A day after I publish my server and viewer updates the Lab releases a new version of the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) viewer: 4.0.8.319143.
New Visual Outfits Browser Project 2016-06-07
You can download a copy from the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
This viewer adds a tab to the Appearance Outfits panel. In that panel an image is associated with each outfit. You can take a snapshot, upload it, and use it for a thumbnail of the outfit. Yes, you do have to pay for the image upload, L$10 (US$0.04+/-). But, you can use an existing snapshot and save the L$10.
It is a nice feature. I have just under 300 outfits (today – I have demos in my want-to-get folder that will become outfits). Something like 150 are older classic avatar outfits (those will get converted to outfits using my mesh body or likely be deleted). But, 300 x L$10 = L$3,000 or US$11.50 for the photos. So, provided the Lab makes a profit on image storage, this could add a bit of income.
I did create the outfits over the 2+ years we have had the outfits feature. So, I’ll probably spend US$2 to $5 per year on outfit images.
Not everyone will do that and some will already have done it. There are those that have been storing an image of their outfits in inventory along with their outfits. But, the possible income from one additional outfit image per week per user… 52 images per year times say 600,000 users (31 million images) times say 50% (15.6 million images) being interested in how they look enough to be into outfits would give the Lab a gross income from Outfit Images of 15.6m x L$10/L$260/US$1 = $600k. From that we have figure out what percent of the Lab’s labor, electrical bill, hardware cost, any additional hardware cost, bandwidth cost… should be subtracted from that income.
I doubt this is a big money maker for the Lab… It is going to save me a bunch of time picking outfits.
Now… if I could have folders for outfits…
I think that the lab had the right idea with this tool, but the decision to not allow for local images (without paying the 10L$ fee) was disappointing. It does show that LL understands the importance of inventory though so I applaud themfor giving it a go. As a big fan though, I wanted to point out to your readers that other tools exist to visualize and sort your inventory. One of the most popular is the CTS Wardrobe (http://www.carlyletheassolutions.com/wardrobe.php). It is an amazing tool for managing large inventories.
Thanks for saying and the link.
The Lab is open to better ideas for inventory and has asked for people to make suggestions. I don’t know of any other ‘game’ that has as complicated an inventory as Second Life. In other games/worlds and inventory of a few hundred things is big. In SL an inventory of 50,000 items is not considered big… The shear size of the information that has to be managed pushes to organize in ways uncommon to most of us.