Last Updated on 01/30/2025 by Lara Carretero
Ever since Instagram became more video-centric, throwing long-term photographer accounts under the bus, more and more pro and hobbyist photographers have been looking for alternative social media platforms. Flickr experienced an upsurge recently after many years, but there are also many new platforms that have cropped up in the last 3 to 4 years or so. Refrakt is one such site that looks to attract purist photographers who are fans of minimalist photography. It certainly has potential, but I’d say it has to do more to stand out from the crowd.
Table of Contents
It’s Still A Baby
Refrakt appears to have launched as a private beta sometime in mid-2023 and was opened to the world to sign up in October of last year. Created by Sam King, who looks to enjoy the Canadian outdoors and takes pics of cars parked on the streets there, I can honestly say that I haven’t heard this site making waves among my fellow photographers. But that’s not to say it can’t gain traction in the years to come, especially because the photography on there is of a very high quality. The URL of the site is Refrakt.app, but ironically the platform isn’t available as an app currently. I couldn’t find any information to indicate the same.
Barebones Layout
The layout of the site is quite plain and white. Maybe that’s what appealed to me the most. It’s minimalistic in such a way that it makes the images featured on the site look cleaner. Almost like you’re viewing them on a gallery wall sans frames. But the minimalistic feel isn’t limited to the site itself – the curated pictures also seem to follow this trend. I can’t recall ever seeing a photo with more than one human subject in the frame. And almost 8 out of every 10 photos in the feed had no humans in there.
Signing Up
In what seems to be a growing trend, the site never asked me to sign up the way most sites do. All I was asked for was an email to which an OTP would be sent. Once I entered this on the site, I was greeted with a small popup window that asked me for some bare essential info and voila – I was registered. Then, what followed the registration really surprised me.
Yes. More blankness in the form of what you see above. I was greeted with the Posts page, which was emptier than my savings account bank statement. Apparently there was nothing to showcase to me on this page and I was told that was because “none of the accounts you’re following have posted anything yet. Check out the Discover page to see what we love at Refrakt.” Well duh, I had just signed up to the site. Wouldn’t it make more sense to show me the Discover page first instead?
It’s free to sign up, but paying for a Premium subscription comes with some perks as seen below.
Adding Photos / Posts
I wish more sites would tell you what image size limitations they have for uploading. I normally resize photos to 2500 pixels on the long side when I want to upload them online. For Refrakt though, I decided to upload some photos that were on the desktop folder of my Mac. I picked a file that I had sized for printing, not one too large at around 30 MB. Again, more blankness
I tried this twice, but on both counts, I saw nothing but an empty page. Then, I decided to try a lower-resolution image file, and that’s when I finally saw some progress.
Here’s something to be mindful of. If you click Save, it just seems to add the file and the information you’ve added to something like a Drafts section. It doesn’t get published to your Posts page until you click on Publish from either here, or the next page.
I uploaded one more image and once I published it, this is what it looked like.
By the way, your Camera Page gets populated based on the EXIF data that Refrakt finds in your image files.
Discover Other Photographers
The Discover page inspires you and guides you to interesting work on Refrakt. Nothing on their Changelog page suggests that this is an algorithm-run model. It all looks to be managed by the curators at Refrakt (who apparently you can join)
Much like me, it would seem the curators love minimalistic photography, which I suppose goes great with the whole layout of the site itself. Here are some images that made me stop during my perusal of this page. All images here are screenshots and are copyright of the respective photographers.
No Likes, Just Props
It took me a while to understand this. Props here refers to the 90s British slang word that’s derived from the words “proper” and “respect”. As far as Refrakt goes, it’s meant to replace the likes and hearts we’re accustomed to seeing and leaving on social media platforms. So, you don’t leave a like here on photos. You add a comment of sorts as a means of encouragement, and Refrakt is terming this as Props. The props you leave are privately seen by only you and the photographer whose photo you’re leaving it on. In order for other Refrakt users to see them, you need to leave them as comments (this is via a different button). There also doesn’t seem to be a way of finding how many Props have been left on an image by others.
Collectives
I first thought this page showcased themed collections by photographers. It’s sort of like that, except the collections aren’t necessarily by one photographer. Each Collective on Refrakt can have images from multiple photographers, and the images they showcase have something in common.
Currently, there are only about 24 Collectives on the page, and it seems that the team at Refrakt collates these.
My Overall Feelings About Refrakt
I really enjoy the curated feed and the overall presentation. If the all-white layout feels too clinically sterile for you, there is an option to switch it to black as well. It’s nice not to be bombarded by hashtags and unrelated videos that have nothing to do with photography, as is common on Instagram these days. But the site needs more work done in the months to come if it has to prevent itself from being lost in the annals of photo platforms that have died a quick death.
There aren’t any groups or communities that led to Flickr being a top-ranked site at one point. I couldn’t find a way to search for images or photographers at all by text. The plain layout is nice, but is it really the only thing that will get people to continue uploading images on a regular basis? Maybe the lack of an algorithm-based feed would make some photographers give it a try, but they’d want to know what could help their images get on the Discover page. I really enjoyed the way the photos were displayed and the quality of the curated photos is great. But as inspiring as the photos are, the lack of any interaction with my photos for hours after I uploaded them felt discouraging.
Refrakt is primarily funded through premium memberships and patron support. If it has to entice more people to join, it definitely needs to find a way to distinguish itself and attract more paying customers. I couldn’t gauge at all how many active users the site had while going through the curated feed. If I can’t get a feel of what the potential audience is for my work, I doubt I’d invest too much time here. I quite like the idea the core team at Refrakt has, yet I somehow feel they’re just banking too much on a we’re-not-like Instagram feel to get people to try them. It kind of feels like all those cryptocurrencies you see being peddled at low-key conferences, trying to get you to invest a few hundred dollars with the promise of them being the next big Bitcoin. I know this isn’t what they’re aiming for, and I sure hope it doesn’t disappear off the internet in the next few years. It has potential; the team at Refrakt really needs to find its niche among all the photo-sharing platforms there are today to make this site seem groundbreaking. The first thing I’d recommend is to get Android and iOS apps out ASAP.
All images seen here are screenshots from Refrakt