I've followed this discussion with interest as I also use compound keywords. Am I right in thinking that the latest release 2.5.0 includes a fix that splits compound keywords into their constituent words - ie NEW YORK becomes two words - New and York? I think Leo said that the original compound ones will be kept in the meta data for later use.

Is there a way to get rid of these split words in future -  or are we just creating a massive keyword spam problem for ourselves? As Ron says, searching for Apple now brings up his NYC flags - that isn't what buyers want, in my view. The speed that this appeared made me wonder if all the implications have been thought through - although I hope they have. I'm not at all sure I want my compound keywords split out for ever just to solve a short term issue on site search.

Please tell me there is a way we can get back to our original keywords in a release that is soon to arrive??

Steve

I sold my first christmas image today, funnily enough:


Happy holidays to you all!

Steve

PS - the first time I submitted this to SS, they rejected for no property release for the artwork! Luckily an appeal got it passed that step.

Thanks for that. This was a simple as setting up autoreturn on the Paypal site and using the Customer Management page as the return URL. (BTW - I thought that originally there was a separate return page - did that go in one of the releases of Symbiostock?)

My ebook site that uses WP eStore plugin ignored the stock photo return URL and took me back to the appropriate page on my other site

So all fixed...

Steve

The reason for the written permission is that in some countries (including the US I think), you can stand on public land and take a picture of a scene with people and a protected work of art, say, and sell that as editorial. However, you can't automatically assume that you can go onto the private land and take the same shot and sell it as editorial - as a real example, I took some images inside the catholic cathedral in Washington DC - they were being offered as editorial, but the church became aware of it and asked me to take them down as they had been taken on private property.

Steve

I didn't think you could have a dot in a file name? THings like hyphens and underscore are OK, but dots?

Steve

looks very nice dash but somehow a little slow in terms of searches and opening pictures, actually doing anything...

I also found it very very slow (and my internet connection is very fast...)

Are we coming up against some limits in the speed of Wordpress to handle really big sites? Or is the hosting slowing it down?

Steve

Thanks for your kind comments about my book! Glad it inspired you!

I'm getting by without Lightburner. I found their new prices to high and unknown (in terms of how much I needed each month), and so I have been using Filezilla (which works fine for me) and also I'm trying Stockuploader and working with the developer to fix an issue where it runs slowly on my machine. More later on that.

I'm also putting a lot of effort into my Symbio site (link below) which I think will turn out to be a good move in the future.

Good luck and keep at it!

steve

However for those who perform a search on our site

You've highlighted one of the areas that I think is a much better area to focus on - the internal search. It is pretty primitive right now, and so my money would go on a much better "best match" search that takes compound keywords into account.

I can see the logic of putting your best images forward in a search on the site - it currently puts newest ones there, and I've tended to put my best images on the site first - hence they get lost. REversing the search display would be a nice option for me.

Steve

I'm sure I'm first this month, but as it is a Sunday and buyers seem few and far between, I decided to work out earnings in advance. I ended the month about $100 down from last month to end up with about $1960. Shutterstock easily the best, with $955 and iS next with maybe $234 but it is hard to say without those PPs. All the rest were less than $100. Looking at the numbers, I think the smaller sites do seem to be suffering since the Google image changes. We know that GL has cut reviewers and I can't see any rosy pictures in the other sites either. I finally got a sale from Zoonar (from Getty as their partner) which netted about $40, but I can't rely on them.  I've got about 4000 - 4500 images on most of the sites. iStock is 2800 but I have given up uploading to them again because I am working hard on my own stock site and would rather put the effort there.

So, overall, not great, but OK. Worrying about the future though - lets hope Symbio pulls it all together for us!

Steve

Another thought - I 100% agree about the issue of adding things retrospectively - I'm struggling to get all my images online and I know I have to go back and change those settings for model and property releases and possibly an editorial marking. Lots of work, but I can see the value. I don't see value in restricting the choice that a buyer has of our relatively small library of images (compared to any of the main agencies. Any restrictions on what they see based on a quality or rating level is not a good idea and I can't believe that a buyer of images will be put off by the sort of nude images likely to appear on our sites. I'm sure they have seen far worse!!

Steve

Thanks for not taking offence about that, I did wonder whether to include it or not.

I thought it was very appropriate - that image did have a number of keywords that were just not applicable at all. Short cuts are not good sometimes!

Anyway, I've fixed it now.

Steve

Thanks Sean

I remember a case of someone making sufficient changes to a photograph that it counted as fair use and the new image was able to be copyrighted by the new photographer. This one is getting close to that, I think. I agree that it is probably not editorial in the sense of news, which shouldn't be modified, but fair use? Probably OK!

Steve

So you are saying with premier, there is no clicking the link in paypal. As soon as the transaction completes, it auto goes back to download.

It can be set up to do that, yes. I don't at the moment because of the double website sharing the same paypal account.

Steve