Check out my 500px profile here – http://500px.com/bhirschyphoto. Also if you are interested in signing up, they offer a free account option.  Yearly fees are $50 but if you use the promo code FRIENDS they knock of $10 for the first year.  Lastly, if you do visit my 500px page, I’m in the process of uploading images I want on there, so don’t expect a ton.  I’m using Chinese internet/internot which can literally take days to upload what I want online.  Woe is me…

There are about a billion difference choices for where you can store your images online.  Unfortunately for Flickr my pro account expired last month and 500px came along at just the right time.  Not really wanting to pay again for a sub-par service who’s user base seems to more and more consist of a bunch of over-happy people leaving over-enthusiastic comments on every single image they see has left me ready to jump ship for about a year now.  There is also the fact that Flickr’s design makes my eyes bleed every time I even think about it. For me, this made it easy to replace Flickr w/ 500px as one piece of my online presence.

click above image to see a larger screenshot of the profile page.

The layout for users’ profile pages are absolutely stunning(see mine here) – squares and whitespace people!  It’s gorgeous.  On top of all that the people making comments seem to be actual photographers – the comments and ratings are actually helpful vs. Flickr’s over-optimistic uselessness.  But here’s the real thing that made me switch – It’s pretty dang cheap at $40 a year. That price buys me another outlet for good feedback as well as the ability to sell my images straight from my 500px webpage.  I’m in the process of consolidating my images on the web and where I sell and display those images.  In the midst of a complete portfolio redesign (coming soon to portfolio page) and wanting to reduce my yearly costs, 500px is making a solid impression on me though I haven’t determined if it’s a complete game changer or just a Flickr replacement for me – still to be determined!

The only real downside I see right now (and this is certainly just me) is that the portfolio option they give you doesn’t look all that great and makes it a bit difficult to work in brand recognition through all your sites.  Let me rephrase that – the portolios are actually really good looking, they just aren’t what I’m personally looking for and the inability to make those changes makes the option not as useful for me personally. I kinda wish I could disable my portfolio and just let people land HERE instead of HERE.  However, for someone who doesn’t have a portfolio at all this is a freaking steal for $40 / year.  It’s everything Flickr isn’t:  Great feedback, excellent profile pages, ability to sell your images for no extra charge, and a free portfolio page (if you want it).

Like I said earlier, I’m not entirely sure where this will play out for me in my online presence.  For now though, it was worth the $40 to get an absolutely brilliant Flickr replacement.  I’m not sure if my 500px account will win out over my incredibly useful Photoshelter account or not, but the fact that I’m thinking about it says something – dare I say.

Are you on 500px?  What do you think of it?  Let’s see your comments below!