I wasn’t the most active photographer on 500px when I set up an account a decade ago, but I will admit this – it was one of the best sites back then to get inspired by. In a world of photography untouched by AI images and spam bots, 500px was overflowing with an abundance of creativity and talent. Getting to the top of the For You page, even if for a few hours, was considered amazing. And if your image made it to the Editor’s Choice selections back then, you were considered legendary in your circles. But then came a time when the algorithm that could get you to the top became easy to play about with and engineer. I know this not just from reading about it, or by word of mouth; a friend did a certain set of steps to get an image of mine almost right to the top. A few years later, with the acquisition of 500px by Visual China Group and the subsequent cancellation of the 500px Marketplace, the interest kind of died down. With the 15-year anniversary of the founding of this site coming up, The Phoblographer takes a look at how much, if at all, things have changed for the better.
Legend has it that the site was named to indicate the optimum resolution for uploading photos to its servers at the time of its launch. It makes you chuckle when you think that these days, everyone wants to upload photos at far greater resolutions. Oh, what simple times we lived in a decade and a half ago.
Table of Contents
Membership Tiers
Much like when it launched all those years ago, 500px is still free to use but also has a selection of paid membership tiers titled Pro and Awesome. If my memory serves me well, these were badges that would get added to your profile back then, based on the popularity of your photographs on their platform.
Free
The most basic membership plan still allows you to browse the site and be inspired by the amazing photos on there without any payment. However, there are some limitations when it comes to photo uploads. You only get to upload 21 photos to your profile a week. If that’s a bit of a downer for you, it’s well worth considering the two paid membership tiers, both of which are available to try for free for 30 days.
Awesome
All the benefits below are also available on the Pro tier
- Unlimited Uncompressed Uploads
- Unlimited Storage
- Ad-free browsing
- Statistics for your photographs
- Advanced analytics
- Offline viewing (on the Android app): Access 500px without an internet connection
- Gallery slideshows
- Profile badge: Display your membership tier with a badge on your profile
Pro
In addition to all the membership perks offered by the Awesome tier, you also get the below benefits in the Pro tier:
- 100% royalties on image sales via 500px
- A custom domain for your portfolio
- Priority Customer Support
- A customizable profile. Although I don’t see why this can’t be offered to the Awesome tier holders as well
Profile Setup
In order to get a 100% profile completion status, you don’t need to create a custom portfolio (as I initially thought). Just fill in your bio, add the URL to your website (or wherever else you have a portfolio), upload a profile picture and a banner photo, and add your socials.
Uploading Images To Your 500px Profile
This isn’t just a fairly straightforward process; 500px also makes it quite hassle-free. Click on the Upload button at the top right of the page and pick an image from your computer. If the EXIF data is present in the file, 500px populates the various upload fields with the necessary available data.
I didn’t see the Location tab auto-populating even when GPS coordinates were present in the EXIF file, so you’ll have to manually add this. Luckily, 500px prompts you to choose from a list of places once you start typing in a few characters in there
Once this is done, your photograph will be uploaded to your portfolio. Almost instantly, you can see insights into how many people have viewed your image
It wasn’t pleasing at all to see spam comments almost instantly appearing after I uploaded my image
Licensing Your Photos
Once 500px approves your photographs for Licensing, you can earn 60% of royalties in the Free tier and even 100% if you’re signed up for the Pro tier. There’s a content inspection to be done prior to which you can register yourself as a licensed contributor. Submission reviews usually take a week to determine whether you’ve made the cut or not.
All content submitted to 500px for licensing is royalty-free, but you always own your copyright when you work with 500px.
Quests
Here’s something new that wasn’t around when I last visited this site. Quests are ways to improve your portfolio and photography skills by participating in competitions that offer cash prizes. Some of these are even sponsored by brands with very large prize pools.
You can read more about this in our dedicated article about their contests
Engaging in Licensing quests enhances the breadth of your Licensing Portfolio on 500px. Not only do you have the opportunity to win a cash prize, but these quests also increase the likelihood of creating highly marketable content. Essentially, these are ways for 500px to get more photos on the site that they can sell, leading to more exposure on a professional level for you and your work. I quite like this idea as it can engage more semi-professional photographers to compete and help elevate their portfolios.
AI Image Search
Search results on photography sites usually get the best results based on keywords. Not every photographer is a keyword expert, however, so 500px has an AI-enabled search option for you to get the best out of images uploaded here.
While the search results for the term “Dubai skyscrapers by the water” did come back with many accurately matching photos, there were some images in there with skylines of China and other countries.
“Dogs running in the park” returned more accurate results. However, if the results did not include enough exact matches, the AI algorithm seemed to populate the results with partial matches.
The results from “Cats Sitting on a Trash Can” further solidified my theory. Most of the results were of cats sitting, and trash cans were hardly seen there.
I assume this search can only improve with time, as with all AI tools. For the most part, you can definitely find what you’re looking for using it; it’s just that not all images on there now appear to match perfectly. Having said that, I didn’t see any unrelated images in the search results. AI search results require at least 3 words in the search bar, however you can still run the regular search with a lesser number of words.
Explore, And Be Inspired
It may not be the same old hottest photography website it was, but I think 500px still has a lot to offer the world of online photography. Gone appear to be the days when they sponsored photo walks around the world. The last such photo walk detailed on their website blog looks to be 8 years ago. I believe they aren’t the powerhouse they used to be, but the community of photographers there still boasts a very vividly inspirational collection of photos. This is most apparent in the landscape and astrophotography genres. One of my favorite genres, sports photography, isn’t very well represented, but this is a problem I’ve seen on most photography sites.
A very welcome feature is the Similar Photos section you can view when you click on a photo that you want to see. Thankfully, there is also an NSFW filter that clearly blurs such photos without even a hint of what the image is about, so feel free to browse the site without embarrassing yourself at work or home.
If mobile browsing is your preferred mode of viewing content, their apps are available on the Apple and Google Play stores. Seriously though, the photos on this site deserve to be viewed on a large-screen monitor. The quality of the content here is still seriously good, even if it appears that many of the big players here from a decade ago have gone quiet.
All images seen in this article are screenshots from 500px.com