In the past six hours, I’ve released 53 of my photos as royalty-free stock. Check out the stock gallery to see them all. This means that every photo I’ve published is free for anyone to use. Quite a milestone, I must admit.
All the photos in the portfolio (about page 2 of the stock gallery at the moment) have source images now. I’ve linked to them in each post. So you can get right to the source of things, be it a JPEG (stuff with my older cameras) or .cr2 RAW (from my Canon Rebel XTi). This is great for digital artists. I can’t think of anyone who is doing what I do: putting countless hours into crafting beautiful and artistic photos (hopefully), and then releasing both the edited and original versions for free to all. Even if you just want to see what kinds of files the cameras I use produce, it’s a great resource.
Anyway, I didn’t post source images for the 53 photos I just posted… because my FTP client keeps timing out on the uploads. Maybe it’s SYN Hosting’s fault; I’m not sure. But I’ll come back to that. The source files should roll in at about 400MB, because RAW files are big. Update: I uploaded them overnight and added links to each post. Every stock photo that’s edited has a source image now!
I’ve already noticed that traffic, particularly bandwidth usage, has spiked. Check out these stats:
That’s how much bandwidth Thripp.com has been using in megabytes per day over the past week. That’s a tenfold increase on the 15th compared to the 14th. Granted, this isn’t drilled down to this particular blog, but I’ve been the most visited one on the Thripp.com network as of late, so it’s safe to say the stock images are being widely downloaded. Thanks everyone! I can go up to 4GB per day safely… then I’ll consider offloading them to a secondary server, because I only get 120GB a month on SYN Hosting.
This is the time to institute some changes going forward. My previous method of posting a photo and then a separate source image has worked well for a long time. It was just last month that I started giving everything away as a stock resource, so it was a fine plan to make new posts for each stock photo instead of adding it only to the old ones where no one would see them. But now that everything’s up to speed (i.e. all the photos are also released as stock), it’s time for a shift. From now on, there will only be one post for each photo, and that post will link to both the edited JPEG stock image and source JPEG or .cr2 file, plus include any 4*6 for-sale versions if applicable. The 8*10’s will stay separate for thumbnailing convenience and because I don’t have many. I won’t make JPEGs for source images with the border and title anymore; just a link to the real source image. This is inconvenient if you want to take a quick look to see my edits (my camera’s raw files can be up to 13MB), but it’s less work for me and it’s worth it because not many people used the old source image function anyway.
I don’t mind the old posts staying the way they are, because it’s historical, it’s different, and it served Brilliant Photography well for many months. I’m looking forward to doing things differently with new photos later today. Must sleep now.
Thanks everyone!