargain if you’re looking for something for a blog, where I’d sell one image for $2.50
@chromaco wrote:
…She bought the image from me even though she originally found it on a free site. Cool huh!
Very!
@chromaco wrote:
A bit off topic but important. If you have a symbio site make sure that your micro user name is well keyworded and extremely present in your symbio site. Customers will be looking for you because they liked what they saw on the micros but couldn’t find exactly what they need.
What a good thought – thanks. What do you suggest about where to put that? Adding (in my case) jsnover as a keyword to every image (which I could do via the batch editor)?
Thanks for the visitor account – that’s a good idea to have one.
As a (pretend) buyer, the big problem I see is that I have no idea what the prices are for an extended license until I see the item in the cart – nothing shows on the image page after I select a size and a license type.
I went back to try again and noticed that if I hovered over the area I did get a display of the price change. Now I’m not sure if that’s something I missed the first time because I clicked Download too quickly? Or it just didn’t display before I added it to a cart?
I think what I’d like to see is a second column of numbers on the right if you click on the Extended License button that shows those prices (the total, not a sum)
I also couldn’t find a menu to take me to my cart – other than hitting download again. I’ve made that a top level menu on my site, although I’ve called it Cart & Download History because I thought Customer License and File Management Area was a bit of a mouthful!
Potential benefits for contributors. Control, control & control! 97% of the sales price (PayPal takes a cut).
I’d hope over time that perhaps we (the group of contributors) could offer the kind of support and learning/growing opportunities that once upon a time were part of being a contributor to iStock.
Benefits for buyers. Direct interaction with the artist, reasonable prices because there’s no middleman to feed, wider range of types of images than the agencies’ reviewing policies will permit.
On the direct interaction issue, a story: I was contacted by a designer (via iStock at the time) asking if I had a vertical version of an image I’d uploaded only as a horizontal. I had shot one but not processed and uploaded, so I processed and uploaded both to the agencies and to WarmPicture (an earlier artist collective site that no longer exists). Because we had images at WarmPicture instantly online, I was able to write back to the designer that it’d be online at iStock in about a week (once it was through reviewing) or they could buy it today at WarmPicture (which is what they did). I made more money and the customer got better service.
As far as wider range of images, an earlier designer contact story explains best. In this case it was images that showed septic system leaks that I shot in response to a designer request in iStock’s Image Request forum. They wanted icky puddles on the ground, but as shot, the images had water puddles that didn’t look as icky. I showed the designer the Photoshopped icky version, which she loved, but I knew I’d never get that through iStock’s review process (overfiltered). What I did was upload the more subdued version (only a little icky) and once she purchased that, I e-mailed her a link to my web site with the more grungy look. On my own site I can make things look however I think they should or (assuming I think a designer request is a generally saleable item) the way a designer does.
BTW, in both the above examples, the things I did as “specials” have sold well. I wouldn’t do custom work for stock prices if I didn’t see a general market.
I posted a reply in the MSG thread that Ezeepics started, but I’ll repost here. I’m not sure if I’m not using the feature correctly, but what I wanted to do was have two licenses offered for all my images – Standard and Extended. I have written the Standard license to cover the restrictions on editorial use, so was hoping I could stick with just two licenses for everything.
I tried creating an extended license to go with the Standard one and attempted to set that up in the Licenses area and apply the changes with the Batch editor to just one image (to see if it worked). It didn’t – no error messages, but I didn’t get any changes in the prices if I selected the Extended license.
First problem is that it doesn’t appear you can edit a license you create (if you got the wrong URL, for example) so I had to delete and reenter all the valid information which was a pain.
Second problem is that I didn’t understand what to select (Yes or No) for Purchasable Upgrade. It says “If “Yes” the onpage location is overridden and options appear under product table.” but what does that mean? The onpage location of what is overridden?
As I entered prices in the boxes (for the extra amount for each size that an extended license would cost), I figured that meant those numbers would be added to the standard license price, but nothing got added to anything when I selected Extended License on the test image I applied this to and clicked the Download button (note to self; I need to change that text to Add to Cart).
Third problem is that I have CleanTheme 2.0, and changing the image to have both Standard and Extended License as an option reformatted parts of the page – blue highlighting on the selected size instead of light gray, for example, fonts changed (or spacing).
In addition to the radio buttons for the two licenses, where there’s a link to the license, under the download button there are two more links for Standard License and Extended license (incorrectly formatted in that it doesn’t look like Clean Theme any more and has blue text on a pale blue background). That takes up space and it’d be better to have the links just once per page.
Fourth problem is that if I use the batch editor go back to just a standard license on that image, I don’t go back look the page had before – I have just one choice of Standard License which looks crazy.
I even reprocessed that image to try and get it to look right, but I still have the misformatted text – see the sample I tried to put an extended license on and then removed
http://www.digitalbristles.com/image/sunset-sail-in-puget-sound/
versus the way a page should look (for a page I never tried to add licenses to)
http://www.digitalbristles.com/image/mount-rainier-and-puget-sound/
I’ll leave this for now, but I guess I’ll have to delete that image and re-upload it to return things to “normal” – I’d like to have a way to do that via the WordPress admin panel instead.
Fifth problem would be how I’d update the whole site with extended licenses – as it is right now I’d have to select categories one at a time in the batch editor to apply them, hope I didn’t forget a category and hope I didn’t ever want to change anything. This really needs an option to apply to all images as well as selected images
Has anybody got this working on their site? I looked at Christine’s site but didn’t see any license choices on the pages I looked at.
Literally an eye opener!
Glad to hear about the sale
