At first I thought you were joking, but this thing has gotten so bad it might be a good idea. If nothing else, a start-over with some opening text explaining that this is a simple program I'm creating (not a save-the-industry-scheme, not an everyone-make-me-rich scheme, etc). Maybe if we pre-address the troll-able accuse-able stuff ahead of time the only people commenting will be people genuinely interested? I think people have trained themselves to overanalyze these things to the point that a simple image-watermarker and website-uploader is considered a weapon of the antichrist.

I don't want to overwhelm MSG though.

You have already done that. Twice. The people that are interested told you so. Why not get on with actually building the thing? 

My thoughts on direct selling is that it is business model not likely to succeed, or rather not generate enough sales for it to have been worth anyone's time. From reading various threads over the years here, I think that has turned out to be the case. Think about it from the customer's point of view. I used to buy stock photos for work, so I once thought like a customer. How am I going to spend the least amount of time searching for the best possible image for myself or my client? I'm going to go a mega big site like shutterstock or istockphoto or adobestock, or gettyimages because I know that is where I'll spend the least amount of time getting the right image for my project. Can you imagine the nightmare it would be if I had to remember 500 individual photographer's websites and go to each one by one and do my search in the hopes they might have something suitable? The latter just isn't going to happen. Say you get an individual website up to sell photos. How are you going to let the hundreds of thousands of graphic designers know you exist? Will you be spending tens of thousands of dollars on Google adwords? You guys are trying to solve a problem that exist for you, but does not exist for the customer.

It will succeed if you understand why buyers search places other than the big stock sites. Then offer something unique to address their needs and have a strategy for them to find you.

The approach that hasn't worked for contributors is to take their microstock portfolio, dump it into a website, and hope to sell something. The question nobody seems to ask is, what does your website offer that buyers can't get through the big stock sites? Like you said, think like a customer.

My ideal site is the same as it was in the beginning. I would love to have one site with three or six or ten like minded shooters with complementary portfolios (size, skill level, complementary subjects) and end up with something with about 100K or so bankable images under one roof. We'd all self market our respective niches and go from there.

with just a few other photogs, it would be easy to set up an external communal search site, exporting image info; so you could do it with Leo's new system

LOL.    And you get meaner all the time.

@cascoly what is your opinion of the inter-site search network that we all had? Hindsite is 20/20, I'm curious what you think.

I didn't intend to carry on anything like that in this endeavor, but still I'm curious. You had contributed very well to it.

Wow, I didn't read like .. 2 pages worth of crap.

The search system I feel like was fine ... The search page could have used some significant improvements. It was more like it was designed for us to go search for ourselves. Not buyers searching for images.

Quote from: Leo on December 28, 2016, 18:30

Quote from: cascoly on December 28, 2016, 18:21

Quote from: cathyslife on December 28, 2016, 18:14

My comment was on point...you want it deleted just because you dont like what i said. Looks to me like you are the one that should be deleted, since all you did was call me names.

I disagree with the need to delete, but your knock against leo was gratuitous (besides being incorrect) 

your other comments were redundant and served no positive purpose other than trying to re-ignite old flames

She could have had her say at the outset, but she showed up when the thread got popular.  Cathy, you will not be receiving any more replies from me for the duration of this.

I actually don't recall him trying to rake in money from us at any point ... the extras and addons sure, and possibly whatever he made from the transfer of Symbio which, when I checked a few months ago was severely out of date and had compatibility issues. So it's dead if I'm not mistaken.

He made some off of HIS OWN WORK. What did we contribute to Symbiostock ... testing scenarios? Plugin developers make money from support and premium plugins, and while premium plugins were offered, support was always given and dealt with in a timely manner. If you don't want to buy something, just don't ... it's that easy. There were never any promises of earnings or potential ...

Anyhow, nice to see you alive and doing well Leo. Keep up the good work.

You should have taken the time to read the 2 pages of crap. In there, you will see that my first comment was directly related to this thread, not the past, not ANY of the things you are talking about above. Instead, it is Leo and cascoly talking crap...but hey, just ignore that. They have. 

My only comment was that cascoly is defensive because he had a stake in the first go-around. And i dont care whether it was sales, SEO positioning, or whatever he wants to call it or laugh at me about. 

True, but what i envision is more backend stuff, only one login for a customer, and easy distribution of dollars to whomever sells photos through one site. Easy enough to allow access to shooters to upload photos to one site, but paying them for sales is the hard part (in my mind). I am not techie enough to automate that.

I think right now few individuals make enough on a self hosted site, but 3-10 might be able to carve out some sales for niche subjects (ie science, industrial, etc). Its not about competing with the agencies, its about finding those few companies and people that only need specific subjects and genres and not have to search through millions of unrelated images. Might be interesting.

For starters, I will ensure that one site can contain multiple submitters. That is a sensible thing to do in the beginning -- ensuring that 1 site is not locked to 1 user. So the first release won't necessarily be built for multiple users -- it will just be blind to the idea of contributors, accepting images under a given author with a password and organizing it as such.

Inevitably people will want tracking of sales and book-keeping, so that might be a latter plugin (and I'll attempt to keep it all pluggable). I'm really adhering to the KISS principle with this project as much as possible.

snip from reply #49 on page 2
 Maybe if we pre-address the troll-able accuse-able stuff ahead of time the only people commenting will be people genuinely interested?

Mission accomplished. Start talking about the old issues, and make it sound like someone else is the crazy, stupid one bringing it up. You boys certainly have an honest, above board way of doing business. As always. 

from post #41 cascoly
is absurd claim -- let us know when you return from the trump-fake-news-whingers universe

This comment makes it sound like you are a Trump fan. That must be who you boys get your business model from.

Wow! Sorry that this thread was trolled so badly and that I wasted so much time trying to get through the pointless banter.

Sounds interesting. I've always wanted to host my own database but any time I've tried Wordpress I just gave up because it always felt bloated.

What I'm primarily interested in is a clean, ultra search engine friendly site to host thumbnails / previews to drive customers to an agency using a referral code.

Anyone working towards a stronger photography community should be encouraged, not trolled.

Wow! Sorry that this thread was trolled so badly and that I wasted so much time trying to get through the pointless banter.

Sounds interesting. I've always wanted to host my own database but any time I've tried Wordpress I just gave up because it always felt bloated.

What I'm primarily interested in is a clean, ultra search engine friendly site to host thumbnails / previews to drive customers to an agency using a referral code.

Anyone working towards a stronger photography community should be encouraged, not trolled.

How do you figure calling people names, asking they be blocked because they express their opinion in a professional manner, and getting angry is someone working towards a stronger community? Some of you seem to have a blind spot. How you can consider working with such people is beyond me.

 If the goal is to actually write software, why isnt there a separate forum set up by the developer where only people interested can go to discuss that software? Why wasnt a link provided in the first post so people could interact directly with the developer somewhere else besides here? My answer is because maybe drama is the whole point, not actually creating software. I cant come up with any other answer why it keeps happening over and over.

Quote from: DallasP on December 30, 2016, 17:01

Quote from: Leo on December 28, 2016, 18:30

Quote from: cascoly on December 28, 2016, 18:21

Quote from: cathyslife on December 28, 2016, 18:14

My comment was on point...you want it deleted just because you dont like what i said. Looks to me like you are the one that should be deleted, since all you did was call me names.

I disagree with the need to delete, but your knock against leo was gratuitous (besides being incorrect) 

your other comments were redundant and served no positive purpose other than trying to re-ignite old flames

She could have had her say at the outset, but she showed up when the thread got popular.  Cathy, you will not be receiving any more replies from me for the duration of this.

I actually don't recall him trying to rake in money from us at any point ... the extras and addons sure, and possibly whatever he made from the transfer of Symbio which, when I checked a few months ago was severely out of date and had compatibility issues. So it's dead if I'm not mistaken.

He made some off of HIS OWN WORK. What did we contribute to Symbiostock ... testing scenarios? Plugin developers make money from support and premium plugins, and while premium plugins were offered, support was always given and dealt with in a timely manner. If you don't want to buy something, just don't ... it's that easy. There were never any promises of earnings or potential ...

Anyhow, nice to see you alive and doing well Leo. Keep up the good work.

You should have taken the time to read the 2 pages of crap. In there, you will see that my first comment was directly related to this thread, not the past, not ANY of the things you are talking about above. Instead, it is Leo and cascoly talking crap...but hey, just ignore that. They have. 

My only comment was that cascoly is defensive because he had a stake in the first go-around. And i dont care whether it was sales, SEO positioning, or whatever he wants to call it or laugh at me about. 

Well, I'm not going to get involved in the pointless banter. I think the OP was to update us on what he's working on. I'm not sure why everything has to be an argument on MSG. We all could use a dose of respect and humility.

Happy New Year to all Direct and Exploited-by-agencies sellers!