Symbiostock Video + Submitter – now available to all Symbiostock users!

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Two invaluable tools which were only available on Symbiostock PLUS, are now available to all Symbiostock users:

Symbiostock Submitter

With the Symbiostock Submitter you can streamline the tedious task of uploading stock media to multiple agencies from the central hub of your Symbiostock WordPress install. Using FTP, the Symbiostock Submitter allows you to automatically (or manually) submit images, vectors and videos to third party agencies. You can submit stock to as many agencies as you need, so long as the agency supports FTP uploads. This plugin truly eliminates the extra work required for managing multiple submissions. In conjunction with Symbiostock’s meta editing features, you can create a setup where all you need to do is upload your media to Symbistock, add meta data information, click publish and that’s it – not only is your image/vector/video live on your independent site, it’s automatically sent to your third party agencies.

Symbiostock Video
Symbiostock Video is a revolutionary plugin that allows anyone to start selling stock footage through their independent Symbiostock site. If you’re a stock video producer, this means you no longer have to rely on stock agencies as the sole means of selling your videos. Once installed, Symbiostock Video permits you to upload a myriad of different video types that will all get processed and added to your Symbiostock store exactly as images do. Your customers will be able to view demo videos, complete with custom watermark protection and instant downloads upon payment! Additionally, a large bonus element of the plugin is that it supports videos that are longer than 1 minute in run time. As this is something that most agencies don’t currently offer, you can use this as a unique marketing angle for your independent site. Symbiostock Video is compatible with the Symbiostock Submitter, so you can just as easily submit videos to agencies directly from your Symbiostock site.

These plugins are available for purchase through the Symbiostock store. If you’re after both of the plugins, we also provide a heavily discounted bundled option.

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Symzio Launch!

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www.symzio.com

Symzio spawned from a deep desire to stimulate some balance within the microstock agency, in the favor of contributors. As microstock contributors ourselves, we are all too well aware of how unrewarding it feels to generate $0.25 from an image that took so much more than twenty-five cents in time value to create. Yet day-in-day-out such earnings make up the majority of monthly royalty earnings for most stock contributors.

But contributors are not the only ones hurting. Consumers are also unhappy with the lack of choices available and are funneled into spending more than they’d like with costly subscription packages.

Which is why we created Symzio. The first completely contributor controlled agency that charges customers less and pays contributors more. With a heavy focus on One Time Use licenses to attract customers who are looking for exactly that – unique one off stock media for that one blog article, or one advert, or one website banner, or one brochure. Individuals who don’t need subscriptions or RF licenses but who end up having no other choice. And the benefits for contributors are just as great – your images don’t get filed into royalty free storage folders for a mere twenty-five cents to your pocket.

Symzio is radical with a massive potential for progress and we want you, our fellow contributors, to be a part of it.

Some key aspects of Symzio include:

– No approval process for stock media. Symzio contributors simply upload media to Symbiostock & manually select what you want to include or auto-include to Symzio (Symbiostock 2.1+ required).
– Contributors retain 70% of their sales earnings.
– Symzio Affiliate Program provides affiliates 10% of every sale referred to us by them.
– Bonus opportunity for contributors to retain 90% sales earnings if a customer purchases the contributor’s own image through their own referral.
– The minimum a Symzio contributor will earn on a single sale is $1.40 (for a medium One Time Use JPG).
– Consumer pricing schedule that heavily targets One Time Use customers, whilst at the same time offering a fair compensation royalty-free option

We encourage you to peruse the new Symzio site, read the info pages and TOS to become familiar with how Symzio operates. We are currently taking contributor applications and details on how to apply can be found here.

Additionally, as Symzio is launched as a Beta, we will be utilizing this phase as a period for tweaking aspects that we may find need improvements as we move forward.

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If you aren’t using a CDN, start NOW to speed up your site

As we near the final stages of the Symzio engine, we started exploring the end service from a global perspective. Our goal, from the start, was to compete at a level that is on par or superior to the larger agencies. In order to accomplish this for customers, we needed a service that would provide quick results for customers in South Africa as well as Japan, and this cannot be accomplished using the standard single server solution.

Well, it actually can. Use a CDN.

We ran a test using Cloudflare’s Free CDN on one of our Symbiostock PLUS sites. Here were the results:

 

With Cloudflare disabled:

With Cloudflare enabled:

This indicates, on average, a 31% increase in load speed for customers.

The way a CDN works is, they have servers all across the globe in different places. When a person accesses your site from a part of the world, it delivers content from a server closer to them. So even if your server is in Brazil, a user in Russia will actually be getting your content from a CDN server in Poland, for example.

Aside from the speed increase, it will reduce the load on your server as cache’d stuff will be loaded from the CDN rather than your original server, as well as provide nearly absolute protection from DDOS attacks as the CDN acts as a shield.

The CDN also has intelligent algorithms that ensure that dynamic content, such as your cart page, continue to provide non-cache’d content so your dynamic content remains intact.

In my opinion, every single Symbiostock user should switch to a CDN, and I recommend the free Cloudflare CDN service.

One additional note – Symzio will be sourcing all its media directly from your sites; it will not save copies of your images (in most cases) on its own server. As a result, we are going to be ordering results on each individual search page according to how fast the image loads for a customer. This means, you are likely to get more exposure and more sales the more globalized your site is. Accordingly, it is a near certainty that Symzio contributors that use a CDN will have a direct advantage over users that don’t.

How difficult is it to use a CDN?

All you do is sign up with them and switch the nameservers through your registrar to them. That’s it.

We are switching every site we run over to a CDN, and see no reason why every Symbiostock user shouldn’t as well.

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Migrations, Support Requests and More

1) Some good news for current and future Symbiostock users – we have now opened our support request system. If you need direct or quick help from the Symbiostock team, you can now submit a support request to us. We have nominal fees attached to some of the tasks in order to make it a sustainable ticket system.

Some services include server debugging, fresh installs, migrations from legacy, and custom work. This system is meant to provide easy solutions to individuals and organizations that want quick fixes or tweaks that they are otherwise unable to implement themselves. There are various terms associated to these support requests which you can find on the request page.

2) We are now permanently going to be using in-house or paid images from users within the Symzio network for all our blogs and emails. Our budget for these one time uses is $5, so price accordingly if you want to be included.

3) We are going to be rolling out the next stage of the Symzio network by providing a central search engine at symzio.com which will permit visitors to search the network in one quick manner.

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Symbiostock 2.0: It’s here

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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.

 

Symbiostock 2.0 is now the realization of a revolutionary
new way to achieve that independence.

 

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!

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Warning: Woocommerce 2.4.X Not Compatible with Symbiostock

Woocommerce has released a new update and unfortunately, the new Woocommerce 2.4.X version has components that are not completely compatible with Symbiostock. All of our current Symbiostock users are warned not to upgrade your Woocommerce plugin to the newest version as it is likely to cause issues for your Symbiostock site. Woocommerce 2.4.X may also make changes to your database that could be difficult to revert.

For new Symbstock users, please use Woocommerce 2.3.13 available here:

WooCommerce 2.3.13 (Download)

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Additional Features: Final Symbiostock 2.0 Preview

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This is our final preview teaser for the upcoming Symbiostock 2.0. We’ve already shown you previews some of the larger features to come – Symzio, video support (for PLUS), geotagging and improved related product tabs. But Symbiostock 2.0 will also have a host of other important additions, improvements and upgrades. Some of these include:

– The capacity to sell non-Symbiostock products through your store.
– Improved SEO features to assist with search engine exposure.
– Greatly enhanced Quick Edits to make meta-data editing and key-wording faster and more efficient.
– The ability to personalize license description from ‘Commercial’.
– Advanced CMYK color correction option if you experience thumbnail color variation and have a server that supports it.
– Custom translations for Symbiostock controlled titles and terms.

These are just a handful of the awesome features we’ve bundled into Symbiostock 2.0. The update is scheduled to be released within the next few weeks. We can’t wait for you to dig into it!

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Related Products Preview

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A particular issue with the existing Woocommerce system is its inefficiency with how it selects ‘Related Products’ that are displayed on individual product pages. For example, a stock photo of a red apple could show ‘related’ images of people rather than shots of other apples. This was a great concern for Symbiostockers and some of you voiced your requests for a better solution on our forums.

And we absolutely agree about the necessity for displaying accurate related product links.

This is why Symbiostock 2.0 completely takes care of this problem. Start looking forward to seeing related products that are indeed related! The addition of this feature uplifts and transforms product pages, increasing exposure for your images and making upsells a lot more effective.

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GPS Geotagging with Symbiostock 2.0 Preview!

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When you upload an image that has GPS information (usually automatically signed with enabled cameras) Symbiostock 2.0 will read this information and provide your customers an interactive Google Map. It will point to the exact location the picture was taken.

This localization is often useful for people looking for images from specific areas or countries and is a great visual tool that will help you increase your sales, especially if you are a traveler.

Again, this system will be integrated right into Symbiostock and will work to add a new tab on your product page, totally compatible with any WooCommerce theme. It can be enabled or disabled globally, on a product basis, and the GPS data can even be manually edited if you want to correct or specify something.

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Symbiostock PLUS Video Support Preview

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If you’re a stock videographer, this is the good news you’ve been waiting for. Video support is on its way to Symbiostock PLUS. This means you will have the ability to sell your stock footage directly from your own independent store. Your customers will be able to view demo videos, complete with custom watermark protection and instant downloads upon payment!

But wait, there is indeed more.

We’ve also developed the facility for you to distribute your videos to stock agencies in an identical manner to our agency image submitter. Upload your videos ONCE to your Symbiostock PLUS site and then proceed to uploading the videos to AS MANY AGENCIES as you want AS MANY TIMES as you want. For those of you with capped internet limits, this translates to saving a great deal of time and bandwidth.

The video functionality on PLUS will not be available for standalone users due to the specialized technical framework required to process them. At the current time, there is no reliable way to bundle this with the plugin.

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Symzio Network Widget Preview

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As you may be aware, Symzio has been quietly under development. Symzio is a means for Symbiostock users to gain greater exposure for their images and to promote the growing network of independent Symbiostock artists. The first component of Symzio, the Symzio Network Widget, is to be released with the forthcoming Symbiostock 2.0 update. The Network Widget will alter the landscape of Symbiostock sites, enabling contributors to syndicate each others images through their own sites seamlessly.

A key feature of the Symzio Network Widget is its versatility and ease of use. You can control how and where the widget appears on your website. You can insert the widget into your site’s theme just as you would any other WP widget, or use shortcodes to embed it into sections of your site. The idea behind this is to ensure you maintain control over the appearance of your site.

Not only this, but the Symzio Network Widget is intelligent. It will provide images that relate to whatever it sees on your page, whether it be a post, product or a search query. It will provide your visitors relevant images from across the network, creating a rich browsing experience.

The good news is that if you are already a Symbiostock user, you can sign up for the Symzio network now so that when it is launched your images will be some of the first to be syndicated across the network. This is just the first step towards a prosperous independent community of media contributors.

 

Symzio-widget-preview

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Over 100 Happy Symbiostockers!

After only about a month since release, the Symbiostock family of artists, photographers and illustrators now numbers in at over a hundred.

This is a great milestone for every contributor that wants to sell their media direct to customers, and hints at an even larger community for the future.

With our latest release, the plugin is now available to even more users, and we expect Symbiostock to continue giving a growing number of artists an independent avenue for monetizing their artistic endeavors.

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Symbiostock 1.3: The Compatibility Update

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By popular request, we have now enhanced Symbiostock to work with systems that do not have Imagick installed. This is extremely good news for individuals who desire to use Symbiostock, but have been unable to due to the limitations of their web host providers. As well, if you don’t have shell access through PHP, Symbiostock will also read metatags.

While most features of Symbiostock will now work without Imagick and shell access, certain enhanced features of Symbiostock will be limited without them:

– only JPEG files can be supported without Imagick
– meta data will be imported but meta data changes made through WordPress cannot be saved to images.

Some features, such as vector processing will not work without Imagick, but for all you photographers, this is a huge opportunity. You can set up your Symbiostock powered image store very quickly and easily by following our 3 Minute Guide to Launching your Store.

Download Symbiostock today and give it a go!

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Symbiostock 1.2 Released

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This release is a relatively large one. The largest changes involve minimizing memory and CPU usage for the processor which has been retooled to evade most of WordPress’s heaviest built in functions. Along with this are a number of bug fixes that rectify a host of minor issues all relating to WooCommerce integration.

It also adds a big feature missing from WordPress which is the inclusion of keywords/tags in the search engine. This has not only been added, but implemented in a manner that is approximately 85% faster than most third party plugins.

This release signifies a significantly large stride forward in providing a truly stable digital media distribution system.

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Speed, Tag Searching and Metadata Writing

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Metadata Writing

Symbiostock 1.1, released about half a week after 1.0, introduced metadata writing. With this powerful feature, you can now save your WordPress edits directly to your images. This only works on images that readily support metadata, such as JPEGs.

What’s this good for?

Well, now you can use Symbiostock as a full-fledged metadata editor. Anyone who is a professional stock image producer knows that metadata editing is never that easy, and now being able to both manage your store and tweak your titles, descriptions and keywords, not just in your store, but right in the core of your images.

But again, what’s this good for?

Simple. If you download this image, submit it to an agency, or even sell it, all that data is stored in it. You don’t have to manually repopulate titles, descriptions or keywords with agencies, which is in itself a large and tedious task. Do all your editing in one place. Thanks to WordPress’s great tagging system, duplicates are automatically removed. So you can just keep typing relevant words, click save, and you’ve got an image ready to go. Couple this with our PLUS hosting system, and you can even automatically submit your images to agencies. This means that as a PLUS customer, once you upload your image to Symbiostock, you never have to do anything else. Edit it there, update it there, and submit it to agencies there.

Massive Search Speed Boost + Tag Searching

Speed? Speed. You may or may not know this, but neither WordPress nor WooCommerce search tags in their search engine. Don’t believe me? Try it out on your own site. Add a tag to a product or article, do a search, and it won’t show up. This is a known shortcoming and isn’t easy to overcome. Why? Because tag searching adds a lot of overhead, and if you have thousands of articles or products, you’re looking at a 1-2 second delay on every search query.

Well, not anymore. In Symbiostock’s next release, the search engine has been revamped to include built in tag searching.

The best part?

We’re talking 0.2 seconds overhead. We’ve cut it down by up to 90% using the Symbiostock engine. In fact, the more images you have, the more tags you have, the more you will see a massive difference between this and third party plugins that provide similar functionality.

This is just one of the many fantastic new developments that are going to keep coming with Symbiostock. And soon, even the Symzio project will come online – a wonderful, community driven search engine that takes all your beautiful images, and presents them to customers in one cohesive and speedy interface. Exclusive to Symbiostock users like you.

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Promote Symbiostock for Free – Get Premium Stuff!

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As a burgeoning new open-source enterprise, Symbiostock is off to a great start. We’ve got a nearly zero error rate with the official plugin, our hosting service is streamlined and likewise bug free, and we’re getting great feedback all across the board in regards to the direction we’re taking.

All that being said, we still need your help! The internet has become a giant social machine and amidst all the noise, we want artists all around the world to learn about Symbiostock. The more people that use it, the more development we can invest in, and the more powerful it’s going to get.

Symbiostock was born out of a need to be in control of our media – to sell it at our rates, in our environment. I wanted to be able to sell any image I took that I felt held artistic merit – not just the ones some person a thousand miles away deemed worthy!

But Symbiostock is just the first step. We need artists, artists exactly like you, to come on board. You see, the more artists that choose to sell independently, the more we, as a group, compete with the larger agencies. In doing so, we force all concerned to take us seriously and even out the playing field. That means more artistic freedom, more profits, and more control in the digital media marketplace.

Here are two cool, totally free ways in which you can help Symbiostock now:

1) Give us a glowing review on WordPress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/symbiostock/

WordPress is where we distribute and update Symbiostock. Great reviews allow people to really understand how the plugin can help them, and are the bread and butter of any good plugin.

2) Submit your site to the Artist Network

http://www.symbiostock.org/artist-network/

Showcasing your site in the Artist Network is a fantastic way to both promote Symbiostock and your site. Visitors will be able to find you and visit your store, and artists can see your different sites to envision how theirs might look. It’s totally free, and a great networking tool.

And, if you help promote Symbiostock in these two ways, let us know, and we’ll give you a complimentary two-months of free hosting with PLUS, or if you prefer, 50% off any of our premium themes.

This is open to both new and current users. Just let us know via private message once you’ve supported the project in both those ways.

And remember – even if you don’t need hosting or themes, taking five minutes to help us out would be a really fantastic way to spend those five minutes – we’d love you for it.

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Symbiostock PLUS: Your All-in-One Solution

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We haven’t talked much about Symbiostock PLUS yet, so this will be our formal introduction to it.

Symbiostock PLUS is the service that the makers of Symbiostock have created for users that need or want an easy hosting solution for their media. It is an economical, fully supported hosting system that does not require any technical expertise to get started with.

As soon as you sign up with PLUS, you log right into a WordPress install with everything ready to go. You have access to a myriad of specially chosen plugins that you can use to enhance your store, from EU VAT tax, to Search Engine Optimization.

Our most economical plan, at only $5 a month, permits you to host all your images in one central location, have your own fully automated ecommerce store, and even allows you to distribute your images to stock agencies as you add them.

Yes, one of our newest features is meant to bridge that gap, allowing you to earn on your media through third party agencies and through your own ecommerce store. Our distributor service automatically uploads your media to designated agencies depending on their media type. It even auto-generates JPEGs for your vectors if you want, and submits them with the vectors. It keeps track of all your submissions so there are no duplicates, and allows you to exclude any images you want from being distributed, or re-uploading ones you want.

This, along with a variety of other services, is completely free with every PLUS account.

Our goal with PLUS is to be able to provide a service at a cost that pales in comparison to the plethora of rich features you, as an artist, can use to further fund and monetize your talents.

Click here to find out more about the features PLUS has to offer.

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Symbiostock is here!

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Symbiostock is now released!

You can download it directly from your WordPress install by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for Symbiostock.

Offering a fully featured FTP/web uploading system, thumbnail and watermark generation and re-generation, and a robust but simple licensing system that permits you to customize your media sales in any way you see fit.

Fully integrated with WooCommerce, Symbiostock offers a secure and automated way for customers to buy your media, receive download links, all without you having to do anything.

Decide on the sizes and set the price for the downloadable image. Upload your own watermark. Globally change pricing and licenses at the click of a button.

Use any WordPress theme to customize your store. Change your theme at the drop of a hat.

Compatible with every plugin WordPress has to offer, from search engine optimization to marketing and analytics, you can now take your media store to the next level.

Be one of the first to try out this powerful new tool: Download it through your WordPress install or download it here!

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Symbiostock Artist Network

Introducing the Symbiostock Artist Network feature!

We want to showcase and promote artists who use Symbiostock to bring their digital media store to life, which is why we’ve created the Symbiostock Artist Network. This is an optional perk only available to Symbiostock users and it’s completely free to join.

Artists who are part of the network will have a their website listed and linked to from the Symbiostock Artist Network page AND their site will be randomly spotlighted on our homepage. Demo samples are currently populating our homepage and network page to show you exactly how artists will be featured. Links are always randomly rotating upon refreshing the page to ensure everyone gets equal visibility – and it’s pretty fun to see!

To promote the network we will be providing optional sleek badges for network artists to use on their website as a means of linking back to the network page. Our Symbiostock Express demo site already has an example of the badge which you can see in the footer section. For full details on how to join, checkout our submissions page.

We’re looking forward to meeting new artists!

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To Switch or not to Switch

The new Symbiostock is right around the corner. It looks great, but how will it affect my sales?

Here we will analyze the pros and cons of upgrading to Symbiostock. If you’re a new user, or don’t have a site currently operational, then there’s no need to read on – Symbiostock is an awesome, beautifully free opportunity to monetize your images. You should be all over it!

However, if you’re an avid photographer, illustrator, or vector artist, and you currently have your own media site that you sell through, you need to decide what’s best for your continued success.

There are only two questions you need to ask yourself: a) Am I making money on my independent site? and b) How am I making money on my independent site?

We’ve been getting questions about the networking aspect of the new Symbiostock. As the legacy version had networking built right into it, users were able to find other Symbiostock users’ sites relatively easily. But legacy users have had mixed results with this feature – do you get sales through it?

If the answer is ‘no’, then upgrading can only help increase your revenue. Your hard work in regards to SEO, keywording and tagging can all be preserved when you upgrade. It will take some elbow grease, but once switched over, you will have a much better experience, whether it be tweaking your site or uploading media. The new Symbiostock has a plethora of features and usability upgrades that make the entire process very fun and pleasant. Not to mention compatibility with any theme you prefer.

If the answer is ‘yes, I make lots of money through my legacy site, specifically through the networking features’, then you are one of the unique legacy Symbiostock users that has to carefully assess how you proceed with the upgrade. As Symzio, the massive search engine system that is the next step of the Symbiostock project, is still under development, if you were to upgrade immediately you would lose the networking feature that is gathering revenue for you.

Our suggestions, therefore, can be summarized as follows:

  1. If you do not currently have an updated, fully operational independent media sales platform, using Symbiostock is an awesome opportunity to monetize your digital art.
  2. If you currently do have a fully operational site, but find that it garners little to no sales, upgrading to Symbiostock can only help increase your sales and throughput through its ease of use, flexibility, and advanced features.
  3. If you currently have a profitable site that generates most of its revenue through your own hard work, whether it be SEO, marketing, or other mechanisms of promotion, then upgrading can likewise only help your sales as long as you take the time to do it right.
  4. If you currently have a profitable site that generates most of its revenue through the networking feature of a legacy Symbiostock site, then it may be best to install the new Symbiostock on a separate server, or go with one of our hosting options, and slowly start integrating your media with the new site, then slowly switch over as Symzio comes closer and closer to release.

If you have a current site, it is very important to take into account all the pros and cons of moving over, ensuring that all your hard work is preserved and amplified when you upgrade to the new Symbiostock. Once Symbiostock is released, our forums will be buzzing with upgrade related matters, so get involved there if you also want to make sure that your upgrade goes smoothly and painlessly.

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The Symbiostock Demo is Live!

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A long time coming, the Symbiostock engine is now almost ready to be released. Along with Symbiostock, we will be releasing Symbiostock Express, a custom premium theme we’ve developed that is built on the wonderful GPL Virtue theme by Kadence.

Fully customizable, Symbiostock Express is catered specifically for people who want to sell their media, whether they be photographers, graphic designers, or vector artists. The demo site can be viewed here.

Soon, we will be doing final testing on Symbiostock and then plan a full release. Symbiostock itself is going to be 100% free, and always will be. You can download the plugin, along with all the necessary other free software (WooCommerce, WordPress) and launch your own digital media store.

Symbiostock will work with any theme. But that doesn’t mean it will look it’s best unless you have a chance to personalize it, or buy one that fits your needs perfectly. Symbiostock Express is an optional theme you can buy that has been built specifically for Symbiostock. It does not add any features you cannot customize yourself with a little elbow grease and some coding expertise, but is still a simple way to get going easily and quickly.

For those of you that don’t want to setup your own server, install all your own software, and debug any possible issues, we have good news for you. Along with releasing the standalone, we are going to be offering the Symbiostock hosting service. With our hosting service, you will be able to sign up and log directly into a fully functional Symbiostock install and begin uploading immediately. No more database issues, no more PHP issues, no more directory permissions or fatal errors; we will manage all of that so you can just sell your media. As an added bonus, Symbiostock Express will be free for all hosting clients. This service is going to be the primary way we fund Symbiostock’s development.

Although not complete, below you will find a list of some of the features Symbiostock has to offer. We anticipate a release date in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Theme Compatibility
– Compatible with any WordPress/WooCommerce theme
– Optimal with Symbiostock specific themes
– Theme can be switched any time without affecting Symbiostock

Front End Features
– Mark certain media to be featured in compatible themes
– Front end completely controlled by WooCommerce (no Symbiostock interference)
– Unlimited categories with category thumbnails
– Full store-front experience: search, categories, product page, add to cart, cart, checkout and more.
– Depending on theme, fully responsive design with animated sliders, large images, image centric.

Media Processing
– Upload via web or FTP
– All meta keywords, titles and descriptions are automatically extracted from media
– Process media automatically or manually
– Customizable processor – choose how many images to process in one go
– Support for most image types, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, TIFF.
– Auto-publish media with meta-data

Media Licensing
– Create as many global licenses as you need.
– Each license can be fully customized, from image size to title, description, and default price.
– Global licenses can be applied to any media in your store.
– Apply licenses to all the media in your store automatically
– Apply licenses based on media type (raster, vector etc.)
– Apply license changes (price, size etc.) to all products automatically.
– Create JPEG licenses for vector images and set the size of the rendered file.

Individual Media
– Apply as many licenses as you need to each media file
– Customize the price to override global settings
– Mark media as editorial for non-commercial media
– Mark media with model or property releases
– Disable or re-enable media as you need to
– Mass edit image descriptions, titles, categories etc.
– Media can be included in multiple categories

Sales
– Fully WooCommerce integrated
– Automatic, customizable emails to customers on signup, purchase etc.
– Customers can purchase as guests or with accounts
– Media locations are protected when provided to customers for download
– Globally set the number of days a customer has to download item
– Globally set the maximum number of times a purchased item can be downloaded
– Increase/decrease the number of downloads/days a customer has on an order by order basis

Watermarking
– Customizable watermark
– Decide on size and opacity of watermark
– Watermarks include diagonal lines to corners of media
– Customizable thumbnail size
– Thumbnail/watermark changes will trigger system to automatically regenerate them over time

Currencies and Tax
– Multiple currencies supported
– Support for VAT, GST, custom rates etc.

Payment Methods
– Hundreds of payment gateways
– PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Payments, ANZ, Authorize.net, eWay, BrainTree etc.

SEO and Marketing
– Compatible with any 3rd party WordPress plugin
– Compatible with Yoast SEO, SEO Ultimate, etc.
– Image information auto-populates page title
– Customize URLs en masse or individually

 

If you have questions about any of these features, or don’t see something here that you would like to, let us know in the forums.

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Legacy Symbiostock Updates – Don’t do it!

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If you’re a wonderful legacy Symbiostock user and are eagerly awaiting the new release, don’t jump the gun when you see an update available for your website. We no longer have control over the update feature connected to the legacy Symbiostock software which departed with a previous developer.

To keep up to date with the new release, subscribe to our forums or keep track of everything through our blog.

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Beta-testing is about a Week Away

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Want pre-release access to Symbiostock? Volunteer to be a beta tester.

We’re going to be rolling out the hosting solution along with the standalone release as well as the Symbiostock Express theme. But prior to that we’re going to be running a closed beta for a few days. You won’t need to download anything or set anything up – as a beta tester, you will have an account created for you where you can log right in and put your media for sale in just a few clicks.

Our motto is: Break it!

We want this to be a robust plugin that is coded tough and ready for abuse. We’ve developed it from the ground up to be seamlessly integrated and easily removed. It is, however, such a powerful plugin that you shouldn’t expect to be using your Symbiostock install for much more than selling media. Perhaps a blog here and there.

Back to the point – as a beta tester, you will be tasked with the job of breaking Symbiostock. Upload weird files. Put in weird settings. Of course, you can easily break your install by deleting pre-configured settings – our goal is to stretch the limits of normal use. And we’re confident you can help us with that.

The Symbiostock Forum

The closed beta will be run within our coding forum. We want to not only hear about bugs, but your thoughts on the system – what you like, and what can be improved.

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Welcome to Symbiostock.org

Welcome!

A new refit to go along with a spectacular new plugin. The new fully Open-Source Symbiostock plugin is almost ready to go. With beta-testing only a week or so away, we’re going to be launching what we hope is an indispensable tool that gives contributors and artists a means of showcasing and selling their wonderful creations online.

Almost there…

Development was a bit rocky with changes and transitions, not to mention an intense couple of weeks of wrestling with both WordPress and WooCommerce! But as with most experiences where you weather the storm, the end result is always more satisfying.

All the colors.

Speaking of beautiful media, we’re going to couple each one of our blog posts with a fantastic, interesting or fun image. Stay informed by frequenting our forums and checking out our blog. We’ll be rolling out some exciting stuff in the next short while. If you have an image you want to throw us, we’d love to showcase it!

It’s all you.

Endless thanks to all the supporters and contributors who have cherished and backed up the project all these years.

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