Completely out of the blue I get a sale today. I've had to neglect my Symbio site over the last few weeks - life getting in the way and all that.

But I've just sold an image that has done well elsewhere but only nets $0.25 each time. Today? I netted 100 times more. Blimmin' marvellous.

Woo and indeed hoo.

I'd be more than happy to pay. Heck, I've been expecting to pay for the update and I'm surprised to see "free" being considered.

Late to this after a busy weekend - awesome stuff. Leo - you are da bomb!

I think I'll stick with what works for now. There's a lot going on with my site at present, and after some wrestling around with layout stuff this past week, all's well. I don't need surprises right now.

Those are my thoughts too.

Hi guys

Right. As you may have seen elsewhere, I've only really got my site running properly in the last couple of weeks. I'm on WP 3.5 and the standard latest Symbio theme/child theme combo.

Has anyone had any major issues with the WP 3.6 upgrade?

Chers
Russell

I haven't updated to 3.6 yet.

I have been with Photoshelter for three years. Sold 2 pics but spend almost a fortune  . They say their SEO, system, network reels in buyers. Well, not for me obviously...<snip>

If you ever go on the PS fora, there are quite a few threads on how cr4ppy PhotoShelter's SEO is. They're hoping that their new HTML5 based sites are going to improve SEO.

There's an active discussion thread on there at the moment regarding a forum discussion on LinkedIn and this is a copy and paste of one of the replies:

One comment from the photo buyers that replied to the thread that surprised me a bit (but shouldn't have) is that they do not use search engines like google/bing to locate images.

They first go to the big stock agencies they have accounts set up with.
Then they will try photographers they have previously dealt with and liked, or are refereed too.
Then they will try smaller places like photoshelter.
And as a last resort if nothing else works and they are desperate will try google.

Images returned in the search engines like google/bing are a big unknown,
unknown if available for licensing,
from unknown source,
unknown previous use,
unknown pricing.
Basically a lot of time and effort to track down the originator just to verify if the images are even for sale.
And time is something they usually do not have

...

Interesting from a Symbiostock point of view, no?

Actually, that could be a good strapliine - "Redefining Stock", "A New Approach to Stock Images", that sort of thing.

For once, such a statement would actually be true both from the point of view of what SymbioStock has already done, what it offers currently and the way we go about things from here on in..

I had this conversation on MSG a few months back.

In some languages, the word for "monkey" and "ape" is the same. In Italian, there is one word for both that has the same etymological root as "simian".

The conversation arose because iStock's keywording system disambiguates "ape" to "monkey".

The "monkey/ape" problem is fairly specific but it is a real one. A similar problem is "English" being used by buyers when they mean "British" (or even "Welsh", "Scottish" or "Northern Irish"). Ditto for "England" being used when the buyer really means "United Kingdom". So just like I may keyword an orang-utan as "monkey" I have the conundrum of deciding whether to keyword all my shots from Wales as "England". I see that even our very own Mr Locke made this egregious error recently in another thread. (That was cleared up but it's still a common problem).

Trust me. Asking a Welshman to include "England" as a keyword for a shot taken in the town of his birth is like asking Dubya to vote Communist. 

I think that the point is that it's easy to spot extreme keyword spam but there's a huge, wide, large, massive, grey, gray, area, region, where one woman's spam is another man's effective, comprehensive, best practice (practise).

What about doing it cheap or even pro bono but make it conditional on them signing releases?  Time permitting, you could then have a separate shoot where you bring some suitable stocky props.

Quote from: Imagenomad on July 26, 2013, 16:08

Woot! Woot!

As do images for other search terms. Thanks again, guys. Genuinely grateful.

right, it wasn't because I had a puffin prejudice!

How could anyone be prejudiced against puffins?! (Unless you particularly love sandeels...)

Yes, if you want others to link to  your site
With this plugin your network results are not displayed.
So maybe deactivate it, and if you want to use it in the future, try to find a solution.
Here is something, maybe it will work for you:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-disqus-comment-system-disqus-comment-system-showing-weird-code-on-my-page
There is something about "advanced options", which allow to fix it.

This "weird code" is added to your network results, now it looks like this:

http://stockphotology.com/?s=puffin&submit=Search&post_type=image&symbiostock_network_search=1

Thanks for that. I've changed the "JS in the Footer" option initially as suggested in that thread. If I continue to have the same problems, I'll deactivate Disqus.

Thanks for your help with this.

Russell