Constant Content

What is the best way to include photographs with my article. Should I simply embed them in my word document in the areas that make sense from an editorial point of view or is there a more preferred method? Just curious, thanks.

Pete

To be honest, photos don't add much to the article. Customers want content more than they want content with photos. After all, they can't see the photos before they purchase the content, and may not even use them.

If you want to upload a photo, please do so as a separate file on the submission form.

Ed

Thanks Ed - The article is all about Fiesta and in this case the customer may appreciate them. I agree in most cases it would not matter.

Pete

If you upload your photos separately in the photo section, you can direct buyers to them in the short summary of your article, and direct photo viewers to the article in the detail of the photos.

Good idea Jak - thanks. I did that with another story as well.

Pete

[quote="Ed"]To be honest, photos don't add much to the article. Customers want content more than they want content with photos. After all, they can't see the photos before they purchase the content, and may not even use them.

If you want to upload a photo, please do so as a separate file on the submission form.

Ed[/quote]

Just an idea - but if there are those of us, like me, who ARE photographers, too... perhaps a means of linking to associated images that we have for sale here, too?

I think this is a good idea, but it's not up to me. Maybe post this in the Suggestions/Requests forum?

You can always manually add a link in your short summary pointing them to images you think would enhance the article.

[quote="Celeste Stewart"]You can always manually add a link in your short summary pointing them to images you think would enhance the article.[/quote]

But perhaps bundling the two in a single price might make the photo section more attractive to buyers, no?

Maybe so! Who knows?

It would be cool if the system let us link to appropriate images (especially our own) as an enhancement to the article. For example, if you were writing about "How to ride a tricycle" and you just so happened to have pictures of kids riding trikes available.... it would be cool to be able to highlight those as optional purchases. Kind of like Amazon's "people who bought this, also bought this" type of thing but more tailored of course.

That way, if they want to enhance their articles with images, they'd have recommended choices to choose from and if they didn't need images, they could just buy the article and go from there.

It has been my experience that when I did include an embedded photo into the word file the end user usually has trouble exporting it. I of course did test the procedure it worked out well for me, but the end user exported and posted their version of the image as a bmp then converted it into a gif. Neither is the best format for photos. Ugh, I just cringed when I saw it published. My other experience is that when you import a photo into Word it does some backend conversion into bmp anyways. No matter what you do. So generally, overall it's a bad idea to embed. Do upload images as separate files.

I would like to offer up an example of website that offers something similar to what was described as linking to the photos. The website is TurboSquid.com. The website offers their artists the opportunity to advertise 3 other products/images (of theirs) that is related to the single product that is being viewed. Implementation is pretty slick. They have a different target audience so their implementation is a little different. They also have the challenge of aspect ratios since every artist uses different standards. In that respect it is somewhat similar to CC - every photographer's camera has a different aspect ratio.

Ed, put a little whisper in Chris' ear to check out the website for a visual.

Well, the good news is that the article sold in like 30 minutes, even before I could get the photos reviewed and approved. The website used their own photo with the story.

As a side note, the photos that the San Antonio Fiesta people gave me were all too small and were rejected by CC. At least the article sold quickly!

Thanks for all the input and help. I think the best idea here would be to upload the photos (greater than 1000 x 1000) here and link to them in the summary. However Ed was right, the website was looking for content, not photos.

Thanks again!

Pete

You really should only be selling photos that you, yourself, took on Constant Content. Photos that are the property of someone else should not be submitted for sale.

Ed

Ok, thanks. I didn't really want to sell the photos, I was permitted to use them with the understanding that they were going to be used with the article, which was the original intent of this post from the start. Had I embedded the photos they would have come with the article and that's was I was trying to do. CC does not allow us to post photos separate without a price attached.

Pete