Author Topic: K-Tools Photostore 4 Finally Available! (Read 7168 times)

cathyslife · « **on:** June 27, 2012, 08:10 »

Haven't had a chance to delve into it (looks like a WordPress kind of setup) but it looks like an improvement.

cthoman · « **Reply #1 on:** June 27, 2012, 10:06 »

I still really haven't figured out what is new and improved with it. One of my biggest complaints was the search and it appears to be the same.

Pixart · « **Reply #2 on:** June 27, 2012, 10:20 »

Hah, but it says it is totally rewritten from the ground up (or something like that).

I was hoping they would change so non-owners could go on the forum. My Smugmug expires in a couple days and I planned to go with Photostore - but honestly I'm afraid it will be over my head when it comes to getting the site off the ground.

RacePhoto · « **Reply #3 on:** June 27, 2012, 11:25 »

Quote from: Pixart on June 27, 2012, 10:20

Hah, but it says it is totally rewritten from the ground up (or something like that).

I was hoping they would change so non-owners could go on the forum. My Smugmug expires in a couple days and I planned to go with Photostore - but honestly I'm afraid it will be over my head when it comes to getting the site off the ground.

Good point and potential buyers could see what people who own it are saying. What's behind a closed site. (OK anonymous trolls, spam and a few others) But email confirmation should keep that down?

lisafx · « **Reply #4 on:** June 27, 2012, 11:49 »

Won't do me any good. I've had so many customizations done to my site that I don't think it would be cost effective for me to upgrade and have to pay for those customizations all over again.

Will be interested to hear from anyone who actually upgrades how they like it

cathyslife · « **Reply #5 on:** June 27, 2012, 12:09 »

It would be interesting to know if the upgrade from 3 to 4 will be seamless, even without customizations. It never usually is.

ppdd · « **Reply #6 on:** June 27, 2012, 13:17 »

I've worked with both 3.x and the new 4 a lot. There is no upgrade, as they are completely different scripts, but there may be a content migration script in the future. (No upgrade of the site content - the software itself is available to current owners.) A lot of what had to be custom work in the past is part of the script now. The new script does not yet have a contributor add on.

To get to the forums, just create a ktools account. I don't have any idea why people are so upset by this: http://www.ktools.net/create.account.php

As for getting up and running, ktools will do the entire install for you once you decide on hosting.

cathyslife · « **Reply #7 on:** June 27, 2012, 13:31 »

Quote from: ppdd on June 27, 2012, 13:17

I've worked with both 3.x and the new 4 a lot. There is no upgrade, as they are completely different scripts, but there may be a content migration script in the future. (No upgrade of the site content - the software itself is available to current owners.) A lot of what had to be custom work in the past is part of the script now. The new script does not yet have a contributor add on.

To get to the forums, just create a ktools account. I don't have any idea why people are so upset by this: http://www.ktools.net/create.account.php

As for getting up and running, ktools will do the entire install for you once you decide on hosting.

Thanks for the update.

Pixart · « **Reply #8 on:** June 27, 2012, 13:38 »

Oh, you can get into their forum now if you don't own the product? That's not the way it was before. I'll join tonight then and do some reading.

Amanda_K · « **Reply #9 on:** June 27, 2012, 22:00 »

I've been working on setting up a new site based on version 4 as well, I'm coming from running a CMS Account site for about a year and I also tried out Pixaria, so far I'm really impressed by Ktools v4 with the exception of some search features that need to be added but in the two weeks since I took the dive and purchased the script they have already come out with an upgrade expanding on it and have another planned soon with even more of the features people have been requesting on the forums.

ppdd · « **Reply #10 on:** June 28, 2012, 00:59 »

I did one site with Pixara as well - I like that script. I do thing the new photostore will be the best option overall. It seems like cmsaccount has come pretty far since I last looked at it.

leaf · « **Reply #11 on:** June 28, 2012, 04:41 »

Quote from: 9lives on June 27, 2012, 22:00

I've been working on setting up a new site based on version 4 as well, I'm coming from running a CMS Account site for about a year and I also tried out Pixaria, so far I'm really impressed by Ktools v4 with the exception of some search features that need to be added but in the two weeks since I took the dive and purchased the script they have already come out with an upgrade expanding on it and have another planned soon with even more of the features people have been requesting on the forums.

I think your current site at 9lives looks great (which is using CMSaccount). Why the wish for a software change?

cathyslife · « **Reply #12 on:** June 28, 2012, 07:17 »

Quote from: leaf on June 28, 2012, 04:41

Quote from: 9lives on June 27, 2012, 22:00
I've been working on setting up a new site based on version 4 as well, I'm coming from running a CMS Account site for about a year and I also tried out Pixaria, so far I'm really impressed by Ktools v4 with the exception of some search features that need to be added but in the two weeks since I took the dive and purchased the script they have already come out with an upgrade expanding on it and have another planned soon with even more of the features people have been requesting on the forums.

I think your current site at 9lives looks great (which is using CMSaccount). Why the wish for a software change?

Good question. I've looked into CMS Account before and wonder in what ways is the ktools better.

9lives: Turns out I've used one of your illustrations in a school project I did! (yes, I purchased a license) You can see it here: http://www.cathyslife.com/animation.html

RacePhoto · « **Reply #13 on:** June 28, 2012, 14:36 »

Quote from: lisafx on June 27, 2012, 11:49

Won't do me any good. I've had so many customizations done to my site that I don't think it would be cost effective for me to upgrade and have to pay for those customizations all over again.

Will be interested to hear from anyone who actually upgrades how they like it

Are you saying your site is actually a heavily customized K-tools or your own code that someone created. It works, it looks great, you make sales, why change?

If you have it working and it's working fine, I'd have to agree. Why upgrade anything, just because it's a bigger number?

Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom and that whole bunch, can often work fine without having every update.

lisafx · « **Reply #14 on:** June 28, 2012, 15:04 »

Quote from: RacePhoto on June 28, 2012, 14:36

Are you saying your site is actually a heavily customized K-tools or your own code that someone created. It works, it looks great, you make sales, why change?

Yes. Being hopeless at code myself, I paid someone to customize my K-tools site. I have much better search and batch editing functions, among other things. Not worth upgrading to version 4 for me, I think.

So agree about PS, LR, etc. Upgrading every two or three years is plenty to keep you up to date IMO.

RacePhoto · « **Reply #15 on:** June 28, 2012, 15:50 »

Quote from: lisafx on June 28, 2012, 15:04

Quote from: RacePhoto on June 28, 2012, 14:36

Are you saying your site is actually a heavily customized K-tools or your own code that someone created. It works, it looks great, you make sales, why change?

Yes. Being hopeless at code myself, I paid someone to customize my K-tools site. I have much better search and batch editing functions, among other things. Not worth upgrading to version 4 for me, I think.

So agree about PS, LR, etc. Upgrading every two or three years is plenty to keep you up to date IMO.

Thanks, I knew you had an exceptional well designed site, I didn't know the original code was K-Tools. Nice work!

Might I add. "if it ain't broken... don't fix it!"

Amanda_K · « **Reply #16 on:** June 28, 2012, 16:12 »

Thanks Leaf! CMS account is a great script especially for the price and I've always found Anton to provide great support but it was lacking and important feature for me personally, I wanted to be able to offer different sized JPGs as well as PNGs and EPS formats of my illustrations and currently CMS account only supports the JPG option (multiple sizes can be generated) or a Zip file option that you can sell any format but they can't be combined. With the new Photostore it's super easy to add additional formats to each file.

The other big deciding factor for me was ease of editing the templates, I want to do a fair amount of customization and with CMS account I found it a bit difficult to maintain my changes after upgrades. I just did the first upgrade of Photostore last night and everything was super smooth no need to touch up my templates.

There were a few other little things I found that pushed me to try out the new script, the watermarks can be updated at any time without having to re generate any thumbnails, in some cases I'd like to add an image to more than three categories, in CMS Account there is a limit of 3 including parent categories.

I will be continuing to use both CMS account (converting that store more into selling design templates and such) and Photostore for the stock image side moving forward. I'll definitely post a link here when I get the new site launched.

@Cathy thanks for sharing that, love seeing things in use!

@ Lisa - I almost emailed you last week I was wondering about a few tweaks and thinking of seeing who you found for customization but Jon is already adding the features I wanted to tweak, new changes seem to be happening pretty quickly, they've been super responsive to people's feedback on the forums.

If you have a customized version of K-Tools 3 I can see why you'd stay with it for now, until the tool is done to help port images and info it sounds like it will be a big undertaking.

lisafx · « **Reply #17 on:** June 28, 2012, 18:25 »

Quote from: 9lives on June 28, 2012, 16:12

The other big deciding factor for me was ease of editing the templates, I want to do a fair amount of customization and with CMS account I found it a bit difficult to maintain my changes after upgrades. I just did the first upgrade of Photostore last night and everything was super smooth no need to touch up my templates.

There were a few other little things I found that pushed me to try out the new script, the watermarks can be updated at any time without having to re generate any thumbnails, in some cases I'd like to add an image to more than three categories, in CMS Account there is a limit of 3 including parent categories.

(snip)

@ Lisa - I almost emailed you last week I was wondering about a few tweaks and thinking of seeing who you found for customization but Jon is already adding the features I wanted to tweak, new changes seem to be happening pretty quickly, they've been super responsive to people's feedback on the forums.

If you have a customized version of K-Tools 3 I can see why you'd stay with it for now, until the tool is done to help port images and info it sounds like it will be a big undertaking.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with version 4. Sounds like there is a lot more customization possible within the program. If my site ever starts to make serious money might be worth looking into it. Meanwhile, seems like it will be a great deal for anyone who hasn't already set up with V3.

leaf · « **Reply #18 on:** June 29, 2012, 03:27 »

Quote from: 9lives on June 28, 2012, 16:12

Thanks Leaf! CMS account is a great script especially for the price and I've always found Anton to provide great support but it was lacking and important feature for me personally, I wanted to be able to offer different sized JPGs as well as PNGs and EPS formats of my illustrations and currently CMS account only supports the JPG option (multiple sizes can be generated) or a Zip file option that you can sell any format but they can't be combined. With the new Photostore it's super easy to add additional formats to each file.

The other big deciding factor for me was ease of editing the templates, I want to do a fair amount of customization and with CMS account I found it a bit difficult to maintain my changes after upgrades. I just did the first upgrade of Photostore last night and everything was super smooth no need to touch up my templates.

There were a few other little things I found that pushed me to try out the new script, the watermarks can be updated at any time without having to re generate any thumbnails, in some cases I'd like to add an image to more than three categories, in CMS Account there is a limit of 3 including parent categories.

I will be continuing to use both CMS account (converting that store more into selling design templates and such) and Photostore for the stock image side moving forward. I'll definitely post a link here when I get the new site launched.

@Cathy thanks for sharing that, love seeing things in use!

@ Lisa - I almost emailed you last week I was wondering about a few tweaks and thinking of seeing who you found for customization but Jon is already adding the features I wanted to tweak, new changes seem to be happening pretty quickly, they've been super responsive to people's feedback on the forums.

If you have a customized version of K-Tools 3 I can see why you'd stay with it for now, until the tool is done to help port images and info it sounds like it will be a big undertaking.

Thanks for the thoughts. Now you are making me reconsider ktools again. The starting design on cmsaccount is quite a bit nicer IMO but it seems a bit of a pain to edit the template. I'll work on it a bit more today and see if I can get it working the way I want. The back end seems quite well coded and things generally work well. The price is also great.

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Author Topic: K-Tools Photostore 4 Finally Available! (Read 7168 times)

cathyslife

cthoman

Pixart

RacePhoto

lisafx

cathyslife

ppdd

cathyslife

Pixart

Amanda_K

ppdd

leaf

cathyslife

RacePhoto

lisafx

RacePhoto

Amanda_K

lisafx

leaf

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