500px.com is the new photo hosting site everyone is raving about. The greatest thing ever!
Having seen a load of these sites come and go, my expectations are a bit more subdued.
I remember Thomas Hawk, now one of 500px's biggest cheerleaders, was formerly a net evangelist (slash CEO) for Zooomr. Heard of that website? Didn't think so. Zooomr's registration has now been "temporarily closed" for several years.
What about Photrade? Do remember when they were going to empower users to make money off their photos through advertising?
We also heard how PhotoShelter was going to let individual photographers take on the likes of Getty Images. By my recollection, that lasted at most a matter of months.
Despite my skepticism, I'm in need of a portfolio host. At $40 for the first year (with promo code), 500px.com fit the bill. So I was willing to dabble.
I uploading photos to my portfolio this morning... and this evening I have a nicely-designed functioning website with contact information and 343 photos spread out over 12 albums. Cool. So in that regard I'm pleased.
Based on my brief acquaintanceship with 500px.com, here's my very preliminary review of its other elements.
The Good
- There's a lot of excitement and upward movement associated with this company, which still only has four staffers.
- Professional photographers are welcome. Flickr, with its prohibitions on commercial notices and photo sales, is decidedly unfriendly toward professionals (excepting those willing to subject themselves to the ridiculous terms offered by the Getty sweatshop... want to sell editorial images at royalty-free stock photo prices? Come on in!).
- Portfolio themes offered by 500px, while limited in number, are pleasing to the eye, utilizing appropriately minimalist designs- with multiple navigation tools.
- Comments and feedback offered by users on the site is more immediate than Flickr, which has made it fairly difficult to stumble upon new work by surprise (random photos no longer show up in the home feed). It's been ages since I bothered posting much on my Flickr site. I posted photos on 500px and feedback was immediate.
The Bad
- 500px's policy of limiting uploads to 10 at a time meant it took me 35 uploads (!) to post my portfolio.
- 500px does not offer customized privacy/copyright limits on blog embedding, EXIF info use, size of photos viewed, etc.
- 500px's tagging and group system and overall infrastructure is legions behind Flickr's.
- The help section seems to be mostly composed of user's private questions (uh, should I reply?) without a dedicated company FAQ page.
- It is easy to overstate the qualitative excellence of the photographs on 500px.com- I don't buy there's anything inherently better about this website quality-wise. Much of the early pages have commercial-style photography- as a site geared toward commercial photographers, this makes since- but I don't anticipate it will stay this way if 500px becomes popular among the masses. I'm not a big fan of commercial-style photography anyway, I would much rather see more daring spontaneous raw (and yes, imperfect) art photography.
The Ugly
- Photos do not always upload correctly (this is big problem with Flickr too).
- The main portfolio pages load very slowly (later photos/pages seem to load quicker, for whatever reason).
- Portfolio images occasionally load at the vertical/horizontal wrong dimensions, giving them an Alice in Wonderland-like appearance (I came across this this error when using the mini-dots to browse between photos).
- As a whole, the site still has the feel of a workshop in progress. One quick example: I spied a note on my profile that there are 18 comments on my photos from the first day. I can't check any of them without browsing through the entire photo collection because clicking on the "comment" link takes me to an empty activity page.
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Finally, there is a much discussed like-and-dislike voting system on 500px.com (much like every other new social network system on the web). Right now this feature means absolutely nothing to me but maybe I'll grow into it, especially if I find more homepages on 500px.com with my kind of photography.
Anyway, my fortunes are now aligned with 500px's at least for the next year... so I hope they do actually rock.
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