My guess was that Fotolia was only mentioned because of the investment by KKR, not because they're really going anywhere in microstock.

Interesting find when I searched to see if Moody's had followed through - a Moody's report from a year ago, Sept 28, 2012, when they previously downgraded Getty's debt

https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-downgrades-Gettys-CFR-to-B2-from-Ba3-assigns-B1--PR_256183

For comparison, here's the current note on the possible downgrade

https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-places-ratings-for-Getty-Images-on-review-for-downgrade--PR_281428

A year ago they said "Although revenue is expected to be flat in FY2012 compared to the prior year, EBITDA is expected to grow in the mid-single digit percentage range reflecting the benefits of recent cost-cutting initiatives"

This recent one said "As a result, Moody's revised forecasts for the next 12 months indicate the company will need more time than initially anticipated to stabilize revenues, restore operating margins, and bring financial metrics, including debt-to-EBITDA ratios (roughly 7.1x as of June 2013, including Moody's standard adjustments) and free cash flow-to debt ratios (estimated at less than 2% for FY2013) in line with the company's operating and financial plan presented when Moody's initially rated debt instruments for the October 2012 buyout. "

First they were talking about growth, now they're talking about stabilizing revenues...what a difference a year makes

I was curious about the origin of Cheap Johns and thought perhaps Google might help me out. Less than I thought, but there was still a hit or two, one of which was from some text from Henry Mayhew's book London Labour and the London Poor. That recent Guardian article about the book is fascinating.

Dictionary.com says Cheap Jack was synonymous with Cheap John

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheap+john

And here's a chapter from Mayhew's book talking about Cheap Johns:

http://dl.tufts.edu/catalog/tei/tufts:MS004.002.052.001.00001/chapter/c15s3

So for gentlemen, or those who aspired to be gentlemen, to be referred to a Cheap Johns was a pretty big insult

Thanks for that rundown - I've bookmarked that.

Thanks for posting about blogVault. I looked at your site and pricing and there a couple of things you didn't answer (at least that I could find).

1) Where is the primary backup data stored and could I get at that independently (e.g. with my own account credentials) if for some reason your company stopped operating one day?

2) I didn't see any details about how the backup is handled. I have shared hosting with Bluehost and it seems important that any process for backup is able to resume after the process is shut down by the server (for whatever reasons). Do the WordPress site owners have any configurable parameters for how the backup is done if for some reason their hosting provider is causing difficulties for blogVault?

3) There don't appear to be any screen shots or demos of the dashboard interface to see what sort of controls the customer has or how things work. Do you have that somewhere (I know there's a free trial, but I don't want to spend time on that if a quick look at an interface, some documentation or a video would tell me that this product is for me or not)?

Sean did a great magnifier for accordstock.com. Perhaps he would do a Symbiostock plugin?

It did help, and I've now implemented it. It still appears that my site is at the top level of the domain - I didn't want to have to put stock.digitalbristles.com - because I've moved around the top level domain name to something else.

So glad this is resolved

I did something like this too regarding focus keyword, in order to have it everywhere, but now I have to do this for all the photos. There is a way to select all the photos in Batch Editor if I don't have a common keyword for all?

I don't think so. I had asked a while back about having a "select all" feature for batch processing, but not sure if that will happen. You can do it by categories now

I'm running my 10GB site now - it is taking a long time as you would expect! I didn't see the chunk size setting so I will see what happens!

Once this has run, I'm going to change my approach and backup the images semi manually to Google Drive as they don't change often (especially the old ones) and then use Updraft on the rest of the site. I think that will make it much faster and easier.

I'll write out some fuller guidelines on how to work this with Google Drive once I have worked it out!

Steve

You have to open the expert settings at the bottom to specify chunk size.

For the image backup, you might use the files generated by updraft - do a backup where you specify symbiostock_rf as an "other" directory - so you can chunk the zip files into manageable sizes. But don't leave it set that way for every day backups

Quote from: picture5469 on September 05, 2013, 07:25

Quote from: Redneck on September 05, 2013, 07:13

No, it's not enough.
You should check "Any other directories ..." and then include the symbiostock_rf, symbiostock_ipn and symbiostock_network folders.

Thanks

You're welcome. Give it a try and let us know if it works because I'm a little sceptical that Updraft will be able to handle a 10 to 12GB backup (like in your specific case).

You can also use the option to backup WP core and exclude the symbiostock cache (possibly also some WP directories you don't need).

Why the query about a large backup - it lets you specify the chunk size of each zip file. The default is 800 MB chunks and I found for me it worked much more smoothly with 400MB chunks

Hi JS

I bought the add ins (the full package!!) and installed nicely. When you selected folders, did you select the choice "Wordpress Core" and excluded WP-admin and WP-includes?

I think that choosing that option would pick up all the image folders.

steve

I picked WordPress Core and excluded symbiostock_xml_cache only. I am not very WordPress savvy, so I didn't know to exclude the other two, but I believe you can make a comma-separated list of locations. If you look at the text file I posted above it has all the directories it caught

Looking at the link you provided and then going to whms3backup, it appears that in addition to paying them for the cpanel app (35 GBP) you also need your own amazon s3 storage to store the backup? It's the uncertain and complex pricing model of buying amazon s3 storage that turned me off.

Did I miss something?

Couple of suggestions from your "about" page (the strike through text is what you currently have):


Welcome to Flashstockphoto, the stock photo agency of  Jochen Sch�nfeld. I am have been a stock photographer for many years, based in the South of Germany. 

 My ambition goal is to have the pictures you need here, but if I do not, I can offer an alternative where you can purchase direct from another independent artist. If you want to search the entire symbiostock network you can do so here: symbiostock.info

From your description of yourself that shows up on image pages:

I'm living I live in the South of Germany, working as photographer since for almost 20 years.

I would probably say "I live in Southern Germany and have worked as a photographer for almost 20 years". I'm not sure if Southern Germany would be confusing to someone who knows Germany well, but I say I live in Western Washington, not the West of Washington.

Hope these help

I didn't use Google cloud storage (assuming that is a separate offering), just the google drive storage option that you probably already have if you use Gmail. I then extended that to 100G for $4.99 a month.

I need to get that extra plugin next to back up all the files as you have done.

steve

You're right - the complicated pricing is for their cloud storage. The Google Drive add on is a bit cheaper than the Dropbox add on, so unless there are any other gotchas with bandwidth or access, that might be the best deal. Both are supported by Updraft Plus