very temporarily popular

Mar 18, 2013 16:10

On a lark, I signed up for a 500px account a while back. I've used it all of twice, now -- but my second picture is very temporarily popular ( Read more... )

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khedron March 19 2013, 16:20:12 UTC
Thank you!

Re: 500px - I don't know. I've seen a number of comparisons of hosted photo sharing sites, and 500px came up fairly well on the features vs. privacy aspects at the time. Admittedly, that was before Flickr started getting more love from Yahoo.

The iPhone app is smooth & pretty. The website is fairly slick. There's a marketplace aspect, if you're in to that sort of thing, although as I found, they want to have high res images. (Fine, fine.)

There's a free version, where you can upload a few pictures a week, and you can pay more for unlimited storage and better photo set creation. There's categorization & tagging.

And then there's Likes and Favorites, both of which play into to the Popularity score, which seems to be a big distinguishing feature to me. If you check out the site, you can't help but see those. I even find it a bit hard to find my own two pictures uploaded there; everything steers you to the community-rated Upcoming or Popular pictures.

Popularity fades; the bluebird picture had a max score of 90.6 yesterday, and that's decayed down to 80-something today, which is as it should be.

I'm a little conflicted. When I look at the Popular pictures, they certainly seem gorgeous to me -- and largely just out of my league, often for reasons I can't pin down. I feel strange saying that there's a sameness to these gorgeous pictures, though. I think it's a similarity of subject matter and the crowd-sourced voting: pictures of women rank highest, and cityscapes and close-ups of animals are 2nd and 3rd. It seems like there ought to be other things out there?

This may be unfair of me. Looking right now, I see kids blowing bubbles and seashells covering a bottle, neither of which are in typecast categories above.

I do think they're doing something interesting, and they seem to be working on growing it. I'm tempted to look at flickr again, though. I've been hosting my own server forever, but there are times I'd like it to be hosted (for better bandwidth). And while I could send the Mac mini it's running on to a colo, that costs money that I don't have to pay right now. Why not have it all for free?

Random link: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/295/what-are-the-best-sites-to-share-photo-galleries-with-friends

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