Hi,

Thanks to this forum I fell upon this piece of software and have been testing it out over the past couple of days. I found it a little confusing at first, mainly because I wasnt expecting it to be able to upload and submit.  It is a very powerful and fully featured product. I find uploads very reliable and I dont get the image failing on uploads I was seeing previously. Im not sure I trust the categorizing enough to submit and I find the submitting hit and miss. For example I uploaded 10 images to all my libraries (10 of them). They 95% uploaded but maybe only 25% actually submitted. All randomly across libraries. one did all and the others maybe 1 or 2. The application then crashed which probably upset the submission process.

Does anyone have any tips? Im thinking Ill not submit as it causes confusion. Just let the software upload. Mind you if I work out the right hand side of the software for categorising then it might be better. Seems risky letting it submit for you though.

Chris

Thanks FotoVoyager. I just checked out your sites. Holy moly. Amazing stuff. If you make it to Oz send us a PM. Your work is amazing.

Hi All,

6 months ago I decided to jump into stock seriously and read ltos about it and started applying for libraries. 6 months later I thought id give my results to see how others compare and I wanted to say thanks for all the help I have received on here. A great community.

I am signed up to ShutterStock, iStock, Alamy, PhotoDune, Veer, BigStock, Dreamstime, DepositPhotos, Fotolia, 123RF, Canstock and my own SymbioStock site just recently.

I have made around $1000 from approx 400 images online. Numbers range from 271 on Fotolia (worst for approving) to 470 on Dreamstime. Shutterstock is on 360 and by far my best selling library. I sold 448 images in September and both sales and revenue have been increasing at a static rate. I try to get 100 images a month submitted from my extensive library of mostly travel images.

ShutterStock is by far the biggest of my earners at about 60%. iStock is next with approx another 20%. The other libraries fill out the final 20% so not very good. I have been very diligent to fairly upload to all to get a fair comparison. ShutterStock kills it and with the recent increase to 0.33 a download I expect this to further improve. Scary reliance upon one library though.

As for where I want to go its tough. I will keep going and I get great satisfaction selling older images that were doing nothing. Selling a big $28.00 download is highly satisfying as it makes the effort at that point in time fully worthwhile. I have sold hundreds of images done whilst on a corporate job which has essentially doubled that income. Amazing. From a wage per hour point of view I wouldnt even want to contemplate. Its poor. Very poor. But, who knows how long these can sell for. Its essentially years of earnings and that per hour wage value will increase.

Probably one of the best outcomes is turning my wife around to the idea and being able to structure family holidays towards awesome travel photos. Always a struggle. She was totally against 25 cent stock but as numbers have increased she is slowly getting the point. Its not a per download problem, but more the quantity. The fact that Shutterstock is one of the worst payers but is 60% of my income proves this.

Its been fun

Thanks

PLRang. Just wondering how the upgrade to Syxtra was going? Super keen for search terms in menus

Since ive joined Symbiostock ive noticed a sudden increase in registrations. Obviously people have to sign up the site to purchase. Is there a way I can check this or should I be concerned? Can I do much to stop this. I had maybe 5 in 3 years just on Wordpress. Ive had 10 in a week since joining Symbiostock

Chris

aha I see. I have that installed already and its great. Look forward to it

Thanks a lot. Yep think we are pretty close to agreeing:) The system you have is good and better than I thought it would be. Mainly because when you apply the image category in 'quick edit' it appears next to be main category making it easy to apply.

I did one here:

http://www.filedimage.com/photography/image-type/australia-images/

Thanks

Hey,

thats exactly what im after. So how did you achieve that. Unless im missing the obvious from within Symbiostock

Wow thanks for great detailed responses. My system in terms of stock (10 libraries) is to go thru my images and mark as flagged and green colour (had issues with just colours in past). I then upload equally to all libraries. No exclusive so thats easy.

My Zenfolio smart collections work entirely off combos of keywords. So when ive edited images for my stock libraries a London image would have 'europe, landscape' in its keywords. This is then added straight to my Zenfolio gallery. Its brilliant. I can make all kinds of changes and just sync perfectly

Obviously the Wordpress side is different, hence my asking. Its a very tricky thing getting this right because it has to be robust, backed up and applied from the start. At present  ill just upload to Symbio as I so for other stock. How I approve images is another matter, I average maybe a 75% so I wont upload images that have failed on most sites.

Chris

Ah got it. Predefined widget areas. I see now. Now i remember my last site why i went 'full width' . Now to make tweet area look nice

Ah thanks for that. Of course. Once again i knew id seen it but couldnt remember where. So obviously that sets it to the side or footer as a widget. One would need  another plugin to make it display in main content?

Excellent thanks guys and girls. Checking them out tonight