MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - LesPalenik
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 20
51
« on: August 27, 2015, 17:42 »
I tried to find the grfx forum and I'm asked to login to Facebook. Having resisted Facebook and Photoshop CC may qualify me as an oddity, but if there is a non-Facebook grfx forum, could you post the link to it?
I don't remember how many times the Symbiostock and grfx changed their forum platforms, and am baffled by it, but am eternally thankful to MSG for their Symbiostock forum section which outlived the previously mentioned instances.
52
« on: August 26, 2015, 08:01 »
I do not understand where the problem is to explain what went wrong. I think you have sold Symbiostock thats it. And once again there was zero communication to the users and thats the real problem.
In germany i would like to say "kindergarten" "Abandoning" the original members was the real problem. But actually we were not quite abandoned (yes, I paid also for the upgraded system and expected a smooth and fruitful continuation), there are now two new systems with two new administrators who are willing to take us to the next level. Let's just say the whole situation got messy. Kindergarten or business agreement gone wrong, I can't see how knowing all the details of a messy transaction would help anyone. What we need now, is a clear and sound way forward. There are thousands of artists who need assistance and networking abilities in selling their art and other creations, and there are now hundreds of big and small agencies exploiting the artists, who also don't make public all their information. And some of them have less business sense and moral scruples than one would expect. Having two independent organizations offering their services in helping the independents is not such a bad thing. And the two are more different from each other then let's say Photoshelter and Smugmug. Heck, to double your pleasure (and maybe also the income), you could subscribe to both. By the way, if grfx will support upload to various agencies, would that by any chance include also upload to the new Symbiostock?
53
« on: August 26, 2015, 05:51 »
Quote from: LesPalenik on Today at 03:01 Lastly, can you share your vision how the future grfx agency would collect and fulfill the orders?
grfx would utilize some enhanced upload features through this Gecko app. Generally you must log in to agencies to change things through a browser, whereas gecko would have a dedicated set of windows for everything. It would operate like any other agency you are aware of with it's obvious differences and strengths put to the front.
I meant, from the point of buyer. Will he see and buy all relevant images by signing on and paying on the main site or will he need to pay separately to different accounts for each image (assuming that he is buying images from different artists)?
54
« on: August 26, 2015, 03:13 »
sounds good. But Symbiotock also sounded good....  I wouldn't be so hard on Leo. Having some design and software development experience myself, I can sympathize with him. Symbiostock Legacy should be considered a valuable prototype which showed what works, and what doesn't, and just by being in existence, it created a platform for an improved version and other add-ons that wouldn't be possible without going through the initial version (including failures). I have seen systems which were not that designed properly (after all, which Version 1.0 is perfect?), and the companies poured a lot of time and money to patch it and falsely believing that they could improve it (the CEO, software manager and accountants couldn't just admit that there was something wrong with initial design, implementation, understanding of the business, not even adding changing environment), instead of learning from the failures and designing a better system with fresh start. On the other hand, a single motivated and competent super-programmer who can see the problems in the old system and can envision the next-step system, doesn't have to worry about saving a face and can concentrate fully on making the new and better system. Unfortunately, in case of the old Symbiostock, a lot of good will and genuine enthusiasm by the users was squandered, and the progression from the Legacy system to the new system could have been handled differently. Also as Leo tried to please everybody, valuable development time was wasted for things like round edges of rectangles on the screen, rather than for the solid core functions. Nevertheless, just that one point Leo made here about the declining performance of large portfolios on Wordpress, makes it worthwhile to make a fresh start. Painful and disappointing now, but hopefully much better in the long run. Microsoft Windows 1.0 was also not exactly a stellar product, and Apple Lisa was ditched unceremoniously in favour of the more practically designed new Macintosh.
55
« on: August 26, 2015, 03:01 »
Thanks, Leo
As to the variety of downloadable products, it's not clear me to how this would work with my own site and various agencies. Images, video clips, audio files - that's relatively straightforward. There are already agencies accepting and distributing these files, so I assume that I'll just post it to my site and instruct Gecko to upload it the appropriate agencies.
On that subject, I can see the practicality of the main image (or footage) catalog sitting on my personal site and creating automated links for images being uploaded to various agencies. Now, uploading is one thing. Acceptance notifications, repeated uploads of the same files, repeated uploads with some modifications and notes, would require a separate subsystem. Can anybody think of a simple way to create image relationship links for existing files on multiple agencies?
How would the new setup work for ebooks, tutorials, Photoshop actions, and other nonstandard downloadable items ? Would all these products be on the same personal site as the images and footage, or would they require a separate site?
OTOH, let's say that I have a basement full of already printed paper books, prints, postcards, or even framed pictures (in other words, physical goods, not downloadable products). Will there be a provision for such products or would it be more practical to create a separate wordpress e-commerce site (linked to the main personal site)?
Lastly, can you share your vision how the future grfx agency would collect and fulfill the orders?
56
« on: August 25, 2015, 22:41 »
It sounds very enticing, Leo. No doubt a lot of thinking and experience went into this project. Can you elaborate on the grfx agency function?
Few questions: 1. From that monthly fee of $15.00, will you allocate a portion to advertising?
2. If we pay a monthly fee (which might go up), what are the chances that we'll make at least that amount? 3, How can a one-man part-time developer compete with IT departments of big agencies?
4. How will grfx compare with Smugmug, Photoshelter, Zenfolio? (earning potential, advertising methods, SEO, ...)
5. What is the upper limit of entities (products) on the site, still guaranteeing fast updates and response time?
6. Lastly, what guarantee we'll get that the product will stay around and be continuously maintained? In other words, what will happen if the chief (and only) developer will be run over by a bus?
57
« on: August 20, 2015, 22:02 »
Hard to keep up with the current flood. Impossible is more fitting.
58
« on: August 12, 2015, 23:28 »
Back to the OP. Just to confirm that disabling "Update public network info" in Author Options tab stopped, indeed, the re-generation of the cache files from the other nodes on the network.
59
« on: August 11, 2015, 22:40 »
Leo,
I disabled "Update public network info" in Author Options tab and it seems that this stopped re-generation of the cache files (at least for now). I will monitor this directory and report later whether this was the culprit.
60
« on: August 11, 2015, 21:37 »
Leo,
are you saying that with the Legacy Symbiostock I can't disable creation of those cache files? Or in other words, how can I stop creation of those files?
61
« on: August 11, 2015, 21:02 »
I deleted manually all files (over 12,000) in /symbiostock_xml_cache directory and deactivated Networking in Symbiostock Network section.
For some reason, all those files are coming back. Are they being rebuilt or copied from another node on the network?
It looks like that those files are copied into my directory from somewhere else. The Last Modified date-stamps display dates prior to today's date.
62
« on: August 11, 2015, 20:55 »
I've tried deactivating all non-SYS plugins and hoped that might help. But it didn't. Not sure what good my site is if the categories don't work. Bummer! Could be that the categories indexes are corrupted. I don't know if the categories are handled by some coded function in the symbiostock program or by one of the external plugins. If by a plugin, maybe it's the Taxonomy one. You could try to deactivate and then reactivate it, to see if it will rebuild the category indexes. I decided to convert to new Symbiostock about 2 weeks ago. I found it to be a pretty simple exercise and I also was able to maintain all my original image URLs so that the Google searches still go through to the same image after conversion. All descriptions, titles, keywords and categories transferred across and the plugin appropriately marked editorial shots. Thanks, Steve. Good to know that the new Symbiostock works and the conversion was smooth.
63
« on: August 11, 2015, 17:33 »
Martha,
When I click on my categories (tried several), they work and display correctly.
64
« on: August 11, 2015, 16:18 »
Thanks, Leo
I deleted manually all files (over 12,000) in /symbiostock_xml_cache directory and deactivated Networking in Symbiostock Network section.
For some reason, all those files are coming back. Are they being rebuilt or copied from another node on the network?
65
« on: August 07, 2015, 08:03 »
really often read here, that the sales on the most agencys are coming after months-years. the bigger numbers.
is it true, for everyone? or depends that on anything?
and when after time first - how long have i to wait? and what is a good number of uploads per week or month?
There used be good jokes by Radio Yerevan on the theme "Is it true?" In this case, they might answer it in a following way: In principle, it's true. Actually, it used to be true, but nowadays the bigger numbers relate only to the size of their collections. When it comes to royalties for the contributors, it depends on the quality of your images, your Zodiac sign, and the specific content uploads of your competitors, and you'll find out that generally, the opposite is true. In other words, you'll have to wait for a very long time - before giving up altogether. As to the number of good uploads per week or months, it's always good when you get some images accepted. Keep reading here, continue uploading, and to lift your spirit, check periodically Google for "Radio Yerevan jokes".
66
« on: August 07, 2015, 00:17 »
I don't do much with my legacy symbiostock site these days, but just got a message from my host company that I had too many files in my /symbiostock_xml_cache
I guess these files are never cleared automatically. Cleared it all manually now. You might want to look also at your /symbiostock_xml_cache directory and delete all or at least the oldest files.
67
« on: August 06, 2015, 21:58 »
Big price drop on big volume. Looks like a lot of shares were dumped in one day.
68
« on: August 04, 2015, 05:18 »
If the main priority is the monetary profit, investment in stock company shares rather than in photo gear might have been a better idea than shooting pictures.
For example, if had invested $20,000 in fall 2012 in SS shares, you could have parlayed it into $100,000 in less than 18 months. Of course, that $100 price per share was overheated. However, if you took advantage of that situation, and sold your shares at the peak, and then shorted your original investment and profit, waited until the shares dropped to $50 (just recently), and then covered your shorts, you could have doubled it to $200,000.
Adobe did also spectacularly well. $20,000 invested at the same time, while they were still more than two years away from their foray into the stock image business, would have grown by now to $50,000. Of course, the timing is everything. Pick a wrong date and a price too high, and you could lose a lot. Mind you, not as much as some people lost on quickly depreciating cameras and computers. If you sank $20,000 into a Hassy H50 at the same time, you could still have, umm, well, a camera that used to cost $20,000, and it has been now blown away by Canon 5DS or Sony A7RII that costs only $3,200. I didn't add cost of lenses, but by any luck, with a nice portfolio, maybe you could have recovered their costs by your stock image royalties. Purely coincidentally, as the oldtimers would remember, just before those stock share prices took off, we were told that Money isnt going to be what makes you all happy. And that is exactly how it happened - money not made didn't make us happy.
69
« on: August 03, 2015, 22:32 »
+1. To rephrase it: 1. It is not too late to sell some of your images. A decent picture will sell sooner or later. (Most likely, later). 2. It is definitely too late to earn good money with it. The same effort and money invested in another endeavor would likely earn more money.
70
« on: August 01, 2015, 23:07 »
What kind of bugs? I always thought, they are more prevalent in the hot summer months.
71
« on: July 26, 2015, 13:24 »
Admittedly, I can't say I'm surprised by the rejections because my camera is old. Despite that fact that it's at 20 Megapixel, the sensor isn't big enough and I don't have a very good lens. Many new contributors have new cameras and I know for a fact they have a better one than mine. Poppycock! If you took the time to read all rejection posts, you would learn that many unjustified rejections are dished out even to experienced photographers who shoot with 5Ds, 810's and expensive prime lenses in a studio from steady tripods and triggered by remotes. The image quality is definitely not the culprit.
72
« on: July 20, 2015, 19:16 »
Perhaps, if it is done in small steps, it would be possible to establish an organization who would stand up for the artists.
The first function of an organization representing interests of artists would be protection of their copyrights, special licensing advice, and going after copycats. A lean copyright enforcement organization wouldn't cost much to run and could potentially earn it upkeep from the proceeds of their activities.
Once you have a successful organization/union working on behalf of artists in one area, other mandates could be added on.
73
« on: July 20, 2015, 05:23 »
Well done! With all the roar of the falls, nobody there would complain about the Phantom buzzing sound. Did you fly above the mist or through the mist?
74
« on: July 15, 2015, 00:33 »
It is a flawed poll. Realistically, very few of the 40,000 images portfolios would achieve the $10,000 income. Of course, there are exceptions, and then there is the hard reality. Another thing is that even if you make $1,000 with x images presently in your portfolio, you can't increase the income linearly with a tenfold increase of the portfolio. If you have currently a profitable niche with 100 pictures, by increasing it tenfold, you'll be diluting the profitability of the old and new images in this niche, and consequently any increase in total income would be marginal. So the answer would seem to be to to come up with new undiscovered niches, which is much easier said than done.
75
« on: July 13, 2015, 22:21 »
If you want to be partner/shareholder in a stock agency, now is the time to load up on SS shares, they are down to $55.
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 ... 20
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|