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Messages - bobbigmac

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1
It's been a long-time coming, since they changed from their original plugin platform to their new one. That's why I've not updated it, the api/access was restricted bit by bit and it became so hard to update that 5-weeks waiting for even minor fixes to redeploy updates was not unusual :/

I don't have an alternative for Firefox (their new plugin platform is pretty useless) but I do have something similar for Chrome over at http://tabcycle.com/ (this is what I use now for my microstock earnings and a whole bunch of other sites' updates). It's a bit more faff as you'll need to be familiar with basic CSS selectors to build your own, and it runs a single open pinned tab at all times(the 'cycle' part, because Chrome doesn't let active pages load in plugins' background process pages, again an annoying restriction of the platform), but there are a few of the microstock agencies in the gallery which are usually pretty decent and keep me up to date.

2
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Picniche tool up creek?
« on: July 08, 2015, 11:56 »
I do. I use TabCycle as mentioned twice previous :) Most people nowadays use one of the (several) mobile apps afaik, but there are various options.

4
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Picniche tool up creek?
« on: July 08, 2015, 08:48 »
The issue there is that my entire underlying system for updates is all built on out of date technology, usually with various tiers in the stack just to keep it at the basic accessibility level it still has (it pretty much costs me money every month to even 'not' maintain the plugin). Combined with the increased access, and thus onerous security implications which need to be checked, it's just more effort than it's worth given the many other (better) ways now available to keep track of your balance.

5
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Picniche tool up creek?
« on: July 08, 2015, 08:24 »
Because of the high level of access granted to traditional firefox extensions (they could basically format your system or steal all your passwords without you knowing) a crowd-sourced maintenance model for the advanced features is highly unlikely to be practical. You could switch to TabCycle if you know how to use css selectors yourself, but that comes with it's own issues (and requires Chrome).

6
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Picniche tool up creek?
« on: July 08, 2015, 08:00 »
It may still work for some people, really depends how much you keep it up to date yourself (basically the 'engine' is still fine, just keeping all the pollers uptodate is pretty much impossible). I've delisted it from the public extensions on mozilla but if it still works for you, great, it'll still be in your browser until you remove it :)

7
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Picniche tool up creek?
« on: March 08, 2015, 08:58 »
Heya Guys

The picNiche toolbar is now pretty-much unsupported, Mozilla limited many of the internal APIs too much, and made the update process too slow (looking at a few weeks per revision) so I can't update it anymore. Also because it doesn't generate any revenue I'm finding it really difficult to justify replacing it with something built on their new plugin platform :/ It's just so much work to manage for every agency site change.

I switched over to Chrome when Firefox entered their accelerated release schedule, so I do have a similar alternative for Chrome (though it's not microstock specific) but it's subject to many of the same issues, whenever a watched site changes it's going to break and you need to know enough CSS/jQuery to be able to fix it yourself. http://tabcycle.com/

Until agencies feel the need to add APIs (probably never) a microstock-specific replacement is unlikely.

It's been many years and I've enjoyed building and maintaining the toolbar over the years (despite half the emails I get every time it stops working are surprisingly abusive), but it's just not something I have the resources to keep up to date for every change, too many dependencies.
You might want to switch to one of the several microstock earnings mobile apps to keep an eye on your earnings, they're facing most of the same problems, but the guys maintaining those are either charging to justify the maintenance or at least haven't given up yet :)

Bob

8
Shutterstock.com / Re: SS not reporting sales!
« on: August 22, 2014, 13:51 »
From a technical estimate... the ordering issues described by the OP are probably caused by 1 or both of 2 technical possibilities:

1) Sharding: Different servers store records for different files, since sorting and filtering are often performed by different process, especially at low levels, some unusual ordering may well happen, especially at lower numbers (which are access less often) and at the scale Shutterstock operate. SS have HUGE amounts of data to store and route.

2) Caching: As different searches are performed, various datasets are cached, then the cached records may be consolidated on display to the user. There's nothing odd about this, though does suggest maybe their processes nearer the user could be optimised.

Add to that that if they were hiding sales, it'd probably be a lot more messed up than it already is (as we've seen with smaller agencies a few years ago who were caught hiding (or just losing) sales).

I've met f2f most of Shutterstock's top technical guys over the years (at conferences) and I'm 100% certain they're not doing anything dodgy and only have the best interests of everyone involved at the heart of their operations... besides, Shutterstock makes enough money as it is, stock photo subscription models are usually highly lucrative :)

9
Microstock Services / Re: PicNiche for Contributors
« on: October 20, 2013, 16:46 »
Fixed Bigstock.
Probably will never get round to adding further features to this toolbar, the changing agency sites (anyone who used the ImageDeck will know what I mean :) ) and the time required to maintain around changes is too much for a free toolbar (even the approval process for firefox addons has changed so much that pushing a client-side update takes aaaages (weeks) for them to approve and release), but if any of the pollers stop working please drop me a message and I'll update asap. I generally catch the big 6 pretty quick, but can be tricky to find a spare half hour or so to 'code' and apply an update.
Thx for the heads up :)

10
Microstock Services / Re: PicNiche for Contributors
« on: October 20, 2013, 09:44 »
Will have the Bigstock button fixed sometime today/tomorrow. They've changed their design so I will figure out a new spec for it soon :)

11
General Stock Discussion / Re: more or less keywords
« on: October 08, 2013, 07:10 »
To confirm, these are keywords the photographers had applied to their images, NOT what customers have used to search with?


Yep.
Like that list, but for searches I have here: http://picworkflow.com/blog/research/top-2000-image-buyers-searches-vs-keyword-popularity/

12
General Stock Discussion / Re: more or less keywords
« on: October 07, 2013, 17:03 »
There is no 'perfect number of keywords'. Just stop keywording before you start adding words which you think 'might be applicable'. If you don't *know* those keywords apply to the image, you've added too many :)

13
Skyped you :)

14
I'd start with the Big 4 and the Middle Tier shown to the right of the page, then choose from the Low Earners based on what kind of images you're producing.

15
PicNiche Toolbar / picWorkflow upgraded, now faster than ever :D
« on: September 25, 2013, 09:23 »
Heyhey :)

Just wanted to stop by and let everyone know that I've finally done a major (and much needed) upgrade to picWorkflow's server infrastructure and we're now running better and faster than ever.

I know quite a few people haven't used the site much the last few months because we were constantly hitting the wall on performance and the site became a total PITA to use, very sorry about that :/ Took me a while to dig up the funds for the upgrade (quite a substantial one, added a meaty new server to the network and redistributed the load better on the existing systems), but we're now running steady and all pageloads (atm) are loading sub-1-second. I know it doesn't sound like much but it's essentially overhauled the feel of the entire site!

The keyworders, captioners and retouchers tell me it's it's made it easier and for them to do their thing too, so we should have much faster completion for those too :D

I also have some plans to bring on a beta platform to test some new realtime UI improvements too (Using Node.js/Meteor for the techies among us), though don't have a timeline yet, I'll be rolling them out over the coming months.

Pretty chuffed (Northern English for excited) that it's grown to this point, thank you to everyone who's been using picWorkflow, delighted to have you aboard :D

16
I do have a fairly substantial API on picWorkflow, but it's not very well documented. If Niak wants to add support for picWorkflow as an intermediary for distributing files there's a perfect example of code to do that in the picWorkflow Lightroom Plugin (it's LUA though). We discussed it briefly a long time ago but ran into the language barrier pretty hard, if anyone wants to facilitate I'm open to doing more to make it happen :)

17
Illustration - General / Re: Picworkflow?
« on: September 25, 2013, 09:08 »
If you use the distribution service (or just the free picWorkflow loopback destination) the site will write the metadata to the files for you. Or export a CSV/TSV and use some software to apply them back to your local source files :)

then had to copy and paste the keywords into my files metadata which is kind of a pain
I'm not trying their distribution

18
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Add new agencies?
« on: August 20, 2013, 10:25 »
Please can somebody confirm this is just how things are and that they see the same thing regarding their portfolio?
Aye, that's been showing 'null' or the stored outdated value from before SS' site overhaul (since they changed the url format I couldn't add to the autoupdate). Will be like that till next major update.

19
Paypal files the transaction receipt in your Paypal account when you make any purchases through them.
This receipt should contain all the required information for taxes. I don't know specifically about Germany but it's enough for UK taxes.

20
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Add new agencies?
« on: August 11, 2013, 16:24 »
Heyhey :)
I don't get much time to spend on the earnings toolbar anymore, so won't be updating for non-critical issues, but I do run it myself so tend to fix pretty quickly for the agencies I use (the big 6 and a couple of others). 123rf doesn't work (still, as per several other threads) and there's nothing I can do about it (see other threads if interested). Next time I'm doing a critical update I'll update any of the minor issues too.

You can add your own pollers using the 'Custom Pollers' item in the 'Options - Contributor Bar' accessible via the firefox tools menu or by right-clicking the P icon in the firefox addon toolbar (usually bottom right if you have it visible), though that does require some regex knowledge and a basic idea of what you're looking for the the 'view source' of whatever site you'll like to parse.
Mostly though I use custom pollers not just for microstock earnings, but also for a bunch of other sites including gMail (to check for new mail), Twitter and Facebook (for update counts) and most of my other tools and sites' status panels so I get constant updates on everything :D
B

21
PicNiche Toolbar / Re: Submission tool questions
« on: August 01, 2013, 09:53 »
Not sure if you mean in the old picNiche toolbar, the scripts in there are just for 3 agencies and probably not working.

If you mean the picWorkflow submission assistant, yes if you distribute images via picWorkflow (and select categories) the assistant will help (for 10 or so agencies) to load in any updated metadata and categories (and record the agency image reference back to picWorkflow). Particularly handy for the agencies which don't read metadata and for footage submissions.

You can see a video of it in action here:
http://picworkflow.com/blog/featured/faster-submissions-with-the-microstock-submission-assistant/

Bob

22
Microstock Services / Re: URGENT: Moneybookers scam
« on: July 01, 2013, 11:13 »
I got this one too, and it was very convincing, very nearly caught me out (and I'm very paranoid about these).
Worth noting that the domain name it tried to send me to was moneybookersi.com.

23
Guess that one fell through the "cracks". :P
lmao :)

24
T: Hand of four asses
D: A winning hand of four asses during a game

Ahahaha, sorry about that, I guess since it's actually word it wasn't raised as a possible typo with the captioner by the UI :)
I notice you've fixed it to 'aces' already when I went in to fix it, and I've also refunded (with a little extra) for the heads up.

Will raise with the captioner on Monday to be a bit more careful in future, thanks! :)

25
Recruiting again as I have massive keywording/captioning queues at the mo :/ Several thousand images seeking experienced keyworders :)

If you're interested in keywording, have fluent english and experience of keywording (your own or someone elses images) please drop a link(s) to your work to [email protected]
Thanks :) Bob

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