The ultimate partner to the Symbiostock project has now been launched - though still in beta, it is fully functional, aggregating all the images across the Symbiostock network.

The Symzio system has been organized for maximum revenue and growth:

1) Firstly, and most importantly, it serves as a one-stop solution for all purchases. Customers do not have to leave the Symzio interface to complete their purchases, making the likelihood of conversion much more likely.

2) Contributors retain 70% of all sales revenue on Symzio - affiliates earn 10%. This gives the engine a small but consistent source of revenue with which to grow through promotions and advertising while passing to contributors a large majority of the earnings (as it should be).

3) Contributors set the price for all their full-sized royalty-free media. All medium sized images are standardized to $1.99 to maximize digital sales, and to attract bloggers who would otherwise pirate images or use freebies.

4) Your contributor profile is the key portal to everything: your Symzio images, your social media, and your independent site. Customers can even contact you through it.

5) With regards to the backend, we've implemented a cutting edge system whereby contributor media is spidered often, changes implemented, and most importantly, all media is sourced directly from your independent site in real-time. Symzio caches very little. If you update a title, or keywords, or a thumbnail for your independent site, Symzio will catch on soon enough. However, on the front end, the search provides results that appear seamless, much like other traditional agencies.

6) No more stress with unreliable reviewers! Once you're approved as a Symzio contributor, you control all your media. Add, delete, or revise it at your leisure.

7) Videographer heaven - no more 1 minute limits. As long as your server can handle it, all videographers can expand their portfolios with longer clips, in any format. Symzio is fully compatible with video: http://www.symzio.com/stock-video-footage/juvenile-grey-butcherbird-sitting-tree-another-young-butcher-bird-lands-branch

8 ) SEO heaven - Symzio has been intricately optimized for maximum search engine stickiness. We've littered the site with algorithms that take your content and dynamically create unique descriptors so that as much of your stuff holds its own in the search results.

----------

Just imagine the future workflow of the average contributor: create a beautiful set of images. Come home, process them. Upload them once to Symbiostock. They go live on your independent site and soon go live on Symzio automatically. No secondary submissions, no fear of them being rejected. And when you get a $5 sale, you keep $3.50.

----------

Symzio, along with Symbiostock, provides contributors a complete independent solution: you can host and sell all your media on your own site, and syndicate it with everyone else in Symzio. Best of all, this is all 100% free. Symbiostock costs nothing, and Symzio costs nothing.

You can expand on the base functionality of Symbiostock if you need Video or agency Submissions with optional plugins. But for most of you, the core plugin will work a treat.

This is a fantastic opportunity, and has been developed to give us the chance, as a community, to truly carve a portion of the industry for independents and reduce our dependence on third parties. Here's one of our more traditional stock contributors talking about it: http://picturebreeze.com/symzio-com-a-new-stock-media-agency-idea/

I truly believe that we have been unable to break out from under the yoke of third parties because the proper infrastructure was not in place to provide both contributors and customers a competitive edge - with Symzio and Symbiostock, a wide array of contributor sites, all supporting one another is now within our grasp. All we have to do is step forward and take it.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to throw them my way, and thanks for reading. As we are still in beta, we're always open to improving the system - so if you have suggestions on how we can make it better, let us know!

I leave you with some random samples from Symzio to give you an idea how how it looks:

http://www.symzio.com/stock-photos/bird.html
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/detail-japanese-cherry-blossom-flowers-2
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/tourists-los-arcos-caves

You can read the full blog post here:

http://www.symbiostock.org/migrations-support-requests-and-more/

In a nutshell, we have now added support requests so you can get help quickly and directly from the Symbiostock team. There are nominal costs associated to these to be able to sustain server specific help and specialized coding. This also allows for migrations from legacy to be managed by the Symbiostock team.

A couple of notes:

1) If we discover the bug you need help with is a bug in Symbiostock, you'll be refunded in full

2) If we implement something for you that ends up making it into the final Symbiostock build, you'll receive credit and a backlink to your site in our permanent changelog.

Additionally, we are now going to always be buying our blog and email images from Symzio members or use in-house creations. Our budget will be $5 for each one time use purchase, so price accordingly if you want to be included.

If you're a subscriber to our newsletter then you'll receive notice of this soon enough. For the rest of you, here's some awesome news. We're going to be releasing previews regarding some of the big upgrades to Symbiostock via our blog and forums.

The first big thing we're introducing is the much anticipated Symzio networking features, starting with the Symzio Network Widget. This is a customizable widget that you can add anywhere on your Symbiostock site, exactly like any other WordPress widget. As well, you can use shortcodes to embed it in any post.

This will deliver relevant images from across the thousands of images within the Symbiostock network. It is the first of the networking features that aims to connect Symbiostock users in quick, sleek and relevant manners to maximize collective sales.

For more information as well as image previews, check out our blog post on it:
http://www.symbiostock.org/symzio-network-widget-preview/

More big feature previews will be posted over the next little while, so keep checking our blog and forums!

Full post: http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/symbiostock-search-wordpress-search/

A big boost in search, especially for people with over 500 images. WordPress and WooCommerce, by default do not search tags - very strange, but it's true.

That means that if you keyword your image and bring it into WooCommerce using tags, your customers won't be able to search using those keywords.

You can buy or install third party plugins that do enable this, but in our testing we've found that once you go over about 500 images you see significant slow down, with some people with 1500 images or more experiencing wait times of over 1.8 seconds.

The next release of Symbiostock will use a new accelerator with the search, and include tag searching. Our tests have shown that where you might normally see a wait time of about 1.4 seconds, it now takes 0.2 seconds (85% speed increase!).

A feature I've added to PLUS is the ability to distribute your uploaded images to agencies. This plugs into a system I already had in place for my own use. Features include:

• Automatic submissions based on media type
• Excluding certain media from being distributed
• Automatic JPEG creation and submission alongside vectors
• Re-submission of media
• Keeping track of all media submitted
• Unlimited agencies
• Add/delete agencies
• System will automatically submit all images to newly added agencies
• Live store not required for submissions to operate

No additional cost for this, and you can submit as many images as you want, as many times as you want. As always, for any questions, post them in the Symbiostock.org forums for guaranteed answers. For more details, check out http://symbiostock.com

Thanks guys.

Okay guys, first some updates - most of the beta testing is over and the plugin is almost ready for release. We're double checking stuff but it will be in the next few days or week. The hosting solution (which we are now calling Symbiostock PLUS) is already live, but we aren't announcing it yet. If you want to get an idea of how the plugin looks and works, go over to symbiostock.com, create a trial account and you can use it for 15 days without fuss.

You can see a long list of features here (http://www.symbiostock.org/the-symbiostock-demo-is-live/) and you can browse the documentation here (http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/).

As for all the other stuff, I encourage you to read our EULA (http://www.symbiostock.org/symbiostock-eula/) and our Trademark Policy (http://www.symbiostock.org/trademark-guidelines/). The EULA overall basically just says 'we aren't liable if Symbiostock doesn't perform the way you want', amongst some other clauses. Pretty standard, I think I lifted it off RedHat (http://www.redhat.com/en) and ammended it.

The trademark policy was likewise lifted off a few other open source projects and tweaked. Specifically, our fair use clause outlines that anyone using any of the Symbiostock software can, and is encouraged to use the name or logo. The main reason the trademark policy was created was to prevent third parties from creating weird software, claiming to be Official Symbiostock this or that, and causing confusion as a result. In order to grow, open source organizations must do this to protect their users.

Most importantly, I'm going to kind of sever my relationship with the legacy software now because it seems my attempt to include it in the future of Symbiostock kind of backfired. In trying to make sure some of you didn't feel left out, I was trying to keep you included - but as I now understand that the previous version was a unique animal unto itself that didn't limit itself to the software, I'm going to only focus on the new plugin and leave the legacy one to you guys. It's Leo's code, after all, and the new plugin as well as the new project, despite sharing many qualities and a very similar vision, does appear to be a new breed. In accordance with this, I'm also not going to be providing legacy users with discounts on future Symbiostock stuff. As I didn't get any of that revenue, your best bet would be to recover it from Leo. My taking responsibility for the old plugin was kind of a good faith gesture, but as it has not been received as such, I'm not going to keep beating the poor, and very dead, horse.

My best suggestion would be this - if you feel content with the legacy Symbiostock, feel that its performance and output, and overall leadership and consistency was good for you, you should head over to Leo's spiritual successor to it. I genuinely believe you will feel more at home there.

The new Symbiostock project and plugin is professional, aggressive, sharp, and meant to expand. It's central, most focused purpose is to make us less reliant on third parties to sell our media. It is an open source business for a community of business-people.

For any questions, feel free to PM me on the Symbiostock forums. My communications here will be sparse, at best, for the time being.

Robin.

Some Symbiostockers have contacted me regarding an update that is showing up on their installs.

Unfortunately, the legacy Symbiostock update system is being used for marketing purposes by the previous developer of Symbiostock. I have asked him to stop doing this, but he feels it is appropriate. At this point there is nothing I can do because he is not giving me access to the update system, which is password protected on third party servers.

I recommend you follow the instructions posted here to disable the update notification and not install anything on your legacy Symbiostock server unless it is posted on the Symbiostock.org forums/blog.

I apologize about the confusion.

Robin.