So I'm just a few days into my Symbiostock site launch, and after spending a few days this week getting things up and running I'm stating to get a better feel for what Symbiostock is and is not. I have some thoughts/ideas about it, as well as some questions, and figured I'd share here and see if other folks have had (and maybe already discussed here) some of what I've been thinking.

First and foremost, as a vector guy I'm just starting to scratch the surface of what is possible with Symbiostock that isn't with most agencies. In particular, aside from GraphicRiver and (maybe) istock I don't think I can upload text-editable files. Most agencies want all text converted to outlines, so no fonts are needed to open files. But I kind of see this as a shortcoming of some images and I think I will want to replace my outlined text files with the original editable text files, or at least offer the additional editable format in the ZIP file option.

Has anyone taken advantage yet of the ZIP file option to offer additional file formats and options?

I also really like the complete freedom to upload things I wouldn't be able to with many stock agencies. For example I started uploading some business card templates (SS and a few other agencies do take these files) but that got me thinking about lots of other things I could upload. I saw it mentioned somewhere that one of the downsides of Symbiostock is that there is no outside review process, so we could populate our sites with lots of junk that would ordinarily be rejected by agencies. And that's true, although I doubt it will be as significant a problem as was suggested. But the flipside to that is we can upload things that agencies just wouldn't take at all, not because of quality but because they just don't take certain types of files, templates, etc.

Anyone offering file types that aren't typically accepted by agencies?

That got me thinking about SEO. One of the issues I've read about here is the concern about duplicate content, Google not indexing more than one version of an image, etc. Again, a valid concern. But also looking at the other side of that issue again, we have the opportunity here to do things with our sites that agencies aren't doing, offering stuff that just isn't what most agencies will take. The SEO advantage for those types of files is huge since we're not competing with ourselves on the agency sites.

Setup of Symbiostock was suprisingly easy. I usually hate digging into someone else's code to customize things, but in this case it was pretty easy. I haven't worked with child themes much before, but this was pretty simple. Thanks to everyone who wrote documentation, tutorials, etc., to make this easy for us.

And of course, thanks to Leo for kicking this thing off. I watched the very early discussions about this when the project first got started and really I never thought it would become what it is. This is really impressive, and I think it's awesome that this became a reality and is now growing rapidly.

...... But I kind of see this as a shortcoming of some images and I think I will want to replace my outlined text files with the original editable text files, or at least offer the additional editable format in the ZIP file option.

Has anyone taken advantage yet of the ZIP file option to offer additional file formats and options?

.....

That got me thinking about SEO. One of the issues I've read about here is the concern about duplicate content, Google not indexing more than one version of an image, etc.

I've used the zip for collections - you also need to upload a jpg (or other image) so that it appears on the product page.  use the same file name for both and symbio handles these automatically. 

only downside is  when an upgrade requires reprocessing all images, all your zips will be repriced as if they were images

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google definitely indexes more than 1 version of an image, but just how, who knows?  I see my images from 123,dream, ss and warmpicture all displayed at times, and now symbio imaes are getting indexed (I rarely was able to get the same images on smugmug site indexed)