UPDATE: 

We’ve just released the next round of updates to our new uploader to help you sell art online. We’ve added some more features and addressed most of the bugs that artists have found along the way.

As mentioned previously, we’ve added the following features:

• Single file upload – Now you only have to upload a single file and we’re doing all the heavy lifting on our end.
• Repositioning on edit – Once you’ve uploaded a file using our new uploader, you’ll be able to reposition your designs straight through the edit screen. Older works on the site will need to “re-upload” a design to take advantage of this feature. But as always, you can download that original file straight from the edit screen.
• Replace all images – From the edit screen, you can replace all your images from the one upload.
• Centering – You can now center your art vertically and horizontally separately.

A few of the key bugs that were fixed:

• Pricing previews and kids clothing defaults are now available again through the availability tab.
• Browsers should no longer freeze when uploading large images – the change to the single-file upload means your browsers won’t be doing all the work anymore, so this should be a thing of the past.
• All products should automatically populate for everyone when appropriate now. So no more of that “Product ‘X’ won’t upload business.

Thanks for all your feedback on the initial release. We’re confident our new uploader is going to help all our artists get their art on as many products as they can, quicker than ever. As usual, all the FAQs for uploading your work have been updated.

ORIGINAL POST:

You’ve probably noticed we’ve released a new image uploader on RB. This updated feature lets you populate multiple products more easily and quickly than before – leaving you to spend your time doing far more important things like designing your next Tote Bag.

Artists told us they weren’t putting their art on as many products as they wanted. So we started streamlining the experience to make it easier to add your design to loads of products – essentially taking the smallest number of files possible to create the most products. After testing this concept with some artists, it turns out nearly everyone was happy to enable more products, when it was easier  to do so – and given this generally leads to more sales for artists, we’ve been pretty busy since.

The first part of these updates went live this week, so let’s have a quick look at what’s new, and what’s still coming.

It all starts from one file now – whether that’s a JPG photograph, or a PNG design – you can now just drop your file on the uploader and hey-presto, we’ll make as many products as we can from that file. Easy.

You’ll see we don’t automatically create T-Shirts from a JPG file. That’s because these types of files don’t always make for the highest quality shirt images. You can still drop a JPG directly on the T-Shirt uploader afterwards if you’re sure that’s what you want, but great defaults are what we’ve tried to do here.

From here on out, everything else is up to you. You can click through each product to preview, adjust and resize as required; enable/disable individual products; adjust margins; or you can even replace the image for a single product with a slightly tweaked design.

There’s a much more detailed look at this entire process over in our FAQs.

So What’s Still To Come?

As we wanted to get these benefits out to artists as soon as possible and then follow up with a few smaller updates, there’s some things that got left behind, but they’re still on the way.

• Repositioning on Edit – Right now you can only adjust the size and position of your design when you first upload a file. To reposition after that, you have to re-upload it. We’re going to get rid of this – you’ll just be able edit a work and adjust away.
• Currently we take your image, convert it to an individual file for each product within your web browser, and then upload each of them separately to RB – this makes you wait around for multiple file uploads. Boring. We’re going to change this so all you do is upload the one file and we do all the other work on our end.
• Background layers – Some of our Tee designers have told us that they just want to add a background to their original Tee design when making other products like Phone Cases & Throw Pillows. Rather than make you upload individual files for each of those products, we’re going to enable a second upload of an optional background layer to add to all these designs when appropriate.

Your Feedback & Bugs That We’ve Squashed

Here’s a few of the squashed things:

• Very Slow Uploads – We used to expand your smaller files out to larger files unnecessarily to upload them. This is no more.
• “Your file is too big” when it clearly wasn’t – Just like above, we were taking your smaller images and turning them into files that may have exceeded our own file limits. Also fixed.
• Edit screens showing loading spinners – It seemed like the “Edit Work” screens weren’t loading, in fact they were – we just weren’t hiding the spinners. Easy squash.

There’s also some bugs we’ve yet to fix, but will be soon:

• Browsers freezing when uploading – For some artists trying to upload a fairly large file may cause their browser to freeze up. We’re aware of this, and have a fix in the works in the coming weeks. For now, we recommend uploading your products individually using the link below the main upload button.
• Product “X” won’t upload – We’re seeing some people struggle to upload one or two individual products when others are succeeding. We’re still looking into the cause of this and will update here when we can.

Unfortunately, in bringing this new functionality to artists, we’ve had a few artists with older web browsers that we no longer support become unable to upload. We recommend using any of our suggested browsers, and we apologise if you find yourself unable to remain on the currently supported versions. We certainly try to continue to support as many browsers as possible, but inevitably that can’t be all of them.

Do you have any additional questions? Let us know in the comments or check out our knowledge base here.