500px
500px is a community based, photo sharing website; much like Flickr. In fact, there’s a growing chorus of articles comparing the two sites and suggesting that 500px might just be a better service for serious photographers. Here is a sampling of recent opinions, Move Over Flickr — Hot Shots Love 500px 500px is not Flickr […]
500px is a community based, photo sharing website; much like Flickr. In fact, there’s a growing chorus of articles comparing the two sites and suggesting that 500px might just be a better service for serious photographers. Here is a sampling of recent opinions,
Move Over Flickr — Hot Shots Love 500px
500px is not Flickr
White-Hot Flickr Alternative 500px Raises $525K In Series A
500px aims to be ‘Flickr for pros’
500px – the new flickr?
500px vs Flickr
I have quite a bit invested in Flickr – more than five years of activity spread out over 894 photos and organised into 27 sets. Moreover, there is a vast community of users on Flickr and most of the images I post there get some attention.
However, Flickr has become a bit of a frustration. I haven’t experienced anything like what Mirco Wilhelm went through, when his 4000+images were accidentally deleted. But, it is disappointing that Flickr haven’t really evolved their service. The site looks dated, there is a growing amount of MySpace-ish spam, showcasing large photos is awkward, the iphone app is slow (there is no iPad app) and activity on Flickr feels a little “walled” off from the rest of the web.
So, last night I created a 500px account. What I immediately like about this service is how easy it is to create a large image portfolio – you can see mine at https://fernandogros.500px.com.
Right now I’m pretty impressed with 500px. The service is easy to use – a lot easier and cleaner than Flickr – with a much more contemporary upload interface. And, creating a good looking portfolio (something you can’t do on Flickr) is far easier than with Photoshelter (you can see my soon-to-be-deleted Photoshelter portfolio here). Within minutes of uploading my first images, I was getting feedback from the 500px community – there’s definitely a “social” thing at work on 500px (complete with a “like” based voting system).
And, the quality of images on the site, from other users, is stunning (take a look at some of the “Editors’ Choice” photographs).
Not that 500px is a perfect service. There is no iOS app available and no way to manage your account from within Lightroom (there is an LR plugin to handle Flickr, but I’m not a fan of it). Ideally, 500px would allow you to manage your collection from within Lightroom and keep the most current edit of each image synchronised between the website and your Lightroom collection – that’s a really “serious” approach.
Still, there is a lot that 500px is doing right and I’m looking forward to seeing if this service can really grow in the coming months.
UPDATE>> I left both Flickr and 500px in November, 2012. To read more out that check out Goodbye Flickr Goodbye 500px.
