We want to thank our generous sponsors, Dreamstime.com, TextureVault.net and Obox-design.com, for their donated prizes

1st. Place

Red hot chili pepper with smoke by Andriy Dykun

Andriy will receive $500 in cash, 6 month Dreamstime subscription worth $679,99, 1 month TextureVault subscription, worth $50 and the Carousel WordPress theme by Obox Design, worth $50.

2nd. Place

Bottle with red wine and glass by Alexandr Vlassyuk

Alexandr will receive $150 in cash, 3 month Dreamstime subscription worth $369,99 and a 1 month TextureVault subscription, worth $50.

3rd. Place

Vintage Book by Alexander Trankov

Alexander will receive $50 in cash, 1 month Dreamstime subscription worth $128,99 and a 1 month TextureVault subscription, worth $50.

Please take the time to visit our Sponsors

Dreamstime

Dreamstime is a distinguished leader in stock photography and a major supplier of high quality digital images at unbelievable prices. All stock images available are provided by Dreamstime community’s photographers, shot on film or digital and approved by our editors. Structured on categories and subcategories, the database is renewed with thousands of fresh images and titles on a daily basis.

Visit Dreamstime at www.dreamstime.com

TextureVault

TextureVault is a community driven supplier of royalty free texture and background images. Unlike the usual stock photo site, texturevault.net focus is strictly on providing high quality, creative and “top of the class” textures and background images that digital artists and designers can use in their creative work.

Visit TextureVault at www.texturevault.net

Obox Design

Run by brothers David and Marc Perel, Obox are the makers of Premium WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr themes. Obox was founded in 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Carousel is a theme aimed directly at photographers. The idea behind this design was to give you an opportunity to showcase large versions of your photos without the fussy front end functionality.

Visit Obox at www.obox-design.com

It’s been hard selecting this bunch. The overall quality of images submitted to the contest is superb, and most would easily get into any professional stock photo site out there. We would like to thank all the photographers for their excellent submissions.

Please remember that although the images can be downloaded for free, you may only use them for non-commercial projects. If you want to buy a license to use the image, contact the author of the image in question. (Login required)

The images are in no particular order. Click each image to enter the download page.

The website holds over 55,000 design items all together includes:

Ultimate CSS Framework – Easy PSD-2-HTML Conversion

3D Creator – Create 3D elements from any shape or text

3D Software Box Creator – Unique method to create 3D software boxes

• PSD to HTML 960 Grid System Tutorial
• 340 Seamless Vectors
• 25,000 Photoshop Gradients
• 16,814 Photoshop Layer Styles
• 1,545 Vector Illustrations
• 815 Photoshop Patterns
• 2,986 Photoshop Brushes
• 1,105 Adobe Add-ons
• 782 Vector Elements
• 990 High Resolution Textures
• 512 Vector Icons
• 527 Stock Photos
• 902 Pixel Icons
• Web Graphics
• 82 Photoshop Actions

Contest details

• To be eligible to win, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post.
• 3 Winners will receive a one year membership.
• One entry per person. Duplicate comments will be voided and deleted.
• The contest will go on for one week. The end date is March 28th.
• The winner will be announced next Tuesday, March 29th.

Good luck to everyone!

Contest Schedule

Start date: Feb 1st. 2011
End date: March 20th. 2011
Winner announced: March 25th. 2011

* Cash prizes will be paid via paypal or moneybookers. The winner has 14 days to claim his prize after we contact him. The Dreamstime subscriptions allow for 10 images to be downloaded per day.

Contest Rules

To participate you must follow the rules below, and include the keyword „con2011“ with your entries. If you don‘t use the keyword, the submission is not considered a valid entry.

• Your entries must be submitted using the upload tools on stockvault.net
• Use the keyword „con2011“ with your submitted files.
• Only submit your own work.
  Please note that the author retains all rights to his photos/files.
• Photos, graphics and illustrations are accepted.
• You can submit as many entries as you want.
• Our normal upload terms apply.

Guidelines

Participating in this contest is free.
To enter the contest you must already have (or sign up for) a free account at stockvault.net
Entries are welcome from photographers and designers of all ages, worldwide.
We are looking for good quality photos, graphics and illustrations that are useful as stock materials.

About our Sponsors

Dreamstime

Dreamstime is a distinguished leader in stock photography and a major supplier of high quality digital images at unbelievable prices. All stock images available are provided by Dreamstime community’s photographers, shot on film or digital and approved by our editors. Structured on categories and subcategories, the database is renewed with thousands of fresh images and titles on a daily basis.

Visit Dreamstime at www.dreamstime.com

TextureVault

TextureVault is a community driven supplier of royalty free texture and background images. Unlike the usual stock photo site, texturevault.net focus is strictly on providing high quality, creative and “top of the class” textures and background images that digital artists and designers can use in their creative work.

Visit TextureVault at www.texturevault.net

Obox Design

Run by brothers David and Marc Perel, Obox are the makers of Premium WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr themes. Obox was founded in 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Carousel is a theme aimed directly at photographers. The idea behind this design was to give you an opportunity to showcase large versions of your photos without the fussy front end functionality.

Visit Obox at www.obox-design.com

Share this contest

When I launched the new version of stockvault.net, I had been thinking a lot about how I could continue to reward contributors for uploading their files. I decided to add a donation button to every download page, and offered contributors with 25 uploaded images or more, to insert their Paypal and Flattr info so they could accept donations from site users. After around 2 months of trying this out, I’ve seen that this is not working as well as I’d hoped. I have therefore added the option of Google Adsense revenue sharing once again.

Those who are already familiar with this program that we used to have, can now add their Adsense Pub-ID and start showing their own ads on all of their download pages, plus their profile page. Those of you that are not familiar with this program, can read more about it here.

Of course, the idea behind this is to encourage users to upload more photos, and feel good about sharing their freebies. Stockvault is one of the most popular free stock photo site on the internet, despite only having around 20.000 files in it’s gallery. I’m always trying to figure out new ways to share the site’s success with it’s users. Some will not work, but others will.

If you have any questions regarding the Appreciation Program, please send us a line by using the contact page.

Submitting photos is a lot of work, and we think that photographers that actively submit photos to stockvault should have the opportunity to enjoy it when guests want to show their appreciation. Therefor we have created the Stockvault Photographer Appreciation Program.

This program allows contributors to accept donations via the site, through our pre-made interface and support buttons integrated with Paypal.com and Flattr.com

How does it work?

When ever a guest sees a photograph that he wants to donate for (and the contributor has activated this program), a donation window will popup with your details filled in. The guest can then select if he wants to donate $4.99 (coffee) or $9.99 (beer) with Paypal, or support you with Flattr.

How do I activate it?

If you have more than 25 photos uploaded, and approved on the site, the program will activate itself and allow you to add your Paypal and/or Flattr details.

What happened to the old Revenue Sharing Program?

The old Adsense revenue sharing program did not perform well and the quality of the ads was not always up to pair.
We are confident that this will outperform our old Google Adsense revenue sharing program for contributors.

For the past year we have been working on a huge update for stockvault.net, both the design and the back-end system. Everything has been re-written for speed and usability, plus we have added a ton of new features to the site.

The Design

The talented designer Ian Mckay of wefunction.com was asked to create a fresh interface for the site. After a few mock-ups Ian came up with a great design that was both eye pleasing, user friendly,  and fitted the site content perfectly. We thank Ian for his excellent work, he was great to work with.

Back-end system

Initially we had decided to go with a ready-made gallery software, but as the work progressed, we realized that it was not fast enough and could never handle our needs. So we decided to start from scratch and custom code a new gallery system specified to our needs. By doing that we got got rid of all the unnecessary functions most gallery software includes,  and  focus on the things we wanted to offer to our users.

What has changed?

A lot of things have changed, but we tried to make the transition as smooth as possible for our current users.
The basic functions of the site are still the sale. Everyone can download a photo, even without registering…

The site layout

The site has gone through a complete overhaul. Every detail of the site has been redesigned.

User system

The users system is now more simple. Instead of having to sign up specially as a Contributor, all members can now upload files and use the site member features via our brand new user-panel.
We can also upgrade users to Editors, that have access to some of the sites Admin features.

Upload system

We now accept both photos and graphic files! Uploading images has never been easier. You can upload as many images as you want at a time, and then process them all at once. The upload speed has also been dramatically increased.

Member features

Users can now have an active profile page by posting mini-news and update their profile information with ease.  Members can also add images to favorites, comment on photos and contact other members.

Downloaders

Regular visitors can still download images without being registered. We have made it ‘super’ easy and fast for visitors to get the image they need without any problems.

Advanced Search

You can now search through our gallery using the new advanced search functions. Search by specific photographer, category, shape, date and COLOR!

Credits

Andri Óskarsson for developing the new back-end system, server setup and consultation.
Ian Mckay for the layout design work.
xhtml4u.com for HTML/CSS coding.

And countless of other great people that gave us input and helped solve problems. THANKS!

We hope that you all like the new site design, and if you have anything to suggest or say, please post below.

We are well on our way working on the upcoming release of stockvault.net

The design and coding is almost finished, and the next step will be to integrate the design into our new gallery management system.

We had no other than Liam McKay of wefunction.com create the new design, and I must say that it looks stunning. (see image sample above)

Check back soon for more updates.

I think now is the time to start preparation of taking the website up to the next level. I have high expectations and big plans for Stockvault in the free stock photo area. Yeah, there are new sites popping up all over the place, but we have a large and devoted user-base which I hope to see grow in the years to come.

Below is a list of things to come within the next 2-3 months. I’m already working hard on these features, hoping to be able to launch them before New Year.

New dedicated server
I’m currently setting up a brand new server dedicated to Stockvault.net – That means you will see massive speed increments, and a smoother all-around experience.

Completely new back-end / gallery system
Our current (old) gallery system has it’s limits, and is missing features that I think are vital for the site to grow. Therefor I have decided to migrate over to a new system which has a lot of exiting features for our members.

Among some of the new features are:

• We can finally accept vector and graphic files such as .ai, .eps, .psd and many more!
• One member system. You will have access to all the site features through one account.
• Upload your photos as collections, better batch uploads etc.
• Private messaging system, favorites, support forums, user news/blogs, just to name a few.

New layout design
All these system changes require a brand new look, right?
Stockvault.net will receive a nice makeover, where I will focus on simplicity and usability. And good looks of course!