Lightbox Banners in iStockPhoto.com

On iStockPhoto, I use lightbox banners to help people go from one image to a collection of images (also called a lightbox). The banners can be placed anywhere from your profile description, your iStock blog or your image description.

The idea behind it is to encourage viewers of one picture to look at related pictures. Many people report an increase in sales using this technique and also, very occasionally, some kind soul will buy a whole set of images: guaranteed to bring a smile to your face and a few extra cents in your account.

It's a simple process, just follow these steps:

1. Create a lightbox and and add your images to it
2. Take a note of the lightbox number. You can find it out by viewing one of your lightboxes and in the URL in your browser you will see something like this:

   http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=6067951

3. Create a banner for your images. This should be a jpg picture. I find dimensions of 380 x 70 pixels works well
4. Upload your banner onto the web. You may well have free hosting through your internet provider. Failing that, there are plenty of sites out there that will let you upload pictures for free.
   
5. And now to bring everything together. In your Profile within iStockPhoto or in the image description, you need to use the following text (consisting of what is termed UBB codes: similar to HTML but with square brackets instead of angled ones), replacing the bits in red with your lightbox ID and the URL of your uploaded banner:
   

[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=6067951][img]http://www.mysite.com/picture.jpg[/img][/url]

And voila! That's all you need...it's worth noting that using the above URL will cause a new window to open.