You will notice that there are featured images, beautiful sliders, categories, and when you go to any of the image product pages, you can choose a resolution to purchase for immediate download.

In a nutshell, Symbiostock allows anyone, whether it be an amateur photographer or professional illustrator, to effortlessly upload their new images to their website, and have them be put on sale through a secured download system for customers, automatically.

But that’s not all. The Symbiostock project is growing by leaps and bounds and has now become your one-stop repository for all your media, with optional addons that allow you to integrate videos, as well as distribute your stuff to third party agencies.

Don’t have a website? Don’t know anything about WordPress? Don’t worry.

Our goal is ease and automation. Once you’re setup, all you have to do is upload your images to Symbiostock, and it will do the rest.

Here is an example of a Symbiostock artist that really show how great a Symbiostock powered site can look:

Amazeindesign.com: Gorgeous vector art
https://amazeindesign.com/

Interested in getting started? If you don’t already have your own webhost, we strongly recommend checking out our hosting guide which is specialized to make the setup process as easy as possible. Just sign up, follow the installation guide, and your site will be up in less than 30 minutes.

The post What is Symbiostock? appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

1) Lite serves as a WooCommerce extension for users that just want to use its functionality for personal, non-professional use. It is simple, easy, and adds very little overhead to your system. It allows you to upload images which are watermarked and added to your store in real time. There is no processor, no licensing, and you must manually alter pricing and publishing.

2) Pro is an upgrade to lite that adds a whole world of professional features, such as licencing, custom watermarks, FTP uploads, Symzio integration, and more. As well, all of our premium plugins, such as the video and submitter addons only function with Pro.

Notes:

1) Symbiostock Express will function with both plugins.

2) Symbiostock Pro requires Symbiostock Lite to function.

3) Symbiostock Lite products are not compatible with Symbiostock Pro. It is strongly recommended you upgrade directly to Pro if you are a new user so that you do not have to upload media twice.

Why the split? We want to provide users a simpler version of Symbiostock so there is less overhead, and by hosting Symbiostock Pro directly on Symbiostock.org we can optimize how the plugin is distributed and downloaded without having to interface with any third parties.

The post Symbiostock Pro vs Lite appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

Hosting your own website is a very easy and satisfying thing to do. The benefits are, you don’t have to answer to anyone or be restricted by any platform or infrastructure as you will have you very own WordPress website that you can design and use in any way you’d like. By using this guide, you can get your Symbiostock site up and running within about 30 minutes.

As Symbiostock uses pretty heavy processing for images, you will need a reasonably powerful web host. That’s why we recommend using Amazon Lightsail, which is an easy and cost effective hosting solution (around $5/month). If you already have your own host, or want to host with someone else, that’s totally fine. This guide has been created so that people completely new to Symbiostock and WordPress can get up and running quickly, without issue.

Proceed to Amazon Lightsail and sign up (or sign in using your Amazon credentials). Now we’re ready to get started!

Note: The following guide has been tested to work with Symbiostock Pro and all the premium plugins, including Symbiostock Video. We cannot guarantee that it will process vectors properly.

Step 1: Create a Lightsail instance

a) Choose a region that is closest to your target audience. This will speed up requests.

b) Choose Linux as the operating system, and Plesk as your software

c) Enable automatic snapshots. This will ensure your entire site is backed up by Amazon. There is a very small additional cost to this, but you will then have 7 days of backups in case you ever make a mistake, your site is damaged, or anything else happens. Lightsail backups are called snapshots.

d) Choose your Lightsail plan. You will only be able to choose from those available. You can start with the cheapest plan and upgrade in the future – this is what we recommend, as once you upgrade, you cannot downgrade.

e) Name your instance whatever you like – this does not affect the site in any way.

Your hosting account is ready. Now we can move onto Step 2!

Step 2: Setting up your domain

a) Go to your main Lightsail page and click on the instance you just created.

b) Go to networking. Create a static IP. Select your instance and name the IP to match your instance, though again, this can be anything and will not affect your site in any way.

c) Go back to the instance and again go to networking. Scroll down to  the firewall settings and add the following two rules: TCP, 20-22 & TCP, 49152-65535.

d) Go back to your instance. Copy the public IP address. Open a new tab and go to your domain registrar. If you don’t have one, or have never registered a domain before, we recommend going with Namecheap, which is one of the largest and cheapest domain registrars in the world.

e) Buy a new domain or choose a domain you already own. Follow your registrar’s instructions on changing the DNS to point your domain to the public IP address from your Lightsail instance. Generally this means after you have registered the domain, you go to edit the domain’s DNS records in your registrar, and where you see their IP address, you change it to your Lightsail one.

Step 3: Setting up your Hosting

a) Now that your domain is all ready to go, go back to your Lightsail instance, click on it, and connect using SSH. You may have to wait a minute or two if you just created it.

b) Follow the instructions to access Plesk and to get one time login link (sometimes you need to resize the window to see the cursor). If there are any other instructions, follow those too.

c) Get the one time login link, highlight it, and copy it either directly or using their clipboard icon.

d) Close the SSH window.

e) Open a new tab and paste the link there. Ignore any SSL warnings and proceed anyways.

f) Follow the Plesk instructions to set it up.

g) Create a new domain in Plesk and add the new domain you just pointed to Lightsail. Create a username and password for that domain.

h) Enable Let’s Encrypt/ free SSL for your domain. Enter your email address.

i) Once your domain is created, go to it within Plesk and click on PHP Settings. Within that, change the memory limit to 256, the max execution time to 3000, the max input time to -1, post_max_size to 20, and the upload max filesize to 20.

Your domain is now ready and hosted! Time for Step 3.

Step 4: Install WordPress

a) Let’s add WordPress. Click on applications within Plesk and install WordPress. Enter your administrator username and password and the name of your store. Install.

b) Now let’s visit your website by going to domain.com/wp-admin where domain.com is your new domain.

Note: If you get a database connection error, do this: Go to Plesk > Files. Click on your main folder which should be httpdocs, and then click on wp-config.php. Scroll down until you find the db_user and db_password fields. Copy the password which is within the single quotes. Now click on databases within Plesk and go to User Management. Click on the user and enter the password you just copied into the password and confirm password fields. Click OK. Then try to go to the admin page again on your domain, and it should work.

c) Log into your WordPress admin panel using the username and password you created when installing WordPress. We’re almost done!

Step 5: Install Symbiostock and all your Symbiostock Plugins

a) Use any FTP program (if you don’t have one, get FileZilla which is free). Create a new FTP connection in it under site manager. Add your domain as the host, make sure the protocol is FTP (not SFTP), logon type normal, and enter the username and password you created when you added your domain to Plesk. If you don’t remember this, just go back to Plesk, go to your domain within it, click on FTP access, then your username, and set a new password there. Enter that same password and username in the FTP program and connect.

b) If you purchased Symbiostock Express, navigate to /httpdocs/wp-content/themes within the FTP program. Unzip your Symbiostock Express file on your computer, and upload the entire symbiostock-express folder into the /httpdocs/wp-content/themes folder via FTP.

c) Navigate to /httpdocs/wp-content/plugins within the FTP program.

d) Unzip every one of your plugins just like Symbiostock Express and upload them all into the /httpdocs/wp-content/plugins folder on FTP. Upload the entire folders for the plugins.

e) Wait for these plugins to all upload. Do not close your FTP program or browse your WordPress site until this is done.

f) Now that the uploads are complete, go back to your WordPress admin interface > Plugins, and enable Symbiostock Pro. Follow the prompts to install Symbiostock Lite then WooCommerce. Once they are all installed and enabled, you can now enable all your other optional Symbiostock plugins.

g) If you purchased Symbiostock Express, go to Appearance > Themes, and enable Symbiostock Express.

h) Go to Symbiostock > Settings > System and copy the processor cron job command in the text box. Go to your Plesk admin interface and click on Tools and Settings > Scheduled Tasks (cron job). Click add task. Choose run a command and paste the Symbiostock processor line into the command box. Under run, choose cron style, and in the text box paste * * * * * (5 stars with spaces in between). Click OK.

Congratulations! All your plugins are now installed and activated, and Symbiostock is ready to go. You’re ready to use Symbiostock to sell your media. Follow our 3 minute guide via the link within WordPress to get started. Welcome aboard!

The post Hosting your Symbiostock Site appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

If you are on your own webhost, you will have to make sure you have WordPress installed, along with Imagick (or the GD library for PHP), along with PHP 7+, MySQL, access to the exec() functions through PHP, and sufficient memory and CPU allocation to process full resolution images, vectors and videos. You can confirm all these things with your webhost.

Once WordPress is installed, add Symbiostock Pro via your Plugins tab, and activate it. Once activated, you will be prompted to install any other dependencies. Go along with those procedures.

If you don’t see any error messages, your installation is now complete.

The next step is to make sure the system is running the Symbiostock processor so that your media gets added and other functions are run. To do this, follow our guide regarding the processor.

If you see any error messages, continue reading.

Symbiostock Pro requires WooCommerce and also requires one of two PHP image libraries called ‘Imagick’ or ‘GD’. GD is generally bundled with PHP now so you should almost always have this installed. Imagick is optional, but provides faster, better processing, and also permits vector uploads.

Imagick may or may not be activated on your server. If you are familiar with Linux and know how to use SSH, you should research how to install Imagick on your server. If you are not familiar with SSH, or use a web-host to manage your server, contact them and request that they install it. If for some reason you are not able to activate Imagick on your server, Symbiostock will just use the GD library. In this case, we recommend you consider using our hosting guide which provides a system optimized for Symbiostock for you to work with if you want a problem free hosting solution. Also note that GD requires about 10 times the amount of memory to process images that Imagick does.

The post Installing Symbiostock appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

Once everything is running, in order to add digital media to your WooCommerce store, simply scroll over the ‘Products’ tab and you will see an ‘Upload Media’ tab. Just click on that, and proceed to upload an image.

Once uploaded, the system will immediately watermark and add the image to your WooCommerce store. That’s it!

You can now go to the product via the ‘Products’ tab and edit the price, title, description, and publish it. Now, if someone goes to buy that item, it will be served to them as a digital product directly through WooCommerce.

Lite is meant to be a very simple, lightweight extension for WooCommerce. For additional features, such as custom watermarks, metadata reading and writing, licensing, resizing, FTP uploads and more, upgrade to Symbiostock Pro for free.

Symbiostock Lite media limitations:

1) As all images are processed in real time, if you try to upload a very large file, depending on your server settings, it may not finish processing. If this happens, you will need to use Symbiostock Pro.

2) Sometimes uploading very large images through WordPress does not work. In this case, you would need to upgrade to Symbiostock Pro in order to use the FTP upload functionality.

The post Symbiostock Lite Quick Guide appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

• When you initially log into your WordPress, WooCommerce and Symbiostock install, WooCommerce may trigger a wizard. You may go through this to setup your store, but don’t create a new product. Do install their pages, however.
• Scroll over the ‘Symbiostock’ tab and click on ‘Upload Media’. Upload an image via the web form.
• Standalone users: Once uploaded, click on ‘Settings’ under the same ‘Symbiostock’ tab. Click on the ‘System’ sub-tab. You will see the Maintenance Command/Processor. You will see a link that says ‘Run Now’. Click on this. It may take a minute for your image to get processed as Symbiostock waits a certain amount of time prior to processing all new images to ensure they are finished uploading. Refresh that page a few times until you see that your new image has been parsed.
• Soon, the image you uploaded will show up under the ‘Symbiostock’ or ‘Media’ tabs. If it is still in draft mode, edit it and click on ‘Publish’. After that, you can click on ‘View’ or click on ‘View’ from the previous list page.
• You will see your live, new image available for sale in your store. Customers can actually buy and checkout that image now. It’s that easy.

Everything else is personalization. Personalize your licenses, your store, your policies, your pricing etc. Also, don’t forget to add your processor to your control panel’s cron system to avoid having to run the processor manually.

When it comes to choosing a theme, we recommend using Symbiostock Express. It is highly customizable and we provide full documentation on how to maximize your use of it to make your site look the way you want it to.

The post Symbiostock Pro Quick Guide appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

Please note that the Symbiostock Pro settings are now documented in-line. This means that for all information relating to customizing your store through the settings, use the information provided within your actual Symbiostock settings pages to learn about their use.

For all other queries, please post your question on our forums or search the documentation here.

The post Symbiostock Pro Settings appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

In a nutshell, Symbiostock Pro allows you to upload media (images, vectors and videos*) which will then become available for purchase by customers. Symbiostock does this automatically, making it extremely easy to produce and sell your media online, independently, securely.

Adding Images

• Web upload capabilities through the WordPress interface
• FTP upload capabilities with instructions through the WordPress interface
• Supports images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF etc.), vectors** (EPS), and videos* (AVI, MOV, MP4 etc.)
• Imports JPEG and TIFF metadata, including titles/headlines, descriptions, keywords/tags, and categories
• Creates new categories if they do not exist (uses the EXIF SupplementalCategories field)
• Auto-marks images as exclusive if the tag ‘exclusive’ exists in the metadata
• Auto-marks images as editorial if the tag ‘editorial’ exists in the metadata
• Auto-marks images with model releases if the tag ‘model release’ exists in the metadata
• Auto-marks images with property releases if the tag ‘property release’ exists in the metadata
• Optionally auto-publishes JPEGs or TIFFS if metadata is successfully imported
• Auto-reads and stores EXIF GPS data upon import
• Auto-generates watermarked thumbnails upon import from original. Creates JPEG preview out of vectors automatically.
• Keywords and renames thumbnails in accordance with read metadata title
• Metadata writing/reading for images

Video Functions*

• Supports most common codecs
• Limited to 3GB in size
• Videos can be distributed using agency submitted
• Videos can be re-distributed using agency submitter
• No limit on submissions
• Videos do not get resized based on license. Only original media file is available for purchase.
• During thumbnailing, generates 4 images at different intervals, picks largest one automatically. You can manually assign another if you wish.
• Video previews and thumbnails do not get regenerated upon watermark change
• Video previews and thumbnails do get regenerated upon replacement of original file
• Video metadata writing/reading

Media Customization

• Edit the titles, descriptions, tags and URL of any image through the WordPress interface
• Change the watermark using a custom PNG. Thumbnails are auto-regenerated using the new watermark.
• Enable/disable diagonal lines added to thumbnails during the watermarking process
• Mark images as editorial, exclusive, with model release or property releases
• Optionally automatically rename thumbnails upon title change for SEO optimization
• Optionally write changes to titles, descriptions and tags to EXIF data of JPEG and TIFF media
• Edit imported GPS data (will not alter GPS data in actual image)
• Add/remove media from categories
• Replace existing media via same process as upload (web or FTP). Instructions on individual media edit pages.

Media Licensing

• Add/remove licenses globally via Symbiostock > Licenses tab
• Add/remove licenses individually
• Choose number of downloads and time limit on downloads for customer purchases
• Choose default license price and media resolution (media resolution will determine the size of the resized image for customers. Not applicable to all media)
• Customize the order in which licenses appear to customers globally and individually
• Change license title and type as displayed to customers
• Sell vectors as JPEGs (Symbiostock will automatically resize and convert vector to JPEG for customer download)
• Advanced global filtering: auto-apply licenses based on established criteria – by media type, size, marks, keywords.
• Licenses are auto-applied to new media during import (will add based on filters)
• Optionally auto-apply licenses to media during save (will add/remove based on filters)
• Optionally auto-apply license globally (will add/remove based on filters)
• Optionally auto-apply license pricing change globally
• Change pricing of license individually (will be overridden if default license pricing is applied globally)
• Create bundle packs – sell multiple media items for one price as one item*

Customer Experience

• Full e-commerce checkout experience, including payment collection (PayPal etc.), email notifications, and digital goods delivery
• Compatible with any WooCommerce and WordPress theme
• Optionally display license details, including resolution, on product page
• Media titles, descriptions and tags populate titles, content and tags of posts automatically
• Symbiostock adds tag searching into default WordPress search
• Symbiostock optionally overrides default related products algorithm for superior results
• Optional simple checkout: if customer cart value is below a certain threshold, reduce the number of fields required during checkout
• Optionally display interactive Google maps on product page if GPS data found
• Customize Google map display, including size and colors.
• Customers are delivered email with secured download links upon purchase
• If resizing is to occur, it is done in real-time when customer downloads image
• Optionally strip original media of all metadata before delivery
• Localization – change words used in Symbiostock via Settings page. Useful for different languages.

Admin Experience

• Enable/disable Symbiostock admin personalization to focus on media sales
• Quick and bulk edit optimized for Symbiostock products
• Quick edit streamlined: move from title to description to tags by pressing tab. Save by pressing enter.
• Quick and bulk edits perform same functions as full edit – save metadata, rename thumbnails etc
• Fully compatible with most WooCommerce and WordPress extensions and plugins
• Compatible with non-Symbiostock WooCommerce products, including digital and physical

SEO

• Media titles, descriptions and tags can populate their equivalent SEO meta fields on public product pages
• Thumbnail file names, alt tags and titles can all be renamed in accordance with media titles
• URLs can be optimized from ugly variable filled URLs to SE friendly URLs based on the media title
• From the front page to the shop page to the individual product page, navigation is all SEO friendly as per WordPress defaults
• Simple URL redirector built into Symbiostock – redirect URLs for SEO optimization
• Fully compatible with WordPress SEO plugins

Symzio Network

• Spiders member Symbiostock sites for media and delivers relevant media to customers through the Symzio Widget
• All Symbiostock sites are eligible for inclusion
• Exclusive to live Symbiostock sites
• Supports images, vectors and videos
• Images can be included/excluded on an individual basis
• Symzio can be activated/de-activated globally
• Automatically and securely spiders registered Symbiostock sites
• Automatically syndicates relevant media to the Symzio Widget
• Widget can be implemented through the WordPress widget interface
• Widget can be implemented through the use of shortcodes
• Widget can be hard coded into themes
• Images are not screened before syndication. Symzio has strict quality control guidelines.
• All Symzio features are currently free

Agency Submissions*

• Add unlimited agencies for submissions
• Choose media type(s) for agencies (image, vector, video etc.)
• Requires FTP login credentials for each agency
• Enable/disable automatic submission of published products
• Mark/unmark individual media as being submitted to individual agencies
• Symbiostock only submits published media to agencies
• Marks media as being submitted upon successful delivery of media to agency
• Resubmit media by unmarking individual media as being submitted to agency or agencies
• Automatically mark all published media as submitted to one or more agencies globally
• Add/delete agencies. Deletion of agency will lose all records relating to submitted media to that agency.
• CSV files with titles, descriptions and keywords for your media for export

Processor

• Must be added to your server’s scheduler/cron system to run once a minute
• Processes all new media
• Processes replacement media
• Re-thumbnails media upon watermark change
• Adds download links to all licenses for each media item once every hour and a half
• Indexes media keywords once a day for both related products and tag searching
• Performs other checks and updates as is required
• Displays memory usage at start, end, and peak during whole process
• Can be forced to process all items by uncommenting the GLOBALS[“ss_runall”] line
• Load limits from 1-40 can be set via Symbiostock > Settings
• Can be manually run via the Symbiostock > Settings page

Security

• All Symbiostock edit features are done within secured WordPress admin section
• All original media is stored in secured, non-publicly accessible directory
• All thumbnails and video previews are in publicly accessible directories as per WordPress standard

Requirements

• A web hosting.
• WordPress

* Available through optional plugins
** Imagick PHP extension required

The post Symbiostock Pro Features appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.

Symbiostock works with any WordPress theme. However, as most base WordPress themes are focused around the blogging interface, these themes may require some extensive customization to look their best. We strongly recommend you use Symbiostock Express which is a theme developed specifically for use with Symbiostock, and is used by a majority of Symbiostock users.

However, be aware that no theme is likely to work as you want it to simply by enabling it. Customizing your theme to look the way you want, presenting your stuff in a manner consistent with your vision is both an exciting and enjoyable part of launching your own Symbiostock store.

The post Look & Feel appeared first on Symbiostock Knowledgebase & Documentation.