Vortexmind: free your mind Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito

22Oct/120

Autumn

4 Autumn vortexnews  photo leaves fall autumn 500px
A glimpse of autumn by Paolo Tagliaferri
Need to find some time to pick up my Canon and take some more pictures in this season ...

22Apr/120

500px vs Flickr – Online Photo Sharing services

500px vs Flickr 500px vs Flickr   Online Photo Sharing services surfing the net blogging  vs social sharing share repository photography photo online image flickr digital comparison community 500px
After being a loyal Flickr fan for years (and pro subscriber), I have to say that I am on the verge of betraying them and move to 500px. A quick comparison of the two follows. Please note I am not comparing the Free service, I want unlimited uploads and storage and both services are offering it only on the paid subscription.

Flickr

  • Price: 24.95 $ (or ~ 15.5 £ ) a year
  • Unlimited Load / Storage: Yes
  • Unlimited Sets: Yes
  • Original file storage: Yes
  • Other: Ad free browsing / Stats / HD video upload
  • Pros: good privacy & licensing options for each picture. Well established website with a large user base.
  • Cons: pricier than 500px , so-so interface and UI, has not changed much lately


500px

  • Price: Plus 19.95 $ (or ~ 12.3 £ ) (*)
  • Unlimited Load / Storage: Yes
  • Unlimited Sets: Yes
  • Original file storage: ???
  • Other: Stats / Sets / Stories
  • Pros: Slick'n Sexy interface. Very good content quality, Cheaper than Flickr with the "Plus" option
  • Cons:Less flexible in Privacy and licensing options

Both services do offer a Developer API to integrate with them, I have not used them so far so I can't really feedback on that. In general I think it's going to be difficult to move away from Flickr at least for me, as up there I have pretty much every picture I took since I own a digital camera on their servers (that's around ~7K images). However recently when I want to showcase a particular picture and get some feedback from other photographers, I've found that this is much easier to be done on 500px . I used to invest a lot of time in Flickr years ago, and back then it was easier to get feedback, but today it seems much more difficult to simply upload a pic and get some instant feedback. As soon as I created the 500px account instead, and put some photos up there, I got an instant reaction from other photographers and felt that it was quite easy to reciprocate by visiting their stream and have a look!

In short, not sure if I am going to migrate, mainly because it will be a painful process if I decide to do it...but I am very tempted!

(*) They also offer an "Awesome" package at 49.95 $ ( or ~ 31 £ ) a year which includes a personalised portfolio with Google Analytics integration. Don't need it, not considering it in my comparison!

   
Creative Commons Licence
This work by Paolo Tagliaferri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.