Creating and promoting public lightboxes

Recently, I've learned that Lightboxes can be "public" only when it has at least 1 photo from someone else but myself. I see a lot of contributors promoting public Lightboxes under their "Stock photo description" area, but those Lightboxes normally contain their own photos plus 1 photo from someone else to make them public?
Thanks for your help!

No.

The whole lightbox naming system can be very confusing. Most of the confusion comes from an incredibly bad choice of names. There are two kinds of lightboxes, private and public. Bizarrely, if you just want to share your images with the public, then what you actually need to create is a private lightbox. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but that's what you do.

So those lightboxes you see in the image description area beneath the thumbnail on the file close up page, which say click here to see more of this model or subject, those will nearly all be private lightboxes. A private lightbox contains the work of just one contributor. Private lightboxes though cannot be searched from the lightbox page.

But what if you wanted to create a lightbox of say the best pictures on iStock of New York, and you wanted it to be searchable from the lightbox page, as linked above? In that case you would need to include the work of other artists in there. The purpose of public lightboxes is not to just showcase the work of one person, they are supposed to serve the buying community by providing a kind of curated search result.

Basically, if you just want to promote your own work to the public, what you actually need to create, somewhat counter intuitively, is a private lightbox.

See this article for a how to guide on sharing lightboxes

(Edited on 2013-02-07 04:53:01 by kelvinjay)

Kelvin, I think, part of the problem is that the wording on the Lightbox page is misleading.


"Your lightboxes can be kept private or, after you've added 20 files, be made public and searchable by other iStockphoto members."


and from the Edit Lightbox page

"Public lightboxes are not visible to other members until they contain at least 20 files, have proper keywords, and a description."


in both cases it does not mention the need for other contributors work to make the LB public.

Ohh, I didn't know at all. Thanks Kelvin for clarification! Yes, indeed, it's quite confusing...

Yep. That's certainly not a recipe for clearing up confusion.

I'll try and draw it to the attention of those who can fix it.

Note to self: ask for lightboxes to be renamed Solo and Group instead.

That or Private and Public Group, but the wording needs some tweaking

I think the word private is the issue. It implies that others won't be able to see it or the contents. Back in the day, they were called galleries and lightboxes, which wasn't much clearer either. Anyway, we shall see...

(Edited on 2013-02-07 06:29:49 by kelvinjay)

What about "Personal" and "Public"?

Again, I think the name implies that it is not public.

The average contributor coming along, hearing about lightboxes and wanting to share their work with the public would still assume they would need to create a public LB in order to share with the public. This is why the whole use of private, personal, public etc cause confusion.

What really distinguishes them most is how many people have work contributed to them. That's why I thought Solo and Group would be a much easier thing to explain. Solo LBs would have content from just one contributor, Group LBs would have content from more than one contributor, and would also be searchable. That's an easier concept to grasp I believe than what we have now.

Anyway, it's a perpetual cause of confusion on the forums. It's not particularly on the official radar to be addressed any time soon, but just something that, having answered this question many times over several years, I'd personally like to see changed, as I believe it could just require a bit of minor text editing and no serious amount of Dev time to make things a lot clearer.

I can dream, can't I?