— sprks

Flickr is Fading: 500px Mini Review

It never rains but it pours, or so it seems. I have used Flickr as an online scrap­book for many years but Yahoo, who own and run Flickr, seem to be have left their prime photo site out in the rain recently and it can’t com­mu­nicate with PayPal for Pro account renewals. That means all but the most recent photos have dis­ap­peared, including photos linked to Bennison email cam­paigns and any links to sets or col­lec­tions I’ve emailed to friends, col­leagues or cli­ents. Apparently they are still there, but we can only find them by searching for the right keywords. ‘Oh well, plenty more fish in the sea’, I hissed, and went in search of an alternative.

Note: The Flickr-PayPal problem was resolved by deleting PayPal from Yahoo Wallet and then adding it back in again, so now I’ve got all my photos back. I’m not sure if I will re-embrace Flickr as whole­heartedly in the future, though.

500px was founded by pho­to­graphy fan­atics Ian Sobolev, Oleg Gutsol and Evgeny Tchebotarev and looks very much like a site for people who take pho­to­graphy ser­i­ously. The site is attractive, is easy to use. It lacks many of Flickr’s bells and whistles and cur­rently has only a few integ­ra­tions, so prob­ably kinder to people with time-management fail­ings. I uploaded a few photos to see how the port­folio sec­tion worked, linked my pro­file, tinkered with the set­tings, logged out and went to do some proper work.

My GMail noti­fier started flashing. I had mail. Lots of it. This rain-swept umbrella pic­ture had 11,500 views, 42 pages of votes and com­ments, and became Editor’s Choice soon after. The 500px com­munity is enthu­si­astic, engaged, active and there are some very good pho­to­graphers on there.

The 20 per week upload limit forces users to choose their images care­fully and the voting system seems benign; votes increase the photo’s per­centage using some kind of inverse log­ar­ithmic cal­cu­la­tions mean that as the photo becomes more pop­ular, it requires more votes for each per­centage point. At the same time, each passing day reduces the photo’s score; images can soar in pop­ularity and then gently fade back as new images take their place. Photographers who build up their net­work by voting and com­menting are likely to gain more exposure, though I would encourage thoughtful com­ments rather than the slightly spammy one-liners that swamp many good photos. Editor’s Choice allows the man­age­ment to influ­ence things and as long as they high­light good photos, nobody is going to object. If the Editors go bland or try to push a cer­tain style of pho­to­graphy for per­sonal or com­mer­cial reasons, there could be trouble, but there is no evid­ence of that.

Will it replace Flickr? Probably not. It’s not much good as a scrap­book, there are no interest groups, the API is still under­powered and integ­ra­tions are rudi­mentary. There are also wor­rying signs that 500px man­age­ment needs to improve it’s com­mu­nic­a­tion skills — wit­ness Jeffrey Friedl’s aban­doned Lightroom plugin, some­thing I would have greatly appre­ci­ated. Let’s hope that this is just a glitch by a small com­pany that must be strug­gling to cope with sudden pop­ularity and the prob­lems of scaling up to meet demand. It’s not Flickr and it’s not meant to be; it’s a well con­structed pho­to­graphy show­case with a strong pho­to­graphic com­munity and I’m going to stick with them for a while and see where it goes.

An iPad app has just been released. I just installed it and at first glance it looks simple and clean, like the main site. Pretty and easy to use.

I will be exploring 500px some more and I’m going to look at 1x.com as well. I’ll report back here when I’ve got more news on them.

Update:
I read about a new Lightroom plugin and decided to down­load it and give it a try. It appears in your Lightroom ‘Publish Services’ and is simple to use. I just down­loaded, installed and uploaded a new photo in about 3 minutes total. Switch to grid view and drag your photo(s) onto either Profile or Folio tabs, then use the Publish button, top-right. Title and cap­tion are retained from Lightroom and you can edit them before you pub­lish, but I noticed that keywords are not included, nor is there an option to add them. Comments from 500px inside Lightroom is an inter­esting addi­tion which I’m not entirely sure is going to float my boat. Yet.

Update Feb 2012:
500px just had a redesign with some nice addi­tions and a few unex­pected dele­tions. There is a new view mode called ‘Flow’ which is intended as a front-end show­case to your photos and your favour­ites. Apparently driven by an algorithm which attempts to arrange your con­tent by attract­ive­ness rather than the straight upload date of your ‘Photos’ page.

I like the idea, but not the exe­cu­tion: the masonry-style arrange­ment of por­trait and land­scape ori­ented image tiles coupled with auto-cropping res­ults in some odd and some­times incom­pre­hens­ible res­ults, with a bias to showing just the top-left corner of the pic­ture regard­less of what’s in it — guessing this is a bug which will get fixed. And the layout? Well, the decision to push for larger images inev­it­ably means less white space. Hmm, have to let my eyes get used to that before I start complaining.

Alas, the 500px team have deleted ‘Activity’ and ‘Wall’ (Activity page is back, by pop­ular demand) which breaks most of the com­munity and social use­ful­ness of the site. In their place are ‘Stories’; pages for words and pic­tures where you can pull together a set of photos or a pro­ject. This, I like.

The 500px.com redesign seems to be aimed at making the site more of a show­case and port­folio site rather than a pho­to­graphy net­work, and per­haps that’s not a bad thing — the com­ments and wall posts rarely raised my pulse — but I think the social func­tion­ality could have been use­fully retained as a back­ground feature.

We now have a ‘Market’ where pho­to­graphers can sell prints together with a HD file. There are very few options here, but it’s early days so I will explore this a little more and report back as it evolves.

Almost lost in the eye-candy makeover items is ‘Organizer’ which gets a thumbs-up (apart from the mis­spelling) for allowing us to arrange photos into col­lec­tions of related content.

Flickr is also get­ting a makeover, prob­ably quite sim­ilar to 500px, which they plan to launch on the 28^th of February. I wonder how they will com­pare with each other after they’ve both had a Spring clean?

What has been your exper­i­ence with the Flickr vs 500px vs 1x debate? I would like to know…