MicrostockGroup

Zymmetrical, the first midstock visual art marketplace has just launched its FTP upload option.

While still out of the box, it is ready to be evaluate and used and abuse by anyone who would like to be an early adopter of its technology.

Here are a few tips:

1. We accept only JPG's, zipped up into a PC-compatible .ZIP file. Please do not upload individual photo files, it is much more efficient in one big .ZIP. Do not include other files such as model releases, thumbs.db, etc.
2. No maximum file size, and no upload limit, although we suggest you don't use more than 5 concurrent connections at once (subject to change upon smoke coming from our servers).
3. Uploaded files will remain visible (but not downloadable) in your private FTP folder until our Editors review them. Currently (soon to be fixed) the uploaded files will not show up in your Submissions list on Zymmetrical until we approve them. Once you have uploaded your Zip file into your own private upload folder, you can verify that it has arrived safely and securely. No one but yourself can see your images before they are approved on the site.


Now that this is finished, we will be announcing a bunch of very interesting marketing initiatives, not only for photographers and graphic designers, but for image buyers.

Stay tune. and as always, let us know your thoughts.

Best

Paul Melcher

It's not a matter of compression (you are right, JPG's hardly compress any more in ZIP), but more for efficiency in the FTP transfer. Each individual uploaded file has a certain amount of overhead for identification, resuming broken transfers, etc. so putting a few hundred JPGs into one ZIP and uploading will be faster than sending them individually.

Additionally, in our datacenter solution we pay for for bandwidth, HD space, and 'requests'. Requests are each individual GET or PUT command, i.e. each single file uploaded. So the more that files can be grouped into one upload, the cheaper the business is for everyone.  We are building our business from the ground up to be infinitely scalable, and do not intend to let technology issues obstruct business as has happened with some major agencies lately.

Cheers,
Keith Tuomi

I had the same problem, you might try refresh or try a different browser. I have Firefox that I use. It's doesn't work good with Netscape or IE.

They are still trying to get it going. According  to Keith who is the big cheese said somewhere around mid Oct for reviews . Uploading is fast. At the moment there is only two of them running the show.

I've had no problems using explorer.  My first image to be accepted there has already had a sale.
judy

Thanks for that.   We just switched over to 'friendly URLs', which in a nutshell means instead of a long, complicated URL style like:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?action=post;topic=2576.0;num_replies=7

we instead have a style like:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/forum/action/post/topic/2576.0/ 

Our system also automatically lowercases all input URL's and replaces all non-"www." prefixed URLs with "www.".    What this means is, we have probably the cleanest, most search engine optimized site structure around now.     We have been around a short while and are already number one in Yahoo.com's search results for 'buy stock photos' and 'sell stock photos', among other phrases. Google is next. 

The system is very picky however, and in the case of the "Creatives - let's get to Art" banner, it had a typo.  The URL it should be pointing to is www.zymmetrical.com/artists/sell-art/, not www.zymmetrical.com/artists/sellart/.     Thanks for pointing this out!

As far as the Info and Help root pages, I agree this is confusing. They need some content, if only links to the sub pages.

We are open for business, if a couple of glitches (semantical at that) in a beta discourage you, then I can't see you having much faith in many other agencies, notably one major in particular, whos worth $50 million and yet is in the middle of a technical 'IStuck' showstopper.   

Taking cheap shots at other sites is uncouth. Especially considering the size considerations, 1773 photos online versus 2 million+.