VCG has acquired 500px
iso.500px.com
iso.500px.com
So if company A used 500px's image in 2014 before VCG's investment, and company B quoted company A's article, and you re-tweet or re-blogged company B's article, VCG (who now has copyrights in China for 500px images) might go after you to collect penalty but never contact A nor B.
Advise to startups : to make sure you don't infringe any copyrights, do a reverse search on VCG's database (especially you have market in China) as well as Getty's/shutter stock's database and never trust unsplash-ish websites (they also have no model releases that will get you in trouble). These stuff could bite you back in years if you have a photo floating somewhere in your public Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.
Now that VCG has acquired 100% of 500px, what would (or could) happen is they will crawl anyone who has referenced 500px photos in China and start to threaten to sue in exchange for opportunity to gain more subscribers for their media library. Last year a couple of social media accounts on Wechat was forced to shutdown by this [2]. VCG quotes different penalty for different images, and it is usually 1000 RMB per image.
Canon and Nikon still provides no on system encryption although photographers have been asked for it for years, so basically if someone stole your camera, they also owns the copyright of photos from those RAW files.
It's photogs looking at other photogs' work, vs. Facebook / Instagram that actually have an audience outside of the creators themselves. Let's say you shoot fashion. On Instagram you have models, MUAs, stylists, studios, agencies, brands and all of their non-creatives friends. On 500px, nothing, just photographers. It's somewhat akin to writing music that only other musicians will hear.
Oh and lots and lots of bots saying the same comment on every post.
Not really surprised they've been slowly slipping out of relevance. There's no particularly great reason to be on that specific platform.
Isn't that the whole reason for them to exist in the first place? I think the problem here is the expectation (maybe internally at 500px as well) that every site has to hockey-stick its way to enormous success. A social-enabled portfolio site for photographers sounds like a very sensible idea to me.
A shame, I was hoping it'd be successful and benefit Toronto's startup scene.
I mostly envision 500px as a B2B platform. That is, showing your peers your chops. You don't see too many wannabes there. The exception to B2B being the elite level shooters who do workshops, etc.
On Instagram, everyone with an index finger and an iphone is a photographer. It's a large audience and images get views / likes, does that make it a good marketing fit?
I haven't heard Flickr mentiined in too long. Shame really. It was Instagram before Instagram existed. Kinda.
There's no built-in way to batch-export your photos, if you don't have a backup. You can visit this link https://500px.com/settings/store and if you click the middle column of images, they should automatically download one at a time at a high resolution (3000px+ w/h). If the images are smaller than that, you have to click into each one and use the dev tools to focus on the image and find the link. Stupid and uselessly, they disabled right-click.
Make sure you do all of this in a non-Chrome browser. In Chrome the images are rendered as webp and there isn't a super easy non-techie way to convert webp to anything else. If you use Firefox for example, its easy to right-click on the image from the link in the dev tools and save as a jpeg.
If you're one of the 100 greatest living photographers, the odds are you're not overly interested in hanging out where average Joe is posting and sharing 927 pictures of the family vacation to Disneyland. People like communities filled with people at least somewhat like themselves. Even the cool factor inevitably plays into it (mass market sites inherently lose that), no matter how much a person may resist that lure. Once upon a time, Yelp and Flickr were small, tight-knit, snobbish communities that the masses had never heard of.
If a site goes fully mainstream, it'll start to bleed off its elite creators (assuming there are alternatives). They'll seek out a new scene, they'll try to get away from the mundane that inevitably sets in, and the dilution of the qualities of the community that initially attracted them.
that site sounds familiar.
I did have an account there. I should probably find my login and delete my images. It was fun, but in the age of image sharing everywhere, I didn't use it much (I uploaded 5 images). I had more friends on flickr and later instagram, so thats where I ended up.
With Flickr->Yahoo->Verizon and instagram->Facebook, there seems like a lot of consolidation in this space.
Nothing in China related to companies scream "choice"
Just a guess, I don't know the details of this deal.
We’re so honored to share the journey with all of youThat said, I think this is a bit different than other acquisitions as it is not an acqui-hire and the product (hopefully) will not shut down.