Notice for everyone who follows my work: I decided to stop the publishing of my photos on 500px.
There were several reasons for this decision. One of them was not an optimal quality of uploaded photos. When I played with it last time, a high-quality JPEG of size about 800 KB was recompressed to size about 200 KB with a visible impact on the quality of the photo.
But more important for me are the focus of 500px on stock photography. They pushed hard its Marketplace earlier, and it will be replaced with selling photos via Getty Images now. I have to admit that you can disable Marketplace, and it will be possible to disable selling on Getty probably, but I don’t like this direction in general. I don’t intend to publish my photos there to sell them for few dollars, although I fully understand that it may be a good opportunity for others. I am not interested in it since they cut the royalty rate from 70% to 30% for non-exclusive photos. But there were other problematic moves. They were selling photos on Fotolia without credit, or they sometimes applied discounts causing that $299 Unlimited Print was sold for $3.96 only.
And of course, the current owner of 500px is Visual China Group, which is a big name in the Chinese stock photo business.
I must admit that I never have any license issues with my photos on 500px, but I don’t like the direction they are heading, so I decided to leave. If you want to follow me, you can still use one of these options:
If you miss my photos on any other sharing platform, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments – I will consider it :)
