500px offers 'Plus' membership, in between free and 'Awesome'

Pretty graphs from 500px

500px has just announced a subscription package in between its free-forever-but-somewhat-limited membership and its all-singing-all-dancing-$49.95-a-year-Awesome service. Called the slightly-less-than-inspired Plus membership, it costs $19.95 a year and offers almost everything that Awesome does, barring the 'personalised portfolio'.

That means you can upload as many photos as you want (uploads are limited to 10 a week with the free service), it allows you to sell your images via the 500px store (something you can do with free memebership), it provides you with the ability to collate your images into collections, sets, or stories, and it gives you access to advanced statistics on your images. Yes, it is all rather similar to Flickr's Pro membership, and comes in about $5 a year cheaper, too.

The analytics includes the basic stats that you'd expect: the number of likes, dislikes, favourites, and comments that each of your photos receives over a time period of your choice. However, it also allows you to analyse who are your most engaged followers and friends and shows you which were your most popular images. And it comes with an interactive graph. Being a sucker for graphs and pie-charts, this is the bit that I like the most.

For anyone who is in the slightest concerned about Flickr's longterm future, 500px is looking increasingly like a viable alternative. You can check out the site here, and the membership options here.

Facebook and Instagram sitting in a tree

Honestly, when I woke up this morning and saw that Facebook had forked out a mind-blowing $1 billion for Instagram, I had to do the BBC-thing and verify it from three independent sources. That one of my sources was the BBC didn't matter. Still, there it was in MacBook screen technicolour.

Last week, when I asked what was next for Instagram, I mentioned that it was taking slow and carefully placed steps towards social media domination. Over 30 million people were sharing their lives photographically through the app, and it was set to grow, and grow, and grow. Facebook was hardly going to be ignorant of this, and there was no better means of keeping their photo-sharing enemy closer than by gobbling it up. Even if Facebook wasn't concerned for Instagram's independent rise, which I doubt, the prospect of another company laying its grubby mitts on the 30 million subscriber prize would have been enough to motivate it to make Instagram an offer it couldn't refuse.

Zuckerberg has been quick to point out that Instagram will continue to be developed independently of Facebook and that users won't be forced to share their images on Facebook or prevented from sharing them via any other means of social media: 'We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.'

Kevin Systrom echoed similar sentiments on his blog over at Instagram: 'You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.'

I'm terribly cynical when it comes to Facebook - that's not something I've ever kept secret - so whilst it may remain the case that Instagram users need have no obvious and overt relationship with Facebook, it's still Facebook at the top of the foodchain with its talons firmly embedded in its photo-snapping prey. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a little further down the line sharing photos to Facebook becomes a default and sharing to other networks just that tiny bit harder. But I am a cynic.

I'm not the only one, though; there has been a clutch of people jacking in their Instagram accounts in protest. It's highly doubtful that out of Instagram's 30 million users there will be more than a handful of dissenters, so their impact won't be more than a drop in an ocean. However, for a lot of people Instagram's appeal was its simplicity - just a photo and a filter. That's the one thing that Instagram and Facebook need most definitely to hang on to.

Photographers on Twitter

Say hello to the Twitterati

For the past year or so, I've kept a repository of awesome photographers on Twitter - and today, we hit a really fun milestone: 2,000 photographers!

The list of Twittering Photographers can be found here, on Twittogs.

How can I join in?

Adding yourself to the list is easy: Simply follow @Twittogs on Twitter. As long as you keep following Twittogs, you'll be kept on the list. If you want out, simply unfollow @Twittogs again, and you'll be removed soon after.

If you want your Flickr to be listed separately, that's pretty easy too: Simply do an at-reply to Twittogs with the URL to your Flickr stream, like this:

Hi @Twittogs, please add http://flickr.com/photocritic

Every 24 hours or so, the little Twittogs robot checks its @replies, and adds the new Flickr accounts and Twitter followers to the list.

Check it out, and follow some awesome photographers on Twitter!

Pictures for the neat and orderly

If you’re even ever so slightly OCD and like things organised just-so (my kitchen cupboards are an homage to this), the collection of photos at Things Organized Neatly will sate your desire for straight lines, neat piles, and perfectly formed boxes.

Austin Radcliffe, who runs Things Organized Neatly, thinks of himself its curator. Some of the photos are his, but many are found or submitted by other followers. None is available to buy, which is a pity because some would make terrific postcards.

My favourite happens to be the radial carrots, but go take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

(Headsup to The Guardian.)

Shotblox: photoblogging made simple

There are millions, maybe even billions, of photographs published on the web and quite a few different content management systems to handle them.

How many picture-specific content management systems are there – you know, ones that really focus on your photographs and aren’t laden down with extraneous features that detract from the real image? If you’re thinking: ‘Not that many,’ then maybe Issac and Kasey Kelly, over at Kelly Creative Tech have developed something to fill this niche.

Shotblox.com is a simple-to-use piece of photoblogging software where the photograph is the centre of attention. Once photos have been uploaded directly from your harddrive or from Adobe Lightroom they are saved in galleries and then each gallery is displayed as a clean block of images. Click on an image and it enlarges. Yes, it really is that simple. I was curious so I tried it out.

A funky user interface should help you along as you're building your new site

It took me a few minutes to sign up, a few more minutes to select a typeface colour and a background colour, and a few minutes to upload some images. Almost before I knew it my distinctly amateur-looking photographs were being presented in a professional-looking format, and I didn’t even have to use the video tutorial. There’s an option to notify your friends or followers of your new posts via FaceBook or Twitter, and if you get horribly stuck the Kelly brothers are an email away. My photos are accessed via the Shotblox subdomain, (http://deb.shotblox.com, if you’re that interested) but if you’ve your own domain, you can point that at Shotblox.com.

As Issac told me, Shotblox is really about what the photographer wants. It is primarily user-led with the emphasis being on simple: simple to use and simple in looks. They want the photography to stand out.

So if you do decide that Shotblox is for you, what will it cost you? Well, there are a range of packages on offer from a free sample of ten photos through to unlimited numbers of photos and unlimited bandwidth for US$500 a year, which means that if you’re serious about showing off your photos, there’s probably a package perfect for you.

Take a look for yourself at www.shotblox.com