500PX: The new craze
A new photo sharing website has been launched called 500PX a few months ago. Just recently it has started spreading like wild-fire. This site is just in its beginning stages, as many will notice it has HUGE potential. It is much along the lines of a website some of you may be familiar with called Flickr. There are a few new things to this website that Flickr doesn’t have…yet. As time rolls I’m sure we will be seeing large changes in both websites, as of now Flickr has some competition.
First off looking at both websites 500px has a lot cleaner look to it and is a much nicer place to display your work. Flickr is still very jumbled together. The other great thing about 500PX is that it’s almost setup like a Facebook profile. You can make an avatar and you have a few sections to your “profile” page. When you sign up for 500px you have a lot of fantastic options that Flickr does not offer. When you first open a profile page on 500PX you are brought to a very clean-looking page with a few tabs to choose from. First you have the photo section which is what is displayed when you first open the page. It displays all of the photos that have been uploaded by that one person. In each persons profile you have a tab called Blog. Here the photographer has their own blog space to write-up anything they want. I thought this idea was great because it lets you know a little bit about each one of those people. Moving along we have a few sections that Flickr members have as well. You have your Favorite tab your Friends tab and also an Activity tab. These all being self explanatory lets move to the last tab. This tab is called Wall. Do I need to explain? Ok fine…picture your Facebook wall…need I say more?
Aside from all the different sections of 500PX there a quite a few more features that this site presents that are pretty interesting. When opening someones page and you click on a picture you are presented with a few options. Next to each picture title you are able to click on a heart shape. This will allow you to add the picture as a favorite. The cool part about this site that Flickr does not have is photo ratings. You have a choice to either click the “like” button or a “dislike” button. This will give the picture a rating, this also boosts your “affection” under your avatar, the more “affection” you have shows how many people have voted on your pictures.
With all this craziness you must be asking yourself about social media link buttons. Well first off each person has an RSS feed to their page. each page has a section at the bottom where you can Facebook “like” the page. This is also a feature on every picture as well as Twitter Tumblr and Stumbleupon. So you have a lot of major ways to distribute your work straight from your pictures on 500px. Also you can share other people’s work as well.
In my opinion the one single greatest thing about 500px is this, you can create a separate portfolio webpage! They have an assortment of different themes you can choose from. Here you can create your own portfolio and how it is displayed. Not to mention the fact that you can also sell your images off of this site : )
Overall I think if you give 500PX a bit more time it will be every photographers “one stop shop”. Each website serves their own purpose and not many websites are great at everything they do, but they have 1 or 2 things that they do very well. So far 500PX has shown us all that it has the potential to do everything well. As for right now it is missing quite a few things that I know I love about Flickr. I think a lot of photographers will agree that we love the “groups” and the “chat” areas in all the groups. Also the integration with a printing website. I personally love MPIX but Flickr uses Snapfish. While I havent made prints through Flickr I think it’s a great idea to integrate that into the website.
My final thoughts
I love Flickr, I love 500PX. I think we can all agree that 500PX is FILLED with AMAZING photographers it is definitely a place to show off “your best”. Pictures that I see on 500PX I am forced to pick my jaw up off of the floor. I’ve been noticing a lot of photographers moving off of Flickr and signing up with 500PX. I can honestly say that will not be the route I choose because there is something very “warm” about Flickr that I like, and yet 500PX still feels very “cold” to me. This will possibly change soon. Lets see where both of these sites go in the next few months.
For now why don’t you guys check my work out.
Drop me some of your thoughts, I’m interested in what everyone else thinks.
Related articles
- 500px Mini Review (photofocus.com)
- Why all the pros are leaving Flickr for 500px (thenextweb.com)
- Google+ (garydenness.co.uk)
- 500px is a new photo sharing site with class (macworld.com)
- Is 500px encouraging copyright theft? (pixiq.com)
- Move Over Flickr – Hot Shots Love 500px (gigaom.com)
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