For the last couple of months we have been busy working on some changes behind the curtains. Our old dedicated servers were becoming obsolete, and the hardware was beginning to fail, causing the site to be unstable. Our gallery system was custom build back in 2010 using current standards which are now long outdated. The PHP code of the site also needed some serious updates to be able to run on updated software.
As we continue to work on fixing up the site, we will be adding new features in the coming weeks and months. Here is a list of things that are already finished. If you have any feature requests, please let us know in the comments or contact us via the contact form on the site.
Faster Site
9 years in internet years is quite a lot. We have now moved the site to new cloud hosting and updated our code to run smoothly and faster than ever before. In addition to that, we recently added CloudFlare CDN to cache files, thumbnails and preview images that will make the site load even faster when fully operational.
License Filter
We introduced a new license system for our contributors last year. This allowed our users to choose a default license they want attached to their uploads. We have now added a new feature that allows visitors to sort image results by license on all category pages and search results. Searching images by license is also an option in our Advanced Search form. Available licenses are Non-Commercial, Commercial and Creative Commons (CC0). Read more about our licenses.
New Image Uploader
Our old Flash based uploader has been replaced with a more modern jquery image uploader that reads embedded metadata in your photos if available. You can upload multiple files in .jpg and .png format. On the process page you can also change the license for each photo if you don’t want your default license applied.
Updated Profile Pages
The public user profile pages have been updated with more statistics. We now show the total numbers for views, downloads and likes from all contributors images together. The profile page also features a “Buy me Coffee” button if users want to donate directly to the author, as thank you for the free images shared. To prevent spam, bio text and website link are only visible for users that have 1 or more accepted images in the gallery. Click here to view a profile page.
New Blog Design
As you can see, the Stockvault blog has also gotten a much needed overhaul. After a long search we decided on a theme that ticked all the right boxes. We wanted something fast and simple, yet aesthetically pleasing with large graphics and readable text. The new theme is also much faster loading than the previous one, despite being much more graphical.
That’s it for now, if you have any feature requests, please let us know.
Bjorgvin, and the Stockvault team.