This is my link to a site called 500px, a photo sharing site which has been around since 2003 but came to more prominence recently when everyone began talking about on Twitter and elsewhere.

The attraction to it appears to be down to its aesthetics and layout, support, the recent stagnation of flickr, and the high level of photography that 500px seems to attract. It’s easy to use, costs nothing (unless you’d like a few extras) and offers near instantaneous support from its staff of actual humans. The site is also progressing and expanding more in light of its new found popularity and audience.

It’s fruitful too, in just one month I have three times more followers now than I did in two and a half years on flickr. One photo, this one, gained 16,000 views in a week, four times more than my flickr best of 4000 over eighteen months. Social networking is prominent too, with Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon and others all integrated well into nearly every page. Portfolio pages are an additional feature, once again well designed, where you can display your photos online to the world using a variety of attractive portfolio templates.

If there is a down side to the site though, then that is its tendency to attract trolling behaviour to its popular photos page (probably its most viewed page) whereby for some users to advance their photos to the top, it’s all too easy to discredit those above by eager use of the dislike button employed there. It’s far too heavily weighted on the wrong side of fairness, where one dislike can cancel out ten previous likes. 500px has suggested that the algorithm is fair, but it is only fair if the trolling behaviour does not exist. It’s certainly evident because, for the most part, only photos sitting near the top of the popular photos page are collecting dislikes. Rather ironically, only the best photos on 500px are attracting dislikes, and low rated pictures are not.

500px is only too happy to listen to suggestions and invariably responds to them in some form. When I had trouble registering the site initially, I had a response and a fix within minutes. There appears to be an iPhone/iPad app on the way, Lightroom extensions, and I would guess more on top of that too. Subtle improvements appear around the site every few days too. The staff at 500px, who are photographers themselves, until now have maintained this site for little or no financial reward.

I just hope that 500px can review the like/dislike system, because that would make 500px quite easily the best photo sharing site anywhere.

If you’ve not visited 500px before, then go and see what you’re missing here because as a photographer you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.