Can anyone recommend any good/useful WordPress plugins for photographers?  Besides the photo gallery stuff, I have that covered.

I've been trying to find a plugin that allows me to create private galleries for clients to review their photo sets via password, but no luck so far.

Interesting... Not sure if I like it or not yet.

I wonder how many hours there is in those images, and what are the returns... sigh

How many hours on an image that never sells?  How many of us have portfolios with lots and lots of submissions that never sell once?  Were they a waste of time and effort?

The sad fact is that this industry is all about individual artists... Almost nobody makes any 'business decision' based on what's best for everyone.  Otherwise iStock couldn't get away with what they are doing... And no agency would have a sustainable subscription model, because artists would have quit them the instant their subscriptions programs started.  The fact is, artists are doing whatever they feel is necessary to sell their images.  Very few (if any) are taking other artists into account in their decisions.

The whole industry is going to crap and we (myself included) are all whining about it, but we're still contributing and still following trends that sell, even if it's another trend that makes things worse for artists as a group.  All we can do is vent in threads like this one and move on...

Quote from: helix7 on November 04, 2010, 17:38

@Peter - Is there an estimated date when StockFresh will officially be launched to the public? Or any marketing efforts planned for the near future? Just wondering when we might see some action from SF in terms of getting the word out to buyers.

The site was officially launched in June, but of course with a small collection of files. We are spending a minimal amount of money on marketing at the moment. This will gradually increase but there's no point in shoveling too much money into advertising when you have a relatively small collection compared to everyone else on the market. It's very easy to burn money on the internet if you're not running things efficiently. We're over 400,000 pics now so we're starting to have a reasonably nice collection, but I think we need at least a million files to be diverse enough and to be taken seriously. It also takes a while to saturate Google which is also important for growth. So to sum it up, we have plans and we have the money, but we want to spend it wise.

You'd have a MUCH larger collection if you actually spent time approving artists...  4 months for approval is ridiculous.

I am a large person, so standing for long periods of time aggravates my back.  One essential piece of equipment for me is a portable stool:

http://www.cabelas.com/product/Walkstool-Basic-Stools/746565.uts?rid=0123456789

For white/color balance, I bought these on eBay and they're fantastic:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Pro-Photo-18-Gray-Cards-White-Balance-card-CMY-3-LOT-/150498472349

Since I mostly record video, I have a Zoom H1 audio recorder, a shotgun microphone, a lav mic, and a Fader ND filter.  I also always keep a fresh bottle of gatorade in one of the outer pockets of my camera bag.

Well to put it short and what works for me is:

- MOV container format
- PhotoJPG for animations
- MotionJPG for filmed clips
- 95% quality
- Full HD 30fps

I wouldn't use MotionJPG for non-interlaced footage.  And if I owned a camera that shoots interlaced, I would NOT de-interlace it myself.  I'd upload it interlaced.

Hmm, interesting concept.  I never noticed a difference between weekend/weekday reviewers (but I only submit 1 to 3 images a week).  What I have noticed is that I don't want my clips to be approved on a Friday or Saturday.  Buyers seem to take the weekend off and every time I get a new clip approved between monday and thursday I get a big bump in sales.  Otherwise, if it's approved over the weekend when buyers come back on Monday my new clips is much faster than the "new items" list and doesn't get noticed as much.

It is MUCH easier to down-convert 30p to 25p than it is to up-convert 25p to 30p.  And 30p is much more desirable in the U.S. market (which is where most sales occur from my own research).

I am a proponent of "the more data the better", so I export my camera footage as PhotoJPEG at 95%.  I have some friends that do 90%, but in cases of extreme motion or LOTS and LOTS of colors, I can see a difference between 90% and 95%, so I just render everything at 95%.

For animation, I render as PhotoJPEG at 85%.  I learned not to use motion blur in my animations (requests from some studios that have directly bought from me) and I don't use complex shaders or textures, so 85% works very well.  For Pond5, CanStock and RevoStock I render out animations with embedded alpha using PNG.

If ShutterStock and a couple other sites supported H.264, I would switch from PhotoJPEG to H.264, but it's not worth rendering twice just to upload H.264 to the few sites that do support it.

^^ couldnt agencies ban you for doing this? I wonder if they give you a warning or not

Why?  They all invite re-submission.

One thing I have learned is that different sites sometimes cater to different types of buyers.  Of the 40ish images common between DT and SS, different images seem to sell on the two sites with maybe 1 common image selling on both sites.

This is especially true on footage...  I have my top 100 selling video clips from Pond5 on every agency I sell video through, except iStock, and most of it doesn't do nearly as well. My top selling clip on SS sells considerably less on Pond5.  My best selling clip on Revo has only sold a couple of times on Pond5.

So, when I'm out taking pictures or shooting video I don't think about what any one site sells more of because what's popular on one site may not be on another...

Quote from: dnavarrojr on October 27, 2010, 06:03

What I miss the most is the analytics.  The ability to long in every day (or several times a day) and review my sales data.  The daily tracking... the historical data... it was all critical to my workflow as it helped me to understand sales trends at different sites.

It will probably sound very rude... but... with 72 sales on DT in over 2 years, and 9 (!) sales at iStock in over 3 years (on average a sale every 4 months), why you need to track/analyze your, ahem, sales "several" times per day? Let alone have "historical" data critical to your "workflow"? With that number of sales, I would just login in every other week and remember everything by heart. I'm flabbergasted.

Obviously you didn't pay attention to what I wrote...  I am primarily a VIDEO guy.  Over the past 3 years I have sold over 3000 video clips through just Pond5 alone and between all agencies where I sell videos I am averaging over 350 clips a month right now.  I have nearly 1200 clips online on Pond5 with another 250 sitting in queue waiting to be submitted and another 300 sitting on my hard drive waiting to be edited and uploaded (I do the bulk of my uploading in the winter when I stay indoor).  Hence the need to track and compare my Pond5 portfolio against all the other sites so that I can spend this winter uploading what's missing to the other sites.

While I do miss the ability to "Upload Once and Syndicate Everywhere", I'll be honest it's not what I miss the most about iSyndica...

What I miss the most is the analytics.  The ability to long in every day (or several times a day) and review my sales data.  The daily tracking... the historical data... it was all critical to my workflow as it helped me to understand sales trends at different sites.

The picNiche Toolbar is nice to see what's happening right now on the few sites it supports, but the lack of historical data is debilitating.

As a video guy, I realize that duplicating iSyndica's video distribution abilities is going to be expensive and not likely to be affordable because of storage costs.  So I am resigned to handling distribution myself and I don't think I'm likely to sign up for any new distribution service unless it's really cheap.

BUT!! I would sign up for a service which duplicated iSyndica's analytics and took it even farther.  It would need to at least support all of the sites that iSyndica did plus the ability to import data (something iSyndica did) and allow manual editing of the data (something iSyndica did not directly do).  In my opinion, it would also need the ability to track my portfolio on every site.  I realize that for most sites automatic import of data won't be possible, but just a web site which allows me to import a CSV with all of my clip data and then update via a web interface manually and give my reports would be worth its weight in gold to me.  The ability to compare my portfolio on different sites to see what I still need to upload... The ability to track what gets rejected so I know not to re-upload...  The ability for me to compare individual file sales across sites to see what is popular at which site.  Those are the things I would pay good money for.

I know that a couple of sites have some of these features, but I want a site that has ALL of these features.  I don't think the other sites even support footage, just images.

So, I hope that you will consider adding analytics support to your new site and the ability to subscribe JUST to the analytics features and not the syndication features.  I would imagine that a lot of other people like myself would pay for those features and not the file service, but that additional revenue could possible help to lower your costs for the file service and offer it at a better rate.  Perhaps if iSyndica had offered just the analytics as a separate subscription they'd still be around.

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