Flickr’s Under Construction
I thought we have seen the last of these. Oh you know, with all the rage of web 2.0, 3.0, and all the slick design breakthrough happening everywhere. So it was a nice surprise when I came across one of these today. On a fairly popular site, nonetheless.
After enjoying a free three-month trial of Flickr Pro, my subscription was coming to an end. For a while I was intrigued to check out Flickr’s Stats page, but unfortunately that didn’t come with the free trial. After months-long deliberation of Flickr’s $25 vs 500px’s $50 annual subscription, I decided to go with Flickr since most of my photos and sets are on there anyway. The decision was also made easy especially considering I just spent some time integrating my Flickr gallery to my Photography page.
Anyhow, I finally purchased the annual subscription, rushed to the Stats page, and lo and behold.
The guy’s actually drilling something.
As of this writing (about 2 hours since I purchased subscription), I still see this page and its lovely under construction gif. Looks like I’ll need to wait another “few days” before I see something.
Comparing the Two? Why not.
Generally speaking though, Flickr.com needs a major redesign. Comparing this with 500px, the outdated design is certainly one of the major cons.
500px puts the only things that matter front-and-center: the photographs. No advertisements. No blog snippets. No marketing spiels. No clutter. Upon uploading a photo on 500px, it gets promoted and exposed enough to the community that you start getting votes/favorites/comments fairly quickly.
Speaking of uploading photos, you’ve got to love the little “Discoverability” meter that 500px recently added. It really makes you want to do the less glamorous process of adding metadata about your photos. Yay for gamification!
Discoverability Meter really makes you want to add metadata of your photos.
Maybe I’m not active enough on Flickr, but I find myself needing to promote my photos by adding it to random groups in order to get any exposure. I do like the nice, active community there though that I scan and peruse from time to time.
I guess it’s all about context of use. 500px has a lot to love and is about focusing on the few beautiful, portfolio-worthy money shots you’ve taken. Flickr is about uploading all those couple hundred photos from Weekend at Uncle Bob’s and sharing the album with your family and friends.
I should’ve gone with 500px. Oh well, there’s always next year.
How about you?
Which photo-sharing website do you prefer? Do you use a different one?
If you haven’t already, feel free to follow me on both 500px and Flickr.
Paris, I Miss Thee
For Part II of the honeymoon series, we’re going to relive our ventures in Paris. After four incredible nights in Florence, we flew to Paris and stayed there for five nights.
I had visited Paris years before, but it was the first time for my wife. While Florence provided a more “old country” feel, Paris gave us a nice (albeit shocking) 180 with the combination of hustle n’ bustle, crowded traffic, and bright lights of the city.
Upon arriving at our hotel room, we were greeted with a nice welcome message, complete with a bottle of champagne. Ah the perks of announcing we were on honeymoon 🙂
Being in Paris, we had to hit all the big spots. Since we did have time there, each day we planned to see one to two things. But since it was our honeymoon, we just did what we felt like and nobody can make us get up at 7AM to stand in line for The Louvre 🙂
Arc de Triomphe
Right by the Arc, Samantha somehow was able to convince these two French firefighters to pose for camera… and she speaks very little French!
Across the Seine River. It was a particularly cloudy day, so we couldn’t see the top of the Eiffel Tower. It made for a good photo op though.
Right by the Eiffel Tower, they had this “United Buddy Bear” exhibition, which featured bears from all over the world dressed to represent each country. My wife though the Indonesian bear with its sarong was more exciting than the United States’ Statue of Liberty 🙂
And a couple more shots of the Eiffel Tower.
We made it to The Louvre! OK, full disclosure: we didn’t spend hours and hours walking around here and admire the art, but we did see The Mona Lisa and The Code of Hammurabi (which for some reason, I really wanted to see) among other things.
The Mona Lisa was very cool to see in person, but the pushy and rude tourists around it were exhilarating.
Interesting fact: inside the Louvre, we came across several artists painting (copying?) the work of art in there. A few posted a sign to not take their photograph, but I don’t think that really deterred anyone (like me) from snapping away.
This next shot was taken from on top of the George Pompidou Center. Great spot for people watching.
On the last day, we visited The Notre Dame.
And that’s nine nights in total. 9 incredible nights that I would gladly experience over again (who wouldn’t?).
For the full album, check out the Newlyweds in Europe Flickr set.
Coming Up Next…
For Part III of this honeymoon photography series, I’m going to focus on the shots that probably filled up most of my memory card while we were abroad: the food. Yup, we spent a good amount of time researching where to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (thank god for hotel wifi!).
Stay tuned!
Florence, I Miss Thee
Ah Florence and Paris, how I miss thee… Looking back at some of these pictures makes me want to plan another vacation… one year anniversary, maybe??
For the grand unveiling of the new “Photography” category (as well as effectively ending my 1.5 year hiatus from blogging), I’d like to share a few shots I took during our honeymoon in Florence. This will be three parts of the honeymoon photography series where I’ll cover our days in Florence, Paris, and all the food we ate there. Why food in its own category? Because after starving ourselves to look good on our wedding day we needed something substantial to eat… for the next nine days 🙂
We left the day after our wedding, and it truly was one of the best experiences of my life.
The Streets of Florence
Overlooking Florence
And of course, the food! This is the famous Bistecca ala Florentina, which is 1.7lb of T-Bone steak.
Then some landscape photos. The first one is a sunrise photo – this day we woke up early enough to catch a tour bus to visit nearby cities like San Gimignano (our tour guide made sure we know how to say the ‘gn’ part), Sienna, Tuscany, and Pisa. It was early, but I’d say totally worth it for the golden hour opportunity.
And of course can’t walk around Europe without some street photography 🙂
Me and the Mrs at San Gimignano. Absolutely Gorgeous.
Coming Up Next…
Next destination: Paris.