If you want a functioning search out of the box get CMS. Anton is also nicer to deal with when it comes to support.   Get your watermark right and don't plan to modify templates much, unless you have a lot of html/css/php experience.

If you want to really customize things ktools is easier to work with but be warned there are a lot of small updates coming close together at this point in V4 and it's a pain to upgrade if you've customized heavily because they are still adding features that change the template files.  The search needs a lot of work for whatever reason they seem to be complicating it more than a simple AND search that just gives buyers images with the tags they typed in.

The biggest plus I've found with ktools vs CMS is slight SEO advantage with more Google traffic in the ktools store but both scripts have a lot of room for improvement there.

Good luck!

I don't find ktools hard to modify at all actually and I've worked with other scripts that were much more "nightmarish".  The one thing that could be vastly improved is the way updates are being handled, I cringe every time I see more changes to the smarty template files and the main css files. I thought the point of the smarty system was so that updates to the software can be made without affecting the templates files for the most part.  It's a real pain to go through all of my template files to figure out what needs to be updated without overwriting my customizations.  Even a change log would make the process easier.

I attempted to but it throws a server error because it apparently relies on some additional updated files in 4.1.1 which he's working on now but it sounds like that one is getting pushed out pretty quickly to fix some known bugs. Someone else got the same result so we are just waiting for the next update to see exactly what it does.

Unfortunately there is still no timeline that I've seen on the search fix despite asking several times.  It also seems that the next big project is Rights Managed pricing.  I don't know exactly what's driving the order of these particular additions, but to me it seems that a proper search should come first or people won't be on your site long enough to find images from additional photographers or with rights managed licensing.

I'm not excited about the addition of a $89 add on before main features that would be useful to all the current customers are finished.

Thanks for the explanation Jeff, I see what is happening there.  I'm doing some research to see if it's worth creating 301's or putting the duplicate entries in my robots.txt file as someone on the ktools forum suggested.  Good to know when editing titles in the future!

I'd be really interested in in seeing where this goes and what you come up with fee wise.  I think a one time set up fee would be good to get the theme installed, how are you handling hosting? Would we be able to self host and register our own domain?

High Paul are you thinking of adding Veer?  Good job with the app nice clean interface and works great!

Thanks Leaf that's a great idea, the site is looking good!

Have you checked the Digital Versions tab of the images and made sure to check "Create Automatically" for each digital profile on each image...you have to do this manually which is QUITE a pain but it is supposedly on the list to be fixed in a future update.

The truth is ktools version 4 search engine does not work as it is.  When a buyer can go to any site you consider competition, type in palm trees (no quotes) and get palm trees, but on your site gets every image tagged tree, trees, etc you are clearly at a disadvantage.

Also it does not take a million dollars worth of development to have a search that works.  I've been working with a competing script to ktools that costs slightly less and has a normal search function that give the buyer images with all of the tags they searched for as it should.

Unfortunately I seem to be talking to myself when asking about this on the ktools forum and facebook page and it doesn't seem like other users are aware of this or as concerned as they should be. 

Apologies for jumping in off topic but this is a giant frustration for me at the moment!

Thanks Leaf!  CMS account is a great script especially for the price and I've always found Anton to provide great support but it was lacking and important feature for me personally, I wanted to be able to offer different sized JPGs as well as PNGs and EPS formats of my illustrations and currently CMS account only supports the JPG option (multiple sizes can be generated) or a Zip file option that you can sell any format but they can't be combined. With the new Photostore it's super easy to add additional formats to each file.  

The other big deciding factor for me was ease of editing the templates, I want to do a fair amount of customization and with CMS account I found it a bit difficult to maintain my changes after upgrades.  I just did the first upgrade of Photostore last night and everything was super smooth no need to touch up my templates.

There were a few other little things I found that pushed me to try out the new script, the watermarks can be updated at any time without having to re generate any thumbnails, in some cases I'd like to add an image to more than three categories, in CMS Account there is a limit of 3 including parent categories.

I will be continuing to use both CMS account (converting that store more into selling design templates and such) and Photostore for the stock image side moving forward.  I'll definitely post a link here when I get the new site launched.

@Cathy thanks for sharing that, love seeing things in use!

@ Lisa - I almost emailed you last week I was wondering about a few tweaks and thinking of seeing who you found for customization but Jon is already adding the features I wanted to tweak, new changes seem to be happening pretty quickly, they've been super responsive to people's feedback on the forums.  

If you have a customized version of K-Tools 3 I can see why you'd stay with it for now, until the tool is done to help port images and info it sounds like it will be a big undertaking.

3 problems with this very bad advice:

1. How do you know that the website or blog has not licensed your RF image legitimately from your agent ? Even at a site like Pinterest there may be users who have licensed your RF image.

2. There is a good chance that sending out these sorts of letters will result in your Paypal account being suspended. At least pending further investigation.

3.  It is the job of your agent to liaise with clients. If you are not happy that your agent is doing enough then you need to address the issue to them.

All very very good points.  It's so easy to get caught up in spending to much time, effort and negative energy into assumed violations.