I'd really appreciate some opinions, I have no fellow photographers I know near me to chat with!

I have a beloved Canon 550D/T2i that I've put through the wringer since it was given to me about 2.5 years ago.  Recently the shutter died so I put it in for repair.

The repair quote has come back at $391 (shutter repair, and the whole outer body needs replacing as the rubber grip has almost completely come way).  That's such a big chunk of money that I'm wondering if it would be better spent on a new camera. 

I think I want to stick to ASP-C for now, as I have a couple of EF-S lens that I can't afford to replace yet (although I dream of a full frame one day) and I suspect even the cheapest is out of my budget for now.

I have been doing some googling but I'd love some fresh opinions - would you repair or replace?  If replace, with what?  I'd rather not spend more than about $700 if I can help it, but could probably stretch to $900 or so if it seems really really worthwhile (and cash in some incoming birthday money!).

24th...

I had almost nothing early December, I don't really have anything Christmassy, but it's nice to see a few now.

Even if I'm about to deactivate them 

Can they all not just have a straight forward "Not commercially viable" reason? Why hide behind technical reasons, if a business decision can be just as good and does not leave the contributor confused about his/her capabilities or that of his/her equipment. 

I really wish that agencies did this. It is very confusing when you're trying to better your work and you're given an inaccurate rejection reason.  I saw a critique on the istock forum where a contributor was asking the same thing, and all the responses came back saying that the original rejection reason wasn't really the point, it was more likely that the image was low commercial value.  That's a very subjective call to make, but then so is composition, so I don't understand why agencies don't use it (or make more use of it).

I'm only small fry really, and I'm might not have the most streamlined method, but so far the best I've found is:

• Make templates for everything you think you might sell.  I'm missing 100s of products, but realistically I think photos tend to sell best on paper products and electronics cases.  At least that's where they look best.
  
• Put your new image on your templates.  I'm also picky about image placement (you have to be really or lots of your stuff will look rubbish) but some images I find I barely have to tweak one or two products, others I may have to tweak 20 or more, but that tweaking doesn't take long and you'd have to do it if you didn't use QC regardless.
  
• Then onto the painful bit - title, keyworking etc.  This is the win for me with quick create, as this is only done once per image.
  

I do find zazzle buggy which is frustrating - eg if you missed ticking the ratings radio button it blanks all the fields when it reloads the page and doesn't give you a clear error message telling you what it's done (resulting in me wasting lots of time re-doing those products from scratch) - but as you get used to those you can create stuff pretty fast.

I created about 1000 products in the 2-3 weeks leading up to Christmas this way.  I don't know if that's heaps compared to everyone else but it felt like a lot to me and has already helped sales a little (well, a lot for me but again, I'm small fry!).  I'd love any suggestions where I've gone wrong or missed something though!

I'm still new so this might end up being unwieldy, but as you mentioned using Lightroom.  I use Collections in Lightroom to categorise my images and track what's going where.  Each site has its own collection, with sub collections for accepted, pending, or rejected.  Easy to move images about between the collections or have the same image in multiple collections etc.  I like knowing what's been accepted where, and for now I think it's helping me get a feel for what different agencies want.

When I'm at a point where I've submitted all my backlog to all the sites I'm interested in, then I might collapse the individual site collections into one, but for now I need to know what I have and haven't submitted to any one site.

Just a thought, anyway!