6 Places to Upload Your Photos That Are Still Awesome

There are a number of photographers who don't find Instagram and other major platforms their cup of tea. Certainly, the engagement is great, but the sheer volume of content can feel suffocating and, oftentimes, building a consistent base is tough. And even if you've built a large following, you could be looking for ways to reach out to an audience of other creators and enthusiasts of your field.

Whether these are your reasons, or you're trying to set your roots, trying to branch outwards, find your place, escape the sea of content, or you just want to explore other options, we've got you covered. We'll go through some lesser-known image-sharing sites which are worth a look, and maybe you might find just the place you'll slot right into.

500px

500px blew up in popularity a few years back and has since relatively died down, but it remains a great place for both amateur and professional photographers. The community is known to give great feedback on posts, and your audience is mainly other creatives. With their free plan, you get seven free image uploads per week, but their yearly plan caps at $60 USD, and you get several customizability features, analytics, and more.

As an added bonus, you can submit your images for licensing to earn some money while you're at it. However, you generally have no reign over the pricing, most earn minimal, and they revoked earnings from images under a Creative Commons License. That said, earning on 500px is something you can try your hands on passively while engaging with one of the best niche photography communities you can find.

YouPic

For something broader and with more positive engagement, then YouPic is probably up your alley. From the get-go, it has a lot of interactability, giving you the options to re-pic, nominate, like, and favorite other people's work. Added to that, your images have the opportunity to reach thousands of eyes in under a few hours, with some reporting upwards of 55,000 views in six hours. Did we mention you could create a shop too?

YouPic's free plan offers global engagement, unlimited uploads, statistics, and the opportunity to create a shop (if monetization is an end goal of yours). However, their paid plans are… on the more pricey end, with their highest tier at $9.99 USD a month. In exchange, you are given courses, increased exposure, and priority to clients and new customers.

Whether or not that's enough bang for your buck, with or without the pricey plans, if your aim is recognition and earning then this could very well be your new home!

ViewBug

For a more competitive platform, you may want to check out ViewBug. ViewBug is a fairly regular photo-sharing site at its base, permitting ten images a week for a free account, allowing direct messaging of other photographers and the like. You get free reign over your copyright, and get to sell what you post. It even runs its own blog with tips (though you'll have to scroll a bit)!

What ViewBug is most known for, however, are its contests. If you feel that a more competitive creative environment is key to honing your skills, then ViewBug could be the right spot for you. Opening ViewBug's “Contests” tab, features several paid and free photography contests ongoing concurrently.

The contest judges are supposedly prominent figures in various fields, from photography, film, and even writing. Not to mention the prizes! Rewards range anywhere from actual cash, to more exposure, to winning DSLR cameras. The competition is tight, but if you feel up to it you could be the next one to succeed!

Flickr

Flickr is next up on our list and is another really well-rounded site. It boasts one of the largest photographer and enthusiast communities on the internet and is reliably versatile and fast, even without payment. Your capabilities here range anywhere from uploading and storing photos, to implementing them on your WordPress site and so on.

The free plan gives a terabyte of storage maintained through ads. But you are limited to one thousand photos with only fifty photos allowed to be private, which is still a lot if you don't have a sizeable collection of images to upload (oh, and you can publish the RAWs too, so the terabyte is very much welcome).

Flickr Pro is around $5 USD a month and provides unlimited variations of the features listed above along with an ad-free experience, greater customizability, and upload resolutions for 6k and above. If versatility and robustness are what you are looking for, Flickr could be one of the few top-notch options available for your purposes.

Behance

Behance is a part of the Adobe Ecosystem and has often been called “The Instagram for Designers.” Quite rightfully so, as with one scroll your eyes are blessed with thousands of images, animations, illustrations, posters, so on and so forth (even obscure things like mood boards!) all within a neat and stylish visual interface.

Most members use Behance as a way of putting themselves out where other creatives can see what project they're up to next, while others use it mainly for inspiration for their personal use. For your photographic purposes, Behance is very image-focused and the necessary features are free. It does not have any limit on the number of projects you can make either. As part of the Adobe Ecosystem, you also have the option to use Behance for your portfolios and linking your latest stuff to your websites and other supported platforms.

If you want, you could also use their job listing service to search for jobs, or even their paid Prosite feature if you want major customizability freedom to your Behance page (adding sub-pages, tiny tweaks, Google analytics, and more control over HTML). It is a bit pricey starting at $9.99 USD a month, but whether you choose Prosite or use it for free, it is one of the best niche places for photographers to showcase their works and mingle with other visual creatives.

SmugMug

Our last site on this list is one designed and optimized primarily for photographers. SmugMug is a photography, e-commerce, and portfolio website builder, and while it isn’t as much a social site as our previous features, it is a good place if you’re looking to host a personal site to showcase your work. It has several features to help deal with problems you may run into online in this field, such as photo organization, galleries, a built-in image lab for commercial purposes, and even end-to-end details like shipping, payment processing, and printing.

Sadly, unlike our other features, this site is not free and starts at a $15 USD a month Power plan and ends at a $500 USD a month Venture plan (very large discounts with their annual plans from $120 USD to $365 USD instead). For smaller purposes, Power works just fine with unlimited photo storage, privacy, and more, but commercial features are limited until the $31 USD mark, and there you can only set a limited number of profit margins (of course, with watermark and theft protection, among other features). Multiple custom price lists are only available upwards of $45 USD a month.

All that aside, the higher plans aren’t needed for a comprehensive and simple to use website builder. You even get built-in integration with Adobe Lightroom with the Power plan! If you have cash to spare and are looking for greater freedom over customization, then SmugMug could just be your next best friend.

Conclusion

So what’s your choice? The stellar feedback of 500px’s community? The quick and positive engagement of YouPic? The enthusiast niche audience of Flickr? The competitive environment of ViewBug? The “Instagram for designers?” Or the commercial web builder SmugMug?

Whatever your “pic” is (you could go for several or none), we hope this list has motivated you to check out some of these awesome lesser-known places for your photography journey.