New Greasemonkey Lightbox Script

Buyers, there’s a new Greasemonkey script in town, and this one is right up your alley when it comes to ease of use of iStockphoto’s lightbox functionality.

Where Are Those Display Options?

Sometime last week at iStockphoto, there was some sort of site outage, causing a bunch of strange things to occur here and there at the site.  One issue that has still not yet been fixed is the search return display options.  So, every time you get a search return, you have to reset it to show 200 images instead of 50, or turn back on image titles, etc.  In case you don’t recall how to set these options, here’s a reminder.

iStockphoto Adds Pricing Filter

Today, iStockphoto added a pricing filter to their advanced filtering options (found on the left side of the search results).  This was announced in the forums:

We’re releasing a new search filter today that will allow clients to sort results by price. By default search results will contain files from every price range. To narrow results, you can select preferred price ranges by adjusting the “Price Range” section on the left-hand side of the page in the search facet area.

iStockphoto adds Live Chat Support

Sometime back in 2010, iStockphoto made an announcement that they were adding live chat support – the kind of thing that a simple click pops up a box with a helpful customer service person to talk to, to solve your issues, or just to keep you company ( ).  Apparently, there were some issues with the implementation, or the staffing, or whatever, so the icon disappeared, only to resurface yesterday in this thread:

The And/Or/Not Search Interface

With the recent update/upgrade to the search interface at iStockphoto, the user interface guys slipped in a little something that might help you when making search queries.  It is not immediately obvious, so I thought I’d point it out.

IS Buyers: See If You’ve Already Licensed Content

A buyer recently posted on the iStockphoto forums was having trouble tracking what content he had already licensed and asked this:

… couldn’t iStockPhoto create a system to help your customers know when we have already purchased a specific item #? When I first started using your site, I assumed, like other vendors I purchase from, that when I click on “BUY” or “PURCHASE” for a particular photo that it would pop up and say “OOPS- YOU HAVE ALREADY PURCHASED THIS IMAGE”, so that I would know to go back to my iStockPhoto files and pull the image from my previously purchased file.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been having some fun writing some Greasemonkey (a Firefox add-on) scripts.  Well, I’ve got good news for this buyer, and anyone else that wants help keeping track of whether they’ve licensed a piece of content.  It does involve Greasemonkey, so start by reading the beginning of this post.  Then install the Greasemonkey add on for Firefox if you haven’t already, here.

iStockphoto Greasemonkey Scripts

If you use Firefox (and some other browsers as well, I believe), you can download an add-on called “Greasemonkey“.  This add on allows you to use Javascript scripting  (of your own or others’ creation) on any web page to do … well, mostly anything.  For example, you could use it to access the DOM (document object model) of the page you are viewing, and move a piece of interface somewhere else on the page.  I could go to the Google homepage, and write a script that removed the big Google logo image, if that bothered me, and then, every time I visit the page, the script would run and remove it.  Things like that.  For users of the iStockphoto website, I’ve got a couple of scripts I wrote that may interest you.

“Agency” Coming Online

With the announcement of hosting the “Agency” collection on the site ( a few weeks ago), iStockphoto has moved more towards a supermarket style of a shopping experience.  Various images are being made available at various price points.  It is no longer a “Dollar General” type store, where one price fits all.  Agency is an edited collection, much like Vetta, with a more bright, modern look at lifestyle imagery (mostly), and the collection is now being actively edited…

Some Day My Prints Will Come

Normally, iStockphoto offers a print service on it’s raster content, where you can order various size collector quality prints at reasonable prices.  I’ve never seen a huge demand on my content for prints, but I think others with landscapes and more artsy stuff do sell a few.  Apparently the print offering has been down for a while.  Admin ‘rogermexico’ offers this up in the forum:

We’re going to change our print provider. So right now we aren’t offering prints but will have them back as soon as we have the new deal finished off.

So, if you wanted to order prints, you’ll have to hold off for a bit.

iStockphoto Dev News

In the last few days, there were two development announcements regarding iStockphoto in the forum there.  Both of these should be of interest to stock content buyers at the site.