Fotolia

What’s new in this upcoming update?

First, Fotolia uploads and statistics will come back. It seems I am going to implement this stuff without using their API, since Fotolia guys are sooo slow in replying emails. Could it be caused by their V2 web site which is unreasonably slow too?

Indeed, the site features almost the same functionality like the previous version and with very similar look and feel. They claim it took them 1 year to develop V2. Add here a week or so while Fotolia web was off-line, loosing their money…
And now “completly redesigned” Fotolia V2 still lacks some basic “must-to-have” functionality (IMO), e.g. “Search-in-Forums”. (Should I use Google for that? – come on, guys!)
Personally, I would expect getting something better than their current V2 after all these efforts.
Hopefully, it will change soon. I believe that Fotolia guys have a pool of features that they are going to implement basing on their new infrastructure.

So, meanwhile I am still waiting for my Fotolia V2 API developer key and my customers are waiting to upload their work to Fotolia. It seems I do not have much choice at the moment, so I’ll go for a proven “straight-forward” implementation technique – and this is what will be included in upcoming v1.3.3.

Next, I am working on speeding up the images preparation procedure. More specifically, on speeding up multiple images selection for the upload.

As you know, ProStockMaster sports 2 options for the stock photos upload: uploading a folder of stock photographs and uploading “a manual selection” of microstock images.
Uploading a folder with stock photography is a wizard-based procedure allowing you to upload a folder full of your stock photos for sale just in a few seconds clicking on “Next”->”Next”->”Next”.

Uploading a selection of stock photos is also quite fast. However, making the selection is not fast at all.
You have open each stock image, add title, description, keywords and select sites for uploading. This is a one-by-one procedure, which can be considerable time consuming.
In order to speed up the selection and image preparation process, I am going to add some new functionality to “Copy” button in the main IPTC panel.

“Copy” button will open a wizard asking you if you wish to copy metadata to or from currently open image. Another option will allow you to add sites selection as a part of data that will be copied.

If you select “from this image to other multiple images” the next wizard window will allow you to select multiple files located anywhere in your system. Once you finish your selection, IPTC metadata and/or sites selection will be copied from the currently open file to the selected files.

I believe it significantly speeds up preparation of multiple images that are going to be uploaded on the same sites. If these images represent a set with the same subject, copying IPTC data from the “master” image to all the rest can also help.

Alternatively, if you select “to this” image the wizard will allow you to select a single image on your system, which will be used as a source for IPTC data and/or for the site selection.