It's important to distinguish between legacy Symbiostock (which many people have had different experiences with) and the new one.

Thus far the new Symbiostock is having no issues and moving along speedily (over 100 happy contributors in a month). If you are a user of the new Symbiostock and have any problems, do let me know.

Hey Sharpshot - you should consider using the new Symbiostock, even as a test run to see if it works for you. Having your independent site going definitely takes work, but with the development and growth we've seen in a short while, along with the networking components that will be released soon, it may breathe fresh air into the independent arena.

You can give it a try for free here: http://symbiostock.com/

You can even import all your legacy stuff into the new site. Of course, there are no guarantees of sales as the independent market is still a new concept, but keep in touch. Once it gets more traction, don't hesitate to try it out.

Thanks for that info!

Quote from: fritz on June 28, 2015, 13:39
What about fill in the meta data into mov (video) file? For JPEGs there are tons of programs to fill in meta data but none of them works for video files.
Best

Have you tested and confirmed that any agencies read video metadata? As far as I know only CSVs can be used to populate video tags.

At this point, you can use the legacy to share in the old networking options or wait for the Symzio roll-out, which will be available to all Symbiostock users, hosted or standalone.

Be weary of any information you get on MSG regarding official policies - if you want answers, get them on our forum or through official reps.

Hey Aitor -

Networking is being retooled to be more powerful and have more quality control with the new Symbiostock. As the old version had certain drawbacks, the new one was released without this component off the bat.

I'm looking to integrate a site-to-site networking option prior to releasing the full Symzio platform so that site owners can benefit from each others' media sooner rather than later.

You can see my full response to your question here:

http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/how-to-show-search-results-from-other-network-sites/#post-23500

I have the 7-14 and it is great. The F/4 isn't perfectly ideal, but it is constant which is a huge step up. In most cases, compensation with ISO works fine.

I did a lot of research prior to buying it and decided not to wait for the Olympus equivalent due to the much higher price.

Here is a large thread on it:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3783188#forum-post-55096344

There are no real other contenders as far as I know. For super wide, these are the two choices.

Another tip for you (and anyone else who is looking at/using one of these) is if you want a graduating filter solution to go with your lens, which you will need 30% of the time when taking landscapes, is to get this:

http://bhmstore.com/774-2055-thickbox/cokin-p-series-universal-adapter-ring-p499.jpg

Along with the associated cokin filter holder (you can get a knock off from ebay for cheap) and then a really good graduating filter, you have a full filtered super wide solution.

There is very slight vignetting with this solution, but is quite negligible with a little post production fixing. In fact, I doubt there is a good way to filter this lens without some vignetting without actually cutting the built in hood:

http://www.mu-43.com/threads/76442/

As per many requests from contributors, Symbiostock has now been released with GD support. GD is the built in PHP image manipulation library and Symbiostock can now work through both Imagick and GD.

GD is less powerful and accordingly Symbiostock will only work with JPEG images for sale if running without Imagick. This means no vectors, but is still great for photographers.

As well, image metadata reading can now also work without shell_exec access.

All this means that if you currently are with a web host that is more restrictive and/or does not provide these previously necessary built in functions, Symbiostock should be a lot more compatible with your current system.

As always, if you guys have any technical questions or support requests, post them here or in the Symbiostock forum.

Just remember that Adobe is a whole different animal to all of the current agency offerings.

If, for example, Adobe were to offer highly lucrative payouts to contributors, that would necessarily attract more contributors to the arena. In doing so, they would almost certainly see an increase in the amount of their software licenses that are sold, and are also inadvertently creating future customers for both software and stock photos, since these same contributors can also purchase stock photos through this same software.

The important thing to understand here is that Adobe is in a win-win situation in regards to contributors, and all they have to do is keep contributors contributing and they slowly grow their overall customer base, which will increase revenue.

This means that increases in contributor compensation may hit their stock photo profit, but in the long run provides them more reliable customers. This is why this is a huge move and a huge game changer. Unlike every other agency out there, Adobe is not trying to squeeze the last few dollars it can out of your artwork; they are trying to make you long term artists so they can make money out of it in the long term.

It necessitates a change in the way every other agency has been operating thus far and makes the agency arena suddenly highly competitive.

Fantastic news - highly anticipated and welcomed!

Well, with the new Symbiostock for example, it reads metadata. Assuming your photos are all tagged anyways, that's quick. And as for designing, well - yes, that takes some time, but probably less than it did in the past.

But I think if you don't market your independent site, you aren't going to get much. This is the same for any website out there nowadays, not just the image industry.

Did you end up marketing your site or were you too burnt out by the time you got it online?

I think it's a cost vs reward question. It can't hurt to have your site online with your images for sale - it will be better if you work to promote it, researching how to build your search engine reputation.

Right now there is no easy solution that replaces agencies because it relies on a communal, shared effort. No one person has enough images to compete alone.

My suggestion to you is to find an extremely low cost way of hosting your images online, having great SEO, and constantly passively marketing it. Regardless of whether it succeeds in the short term or not, if you are a professional in the field, it can only benefit you in the future when independent sales start really taking off.

And of course, volume matters. If you only have a few hundred images, it would be a good idea to start developing your independent online presence, but you may find it difficult to necessarily get high volume sales. With thousands of images being indexed, you have more 'hooks' in the search engines, which will then drive more visitors to the entirety of your site.

But stutterstock is right - it will take hard work to market any individual site, just as it does any site in any industry. If you have the right images, and customers find you, you'll get the sales.

Let's examine an open source project without trademark protection:

1) Symbiostock 1.0 is released. As it is licensed under the GNU, anyone can use the code and even sell it.
2) A group of black-hatters take Symbiostock, add malicious code to it in order to collect passwords
3) They release Symbiostock 2.0, call it Symbiostock 2.0, and advertise on Google Adwords using the name Symbiostock 2.0.
4) Users, just like you, purchase Symbiostock 2.0, your passwords are extracted, your sites are hacked, and all your full resolution images show up on free sites.
5) The group of black-hatters stop advertising, close up shop, and disappear.
6) You come to the original developers and want to know why they let this happen.
7) They respond by saying that without trademark protection, they could not legally prevent the sale of Symbiostock 2.0.

This is just one of the reasons why Symbiostock, and other open source organizations such as:

WordPress: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.2.9
CentOS: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.3.2
Linux: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.4.12
Debian: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.5.1
WooCommerce: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.11.1
MySQL: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.7.5
phpMyAdmin: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:4ow9iu.8.7

All have registered trademarks. It has very little to do with end users.

Robin.

Yes, the base search of WordPress and WooCommerce does require tweaking.

It has already been improved in a variety of ways by Symbiostock, but this is a big jump.

Full post: http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/symbiostock-search-wordpress-search/

A big boost in search, especially for people with over 500 images. WordPress and WooCommerce, by default do not search tags - very strange, but it's true.

That means that if you keyword your image and bring it into WooCommerce using tags, your customers won't be able to search using those keywords.

You can buy or install third party plugins that do enable this, but in our testing we've found that once you go over about 500 images you see significant slow down, with some people with 1500 images or more experiencing wait times of over 1.8 seconds.

The next release of Symbiostock will use a new accelerator with the search, and include tag searching. Our tests have shown that where you might normally see a wait time of about 1.4 seconds, it now takes 0.2 seconds (85% speed increase!).

Now you can use Symbiostock to not only read metadata when adding images, but as a free full metadata editor.

Full docs here:

http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/reading-writing-metadata/

You can automatically save your product title, description and tag edits to files now so if you want to export those images, or upload them to agencies, you now have the ability to do all your edits within Symbiostock.

For PLUS users, this now means that Symbiostock can be your all-in-one repository for images:

1) Upload your image

2) Do all your metadata editing within the WordPress interface

3) PLUS will automatically save your metadata and distribute your newly keyworded image to agencies.

4) Your image is fully keyworded for your own Symbiostock store as well.

This feature can be enabled/disabled on a global and individual product basis.

I considered maintaining the versions, but I think that would be more confusing since the new Symbiostock is different in more ways than one. Accordingly, the use of the word 'legacy' is more apt a term for it, especially from a software standpoint.

A feature I've added to PLUS is the ability to distribute your uploaded images to agencies. This plugs into a system I already had in place for my own use. Features include:

• Automatic submissions based on media type
• Excluding certain media from being distributed
• Automatic JPEG creation and submission alongside vectors
• Re-submission of media
• Keeping track of all media submitted
• Unlimited agencies
• Add/delete agencies
• System will automatically submit all images to newly added agencies
• Live store not required for submissions to operate

No additional cost for this, and you can submit as many images as you want, as many times as you want. As always, for any questions, post them in the Symbiostock.org forums for guaranteed answers. For more details, check out http://symbiostock.com

Thanks guys.

Hey Nando - as I coded it previously, it will still be available to legacy users.

As I've just released the plugin, I'll make the importer live through our forums soon. Let me know if you (or anyone) needs it immediately.

Thanks!

Symbiostock 1.0 has now been released. You can install it directly through your WordPress install by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for Symbiostock, or you can download it directly through WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/symbiostock/

Thanks to all of the supporters that helped out, and there's lots more to come.

Hey Tantoon,

The new Symbiostock plugin will be released next week sometime (and it's going to be completely free). It's going to be a major upgrade to the previous version in terms of functionality and expandability.

You can give it a test run via symbiostock.com to see if it's something compatible with your needs. That's our hosting solution for people who don't want to self-host their wordpress install, and you can try it out for 15 days for free. I am recommending people give it a test whirl there to get a feel for it.

If you have any questions on usage, you can post it in the symbiostock.org forums. Oh, and it comes with a very good VAT plugin - it collects the necessary proof, offers detailed reporting, and can allow business customers to exempt themselves. If you're a standalone user, you can buy a plugin that will do this for you as well.

Robin.

Okay guys, first some updates - most of the beta testing is over and the plugin is almost ready for release. We're double checking stuff but it will be in the next few days or week. The hosting solution (which we are now calling Symbiostock PLUS) is already live, but we aren't announcing it yet. If you want to get an idea of how the plugin looks and works, go over to symbiostock.com, create a trial account and you can use it for 15 days without fuss.

You can see a long list of features here (http://www.symbiostock.org/the-symbiostock-demo-is-live/) and you can browse the documentation here (http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/).

As for all the other stuff, I encourage you to read our EULA (http://www.symbiostock.org/symbiostock-eula/) and our Trademark Policy (http://www.symbiostock.org/trademark-guidelines/). The EULA overall basically just says 'we aren't liable if Symbiostock doesn't perform the way you want', amongst some other clauses. Pretty standard, I think I lifted it off RedHat (http://www.redhat.com/en) and ammended it.

The trademark policy was likewise lifted off a few other open source projects and tweaked. Specifically, our fair use clause outlines that anyone using any of the Symbiostock software can, and is encouraged to use the name or logo. The main reason the trademark policy was created was to prevent third parties from creating weird software, claiming to be Official Symbiostock this or that, and causing confusion as a result. In order to grow, open source organizations must do this to protect their users.

Most importantly, I'm going to kind of sever my relationship with the legacy software now because it seems my attempt to include it in the future of Symbiostock kind of backfired. In trying to make sure some of you didn't feel left out, I was trying to keep you included - but as I now understand that the previous version was a unique animal unto itself that didn't limit itself to the software, I'm going to only focus on the new plugin and leave the legacy one to you guys. It's Leo's code, after all, and the new plugin as well as the new project, despite sharing many qualities and a very similar vision, does appear to be a new breed. In accordance with this, I'm also not going to be providing legacy users with discounts on future Symbiostock stuff. As I didn't get any of that revenue, your best bet would be to recover it from Leo. My taking responsibility for the old plugin was kind of a good faith gesture, but as it has not been received as such, I'm not going to keep beating the poor, and very dead, horse.

My best suggestion would be this - if you feel content with the legacy Symbiostock, feel that its performance and output, and overall leadership and consistency was good for you, you should head over to Leo's spiritual successor to it. I genuinely believe you will feel more at home there.

The new Symbiostock project and plugin is professional, aggressive, sharp, and meant to expand. It's central, most focused purpose is to make us less reliant on third parties to sell our media. It is an open source business for a community of business-people.

For any questions, feel free to PM me on the Symbiostock forums. My communications here will be sparse, at best, for the time being.

Robin.

Hey guys,

Along with an extensive feature list, we've launched a demo site where you can see both Symbiostock and our premium custom paired theme Symbiostock Express. The news release regarding this is viewable here:

http://www.symbiostock.org/the-symbiostock-demo-is-live/

If you have questions about it, want features not listed, or have general comments, don't hestitate to post them in the Symbiostock forum.

Some Symbiostockers have contacted me regarding an update that is showing up on their installs.

Unfortunately, the legacy Symbiostock update system is being used for marketing purposes by the previous developer of Symbiostock. I have asked him to stop doing this, but he feels it is appropriate. At this point there is nothing I can do because he is not giving me access to the update system, which is password protected on third party servers.

I recommend you follow the instructions posted here to disable the update notification and not install anything on your legacy Symbiostock server unless it is posted on the Symbiostock.org forums/blog.

I apologize about the confusion.

Robin.

I have asked Microstock group to move this to general discussion or merge it with the other thread on grfx as I am receiving too many queries from contributors who are understandably confused as to why this is in the Symbiostock forum.

Just to be clear, grfx has nothing to do with the new Symbiostock.