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Hey Antony,
Send me your login information privately and I will take a look. I’ve not encountered any issues like this before, so I can only assume there is something special about the way metadata is stored in your images.
Also, please ensure that you are using WooCommerce 2.3.X and not the latest version as the latest version may include either bugs or changes that have not yet been rectified. Therefore, we are going to be explicitly declaring what version of WooCommerce Symbiostock is stable with from now on.
WooCommerce 2.4.4 ‘appears’ to have fixed the issues, and Symbiostock ‘appears’ to be working with it. However – we still strongly recommend not upgrading your WooCommerce install until we have had a chance to confirm stability. Currently, Symbiostock will only be supported in 2.3.X of WooCommerce.
Yes – metadata writing is already a setting. I believe it is disabled by default, but you can see it in the Symbiostock settings. You can enable or disable it on a per image basis too, so if you change the description and don’t want that one with the agencies, disable it on the image.
Wow that’s massive! Maybe we’ll add stuff like this and link to your blog in our FAQ. Very thorough.
Couple of things:
1) Yes, Symbiostock generates the proper image size on the fly when a customer downloads your image
2) One additional ‘backup’ system is to have metadata saving always enabled on your images. This way, if everything were to go down, at least all your keywording, titling, and descriptions would be stored in your raw images. In fact, if that were to happen and you had to start fresh, other than categories, a majority of your work would still be preserved (even URLs would match since they are usually generated from your titles).And finally, one other feature of Symbiostock 2.0 is it imports categories (as per your request) so now it will either look for the category and add it to it, or create a new one when it is processed. You can have multiple categories in this regard as well. It does not write categories back to the files (yet), but nevertheless, with categories and all the other data, through Symbiostock metadata writing your images act as a secondary backup system for all your work as well.
Good news is all you need is ss_media and the database. Since Symbiostock has a robust and quick thumbnail regenerator built in, all you have to do is re-upload your watermark or change its percentage slightly and it will automatically regenerate all your thumbnails.
You may have other things in the uploads directory you want to save, but the thumbnails are certainly not at all necessary for Symbiostock.
That’s pretty cool – Symbiostock 2.0 has a built in redirector now. So what you do is stick in the string you want replaced, and it will automatically redirect those portions. So, an example syntax for your site would be:
“/index.php/product/”>”/image/”
And it would properly redirect all those URLs. Very simple but powerful for SEO.
After looking into it, looks like WooCommerce itself is bugged:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variable-prices-coming-up-free-after-upgrade-to-24/page/2
At this point, I think it is likely we will fork all future Symbiostock development through standardized WooCommerce versions, host it on Symbiostock with the update notice disabled, and no longer offer immediate upgrades to WooCommerce releases. It is too troublesome to have to warn users not to upgrade when the third party engine is bugged.
I just tried a couple of things out – looks like there may be some issues so it is recommended you not upgrade WooCommerce yet.
None of the WooCommerce changes are critical so there is no tangible benefit to do it. It is good you asked though – never upgrade WooCommerce on a live site until you check here because Symbiostock works very closely with it, and we have no way of knowing what they are going to do that may impact performance.
Hey Geraint,
I’ll have to wait for Dawn to attend to this – she is the one that developed the theme and I’m not that familiar with customizations within it.
Otherwise, you may want to contact Henri at https://henri.photo/ – he has really customized the theme using a child theme very well.
Hey Steve,
As you can see via this:
http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/symzio-network-widget-preview/#post-23715
We are improving on specifically the image SEO so it improves your results. However, since you are number 1 already that won’t affect that phrase. As for where Google is linking to, it is likely that this is a quick fresh crawl and Google will eventually determine that the most relevant place for that image is the product page itself. There is no way for us to control that, but generally Google tends to be smart enough to link directly to your product page.
The way Google works now is they do deep crawls and they also do not so deep crawls. The deep crawls are performed less often. Accordingly, it is possible they quick crawled your search results but haven’t had a chance to deep crawl every single product page as well.
Regardless, it is really good news that your images are showing up in Google results. Symbiostock along with SEO plugins is great when it comes to keywording and titling. 2.0 will improve on these things in a more aggressive manner.
Additional Features: Final Symbiostock 2.0 Preview
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… Continue reading –>
Hey resourcebucket,
This is unique to Symbiostock Express (http://www.symbiostock.org/shop/). It’s a theme we have developed upon other GPL products that specializes in media sales. There may be other themes that provide similar functionality, but we haven’t found many that cater to most aspects of digital sales as well as it does.
If you want to manually fix this, it is quite easy:
1) Edit symbiostock-init.php
2) Find the line that starts with: update_option( ‘woocommerce_email_footer_text’,
3) Move this whole line below the line that says: if (get_option(‘ss_init_base_settings_done’)) return;
That should fix it.
This is a known bug pre-2.0. Been fixed in 2.0.
The image is delivered via code – it’s not a hard link that the customer gets access to. In fact, the original location of the image is perpetually obfuscated and used only as a reference for Symbiostock to access. Since Symbiostock acts as a gateway to all your original files, it can do anything it wants to the image before it is delivered to the customer.
This includes resizing, watermarking, etc.
One thing it can easily do is strip metadata as long as you are using Imagick. In fact, this is an option in Symbiostock 2.0 that you can enable or disable.
To understand what I mean by metadata, you need to create two distinctions: metadata, and database data. Metadata is information physically stored in the actual image file. Database data is not stored in the file – it is stored on the server and references the file. So if you only had database data, your image file would have no keywords or anything attached to them.
This is why my suggestion regarding using metadata is good – your users submit an image with metadata, which Symbiostock converts into database data. WordPress uses database data for everything. You can change database data all you want and it has nothing to do with the image’s metadata. Symbiostock permits you to alter the image metadata too, but for your purposes this isn’t purposeful.
Accordingly, we can easily strip the image of all metadata before delivery and this won’t affect database data, which is what is used to display your image in WordPress.