Yes, sorry if I didn't jump into this earlier - I was going to say the same about NextGen gallery. That plugin is purely intended to be able to create a page with some display of your best images, or a selection of your portfolio in a slide show, slider format etc. It is completely optional to the Symbio theme. From what I recall, you upload your images for use in NextGen (which may be ones you have sized differently for instance) into one of the normal image upload folders in WP and then point Nextgen at them.

I did try an image slider on my site in the early days, but it is one more piece to load, only appeared (in my case) on the home page and I decided that a fast simple site that moved people to buying an image was better than expecting people to sit there looking at some nice pictures in a slide show. I want people who have a specific need in mind, find it quickly and buy it. The chance of them seeing a nice shot on a slide show and think "I need to buy that" is miniscule for my portfolio.

Steve

I did spell out in my SY EULA that licenses are single-use basis only but wasn't completely comfortable with that for Alamy RM

Why do you think this wouldn't work. These are just licenses and there is nothing set in concrete that says that they can only be two types of license. As far as I understand, Alamy says that an RM license on their site should not be sold as RF elsewhere. If you have a license on your own site that isn't RF - ie there are restrictions on unlimited use - then you are not breaking that contractual agreement with Alamy.

I've been mulling this problem myself - hence my interest

Steve

Edit: This is the clause in the Alamy contract:

2.2 You cannot submit identical or similar images to Alamy as both Royalty-Free and Rights Managed. The licence type on Alamy for an image must be the same as the licence type for that image and similar images which you have on other agency websites.

And mine - I'll check out these other ones as well.

Steve

http://www.backyardsilver.com/2013/07/selling-stock-photos-through-your-own-personal-website/

I'm sure it was to do with the inability to handle large images - if I recall, you need to put the php.ini file in every folder in the Wordpress installation - and I found a script that did that somewhere on the web - but even when I did that, I couldn't get the amount of memory assigned to my account up to the level needed. I do have some issues uploading images to my other WP blogs on 1and1 when I have complex plugins installed (like the shopping cart stuff) and I think it is all part of the same issue. I contacted support at 1and1, but didn't really get very far at all.

As everyone was having success with Bluehost, and it was only $4.99 a month, I gave up on the 1and1 site for Symbio and went to Bluehost. Never really had any issues since.

Steve

I was on 1and1 - still am for most of my websites, but I had a lot of issues with Symbio in the early days - I moved to Bluehost after about 2 weeks if I recall and set up a new hosting package there.

Steve

My site is waaaay too slow on Blue Host, not happy with at all the longer I have to work with it.

This is obviously the problem with shared hosting - you have no control over who you share with. I keep toying with the idea of the individual server (or at least a managed server where you have defined capacity, memory, processing and bandwidth. It is about $40 I think, which is certainly worth doing once I get a bit of traction. We can then have a series of threads about moving your Symbio site!

Steve

They are picked up by google, which is why it is important to have comprehensive (but not spam) keywords and also use compound keywords - such as "New york" rather than "new" and "york", neither of which are appropriate for a New York image. Google can properly read those, Symbiostock.info searches them and I'm sure we will get a fix to the in-site search soon.

Steve

So the unrated/rated tick box might work correctly, the color ratings don't...

So is there a combination of settings that shows everything both on your own site and in the network?

Steve

I've finally managed to put the time into creating my graphs and commentary on my blog. Amazing how it doesn't seem important to do that when it is a poor month! Anyway, the main graphs are there now.

Here is a taster!

Steve

I agree - quality is as important as quantity, but getting the message out is equally important. I'm constantly amazed at how we collectively perform on Google images - I got an incoming search for "beer poolside" today which is by no means as unusual a phrase as "lonesome bengal cat"!!

To spread the news, I've just finished my own blog post about the opportunities in this network http://www.backyardsilver.com/2013/07/selling-stock-photos-through-your-own-personal-website/ and will get it out in my monthly newsletter to my followers in a day or two (I want to write a good explanation of StockUploader on my blog as well, but that is another story...)

Steve

Interesting that you added stock image to the searches. I have added "stock photo" to all the metadata of my descriptions. Any view on the difference between stock image and stock photo?

Steve

Good ideas for editorial pictures on SY, editorial are a pain to push on some agencies and Shutterstock reject some because of the captioning...

I think so. As an easy example, I uploaded some images of the ornate altar in a church in Germany (marked exclusive as I am only planning to upload it on my own site) three days ago. I checked just now on Google. Someone needing that specific image will be very specific in their search and so "Gerlachsheim church" has me at position 2 in Google web search. (Bit too early for image search indexing)

No sign of any other stock images from other agencies even though there is a similar photo in Getty's creative collection, and four external shots of the church in Alamy.

All I can say is that Leo did a fantastic job on SEO!

Steve