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Great to know, Robin. Any ideas prior to the launch of the new Symzio about how we can collectively market? I’ve continued to add images to my site (5800 now) and I’m putting more editorial shots that are only on more expensive RM sites like Alamy and Corbis so I’m not competing with my own shots on the microstock sites.
I blog about my site, but I haven’t done much more broadly. I think I could get a guest blog on Rick Sammon’s site if we have a common message to plug about our group approach. Perhaps wait until the new Symzio is ready?
Steve
Hi Robin
I changed my pricing and licensing to the same approach when I originally read this, but so far, no sales…
Are you having any better luck?
Steve
I think you are setting the max dimension of the longest edge. So if you want 939 as the max dimension (although 1000 is a nicer number), then you put that in both boxes.
Steve
When I look at my license section in the Symbiostock menu, I have set both width and length of my medium JPEG as 1000. This then makes sure that both horizontal and vertical shots have a max size of 1000. The other dimension just depends on the size of the original image. Is that what you have done?
My site is at 2.4.6 as well. So the issue appears to be that resize function in WooCommerce. I just bought a file from my own site to make sure it was working – no issues at all.
What are you trying to resize it to?
Steve
Hi Luke
Are the files you have uploaded (in the ss_media folder) properly structured JPEGs? Can you download a full size image (as I’m assuming that there is no resizing or processing of those files before they are downloaded?) Is it just the smaller ones that are 0mb? I think that WooCommerce creates the required file size on the fly when it is bought – I can’t see any sign of the various sizes sitting on my server ready for download.
Steve
I’m a bit late to this little discussion, but I always export my stock photos at 4500 pixels on longest side (resized down a bit to hide any residual noise) and then export them in Lightroom using the quality setting of 90. That usually gives me a file size of 3 – 7 MB or so depending on the detail in the shot. Never had any rejections from stock sites and that seems to work fine on my own site. I’m not sure that buyers can see the file size, can they? Looking at my own site, it gives a choice of pixel dimensions, but no indication of how big the file is.
Steve
Hi Jack
I’m using a managed VPS – in the sense that I am able to create new sites onto it so I can have multiple websites running on the server, but I haven’t had to do any server level work. The support team enabled the Imagick extensions for instance.
Steve
Hi Jack
My site was mentioned above as one that had good performance (thanks Robin!). I did decide to use a VPS in the end, and am in the process of moving my other websites to that and closing down a shared hosting plan I have with 1and1. After much research, I went with Inmotion Hosting as they have a good reputation and I found them to be very responsive at fixing my various issues. There is a special 12 month price of $29.95 per month.
I don’t use any caching – this is straight out of the box performance. I wrote more about the details of transitioning my site from the old Symbiostock on a different host to InMotion in this blog post:
http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/07/learning-points-from-creating-a-new-symbiostock-website/
Steve
Hi Robin
I’d be interested to hear of any success – I just checked my account – zero….
Steve
Oh – I see. My issue (which can wait) was with search on the main site – ie my own pictures show cathedrals when you search for cat
Steve
Do I need to pick up a new release of the plugin to implement?
Thats great – I do well with cats, surprisingly (although not yet from my Symbiostock site) and I see that I already pull in some shots from Hei’s site in my search:
http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/?s=kitten
One thing, Robin, if you search for “cat” on my site, I see all the images that have the letter “cat” in the keywords – like cathedral. Is there a way to change that?
Steve
I followed the excellent documents, but then wrote my own primer on how I migrated my own site. It is here:
http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/07/learning-points-from-creating-a-new-symbiostock-website/
As my blog post explains, I moved myself to a new server during this process, and I’m migrating BackyardSilver today to that same server. So if the link doesn’t work, please bear with me!
Steve
That makes sense. For me, I’m not really altering the tags when I upload my images – and so what went into Shutterstock and the others also goes into my personal site. I do sometimes alter the description to make it richer in detail, but that is all.
So please don’t introduce anything that assumes we have time to change our tagging approaches specifically for Symbiostock sites.
