www.photoshelter.com

This would be quite an asset to many photographerthat I know

it's a nice solution... quite a bit more money than zenfolio...  and all those features.. zf will get there I'm confident of that. 

one little thing that i saw there that bothered me... pet peeve of mine really, is the way people in internet businesses tell you about getting listed at the 'top' of search engines...  "Google placement. Everyone uses search engines. Get your site listed at the top."

define 'top'.

see in my experience as a web designer, customers want to be 'on the top' of the search engine listings... meaning 'first page'.  I just typed "wedding photographer" into google, and got 23,500,000 hits.  Twenty-three MILLION, five HUNDRED THOUSAND.  and every one of them wants to be 'on the top'.  so how can I promise that?  there's 10 spots on the first page...  22,499,990 people are gonna be disappointed.  maybe they mean the top 99%, which would still put you on top of a few people...  again, I'll get off my soapbox... just a pet-peeve of mine...  but do be careful when you hear claims like that.

I would love to have the ability to sell stock photos on this website like Photoshelter does.

Something more sophisticated with Light Boxes for users to add images to. Photoshelter's version of this looks really good.

Even without a lightbox feature you can sell stock photos on Zenfolio by creating digital products. More information is available here on this topic.

I hope this helps.

This is not a new request.  I think that the whole issue is just not being presented.

The way that PhotoShelter and a few of the other pricier individual stock selling sites are set up enables the photographer to spend his or her time photographing and not spending a lot of time setting up and tracking price lists and making spread sheets. 

What everyone asks for is the ability to sell stock, and as many Zenfolio techs have replied all you need to do is set it up as a download and price it.

I think that the real question is, when will the ability to automatically sell images as stock that is automatically priced according to industry standards be available?

Thomas Mangelsen, as well as Art Wolfe use PhotoShelter to sell stock even though their own sites are content rich/dense.  The software and pricing are industry standard.

So, the question is not when will the ability to sell photos as stock be available but when will the service be automated so that the photog can focus on photography and not setting up pricelists.

This, by the way is one of the selling points of these sites.

The newest wrinkle is this.  PhotoShelter (lowest package is about $30 monthly) offers a way to sell images as stock as well as prints.  It has teamed with someone to provide the software to calculate the pricing.  PhotoShelter does not, however, track the information for you.  Once someone licenses one of your images it is up to you to track that image, keep track of the contract etc.  It is an empire building solution (if you sell many licenses you eventually have to hire someone to keep track of them so that you can go out and keep taking pictures).

License Stream has been around for awhile but recently improved their service.  I am trying out the trial (30 day) version.  It works the same as PhotoShelter and Zenfolio in the photo hosting area but differs in that it is oriented toward stock sales.  I wrote a longer post about it on my blog - as I did have a tiny problem that I didn't want to gripe about here.  The price is reasonable - similar to Zenfolio and it looks like a good solution for those images that are good but not right for hanging on a wall.