everystockphoto blog

Major Performance Upgrade

everystockphoto — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:35:45 +0000

One of the ongoing challenges we have been facing is slow response time for uncached queries. This has been due mainly to trying to sort the results we send back, which often number in the many tens of thousands or more.

As of today we have a new database index scheme that should make a dramatic improvement in search response times. We look forward to seeing it perform and are confident it will make the site that much more usable for everyone. Thanks to Alex for making it happen.

Photo Credit: Stig Nygaard CC-BY from Flickr

Celebrity Images from Image Collect

everystockphoto — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:31:44 +0000

Everystockphoto’s growing collection of freely licensed photos does not do very well in the celebrity images category. For that reason, we have partnered with ImageCollect, and integrated their growing library of paid or subscription celebrity images. We hope this will increase the usefulness and enjoyment brought by everystockphoto.com. Give it a try and search for your favorite celebrity!!

Now Searching More than 10m Free Photos!!

everystockphoto — Tue, 31 May 2011 18:04:22 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our ongoing indexing efforts have now grown our library to more than 10m free photos. To put that in perspective, if you looked at one photo every second, for every minute, 24 hours a day, it would take you over 115 days to see them all. And your eyes would be very, very tired. Thanks for your support as we improve the site, and we look forward to the next millions! Keep your eye out, we have an exciting new source of free photos coming soon.

Photo Source: NASA

Column View & Other Upgrades

everystockphoto — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:59:27 +0000

It is release time at everystockphoto.com again! With this major roll-out we are overhauling our search interface and our photo page! We hope you find these upgrades useful, please let us know your thoughts.

Column View – toggle
Using this new handy toggle, you can jump between Classic Search View and Column Search View.

Column View
The new column view sorts search results into 4 license categories, and lets you scroll down endlessly through the results. This means you do not have to reload the page through pagination. It also separates out the most noisy photos (creative commons photos are over-tagged!) from the more professional free sources and the public domain sources.

New Photo Overlay
Instead of the old plus button, we now show you more photo details, and a bigger thumbnail, if you mouse over a thumbnail.

Photo page – carousel
When you click through to a photo page from a search, you can now view the search results in a big carousel at the top of the page, that allows you to scroll through search results directly from there.

Photo page – shortcuts!
These keyboard shortcuts work on the photo page:

← previous photo → next photo
< scroll film strip left
> scroll film strip right

Photo page – large photos
In the case where we have a really large photo, we now display a much larger version of it!

Enjoy!

Big Site Update

everystockphoto — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:13:39 +0000

As a part of our ongoing efforts to improve everystockphoto.com, we made a big release today, detailed below.

Source Drop Down
In the past, you could select which sources to choose from a list in the advanced search (pictured below). This still works, but we have added a multi-select drop down beside the (always visible) sorting options, so that you can always see and modify the sources available for search, without having to open the advanced search.

Hint: if you are having relevance problems with your search, but get lots of results, try removing Flickr! Flickr is the most over-tagged / mis-tagged source that we have.

Sources Choice in Advanced Search Panel

New Sources Drop Down Feature

License Drop Down
We have added upgraded the license chooser in the same fashion as the source drop down. In the advanced search panel, you can choose specifically which licenses to search. We have also grouped custom licenses (which are typically site-specific) into one choice.

Hint: To search a single custom license, you can target that source in particular with the source drop down.

Facebook Like & Tweet Buttons
We have added the Facebook and Tweet Buttons to the photo pages, as well as a Like button on our homepage! We hope you Like us!

New Blog
You’re looking at it! We are using wordpress now, and we will use this along with our twitter account (@evrystockphoto) to keep you up-to-date with everything going on.

Behind the Scenes
Our users don’t get to see the architecture changes we make, but you feel them! Today we rolled out a better re-caching scheme that will result in faster response times. We have also implemented a more sophisticated load balancing set-up, some DB and stats optimizations, and cool graphs.

We hope these new features are useful, please don’t hesitate to give us feedback! We have some excellent additional things in the works, stay tuned!

New Blog

everystockphoto — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:40:34 +0000

Photo Credit: jurvetson, CC-BY on Flickr via everystockphoto.com

Welcome to our new blog! As a part of the latest everystockphoto.com release, we have moved to a more sophisticated blog. This will help us keep you updated on the latest developments.