Quote from: peuceta on June 06, 2020, 05:54

Actualy it's 4 clicks -> Account settings/-> Licensing options, click "NO/NO" for image and video sales, click save settings. Don't sell yourself for $0,10 per image.

This is true, but from what other collaborators say they have done so it seems that SS continues to sell the images and probably pocket 100% of the sale.
To permanently delete photos you have to do it for single photo !!!
Unless that's true

Quote from: gameover on March 30, 2019, 08:34

Quote from: swisschocolate on March 30, 2019, 07:10

But now it takes much more legal work:
I live in European Union and it is practically impossible (without tools like Shopify) to track VAT transactions for every sale from every country, because % changes by customer's location. And keep all the info about transactions/customers for few years, in the meantime being complied with GDPR, etc. And all the tax work that follows it - you can't do it without an accountant.

Please don't make a big issue of everything. Professionally I do websites, daily privacy policies and GDPR compliance for my customers; there are ready-made plugins to make all you say, including VAT transaction for every country: not only that, but they also check it against the customer's IP address: it is really a breeze 

But you have expertise..most here are photographers, not website gurus, and don�t want to be. It kinda sounds like you are here to advertise and sell your services, not contribute to the actual topic of uniting photographers.   

Why don't you take your vintage collection and go with it to another thread? It is free to create a new thread!

The original post is about UNITY between contributors and not self-interest of particular individuals.

Quote from: gameover on March 29, 2019, 07:52

�..
I followed at a distance the Simbiostock experiment: IMO the basic idea is still appealing, although it think that the way it was technically carried out proved not to be the best.
.....
I focused on reducing the cost of the hosting by developing a fully automated OFFLINE procedure (on my computer) to prepare the data before uploading them:
-      fully automated .csv files  - including the automation of Excel - to populate the product webpages
-   ftp to upload the files to be sold and the watermarked images to be displayed
-   no manual intervention required
-   no extra costs for a special hosting.

�.

Now after a month�s work my fresh new website is taking off satisfactorily. To get started, rather than my favorite shoots I chose a niche that had already proved quite profitable: illustration scanned from old books (I am an avid collector of antique dusty tomes), refurbished and processed.
�

great looking site - but how did you 'automate' the time-consuming process of captioning and tagging? symbiostock had the automated features you describe (using metadata rather than csv), but still took time to prepare the images for upload. 

 but tech problems weren't the biggest problem  --  even with the combined search across hundreds of individual sites, we never drove enpugh traffic to our sites;  especially after google exponentially expanded their 'googleimages' displays.  my images often show up on the first pages of results, but they're not from my symbio site - they're links to 123, ss, et al.   

it all comes back to getting the links - your SEO expertise may let you break thru, so please come back to report after a few  months -- but did you know the following

<li>alamy  "Vintage Nostalgia" -->  Stock Photos and Images (2,251,158)
<li>SS -->  354,743 vintage nostalgia stock photos, vectors, and illustrations

Quote from: gameover on March 29, 2019, 07:52

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on March 28, 2019, 23:26

I'd love someone to come up with disruptive innovation to drive prices back up.

I�ve been reading a lot here and I would like to say that I think there is a way to shake loose the agencies.
The problem has ever been the way of piecing together and maintaining a proper website, the costs and the time. It seems that nobody thinks that this is really feasible, and that joining several websites of this kind at the same hosting place would result into a portal alternative to the agencies.
I followed at a distance the Simbiostock experiment: IMO the basic idea is still appealing, although it think that the way it was technically carried out proved not to be the best.

I'm mainly a web programmer and SEO expert (who loathes the �social�, sorry :-)) and secondly a photographer. As such I couldn�t resist the temptation to build my own virtual shop, and eventually I was surprised myself by how little expensive my effort has been, both in terms of money and of time.

I focused on reducing the cost of the hosting by developing a fully automated OFFLINE procedure (on my computer) to prepare the data before uploading them:
-      fully automated .csv files  - including the automation of Excel - to populate the product webpages
-   ftp to upload the files to be sold and the watermarked images to be displayed
-   no manual intervention required
-   no extra costs for a special hosting.

Now after a month�s work my fresh new website is taking off satisfactorily. To get started, rather than my favorite shoots I chose a niche that had already proved quite profitable: illustration scanned from old books (I am an avid collector of antique dusty tomes), refurbished and processed.
My investment? All together $171.00 (hosting included) !

If you like the idea, have a look at: https://vintage-nostalgia.com
Or find more details on the subject in my blog here.

Should you feel tempted too, I�ll be happy to give you a hand :-)

The problem there is that most of us are NOT web programmers or SEO experts, and you haven't included the cost of your time for both those things in your $171 investment. Nor have you mentioned how much your website is making for you each month.

Many of us spent a lot of unpaid hours building our own Symbiostock sites, only to lose money on them.

How much time have you invested?