Where should I be posting my photos?
August 24, 2017 5:19 PM   Subscribe

I like to take and share photos of landscapes, and I like wide, panoramic aspect ratios. I enjoy Instagram as a platform for sharing photos, but it is hot garbage at panoramas. Also, I'd like to have somewhere with a little sharper focus on photography as an art form, where I can be exposed to and learn from the works of people who are more skilled and experienced than me. Where?

It would be great if this community had good mobile support, since I spend a lot more time on my phone than I do on my laptop (although that may change somewhat). And obviously it needs to be somewhere active and vibrant; I'm not expecting Instagram big, but the more that's going on there the better. Ideally it would be somewhere that caters to a more enthusiast/professional audience, rather than the general-interest flavor of Instagram, and where one can see pictures at higher resolutions (and larger sizes) than Instagram supports. And it must be able to handle widescreen/panoramic images without shrinking them down to the size of a literal postage stamp.

It doesn't necessarily have to have the ultra-minimal, feed-driven interface paradigm of Instagram, but it should hopefully be easy to share things and find things and be fun to play around with both as a consumer and a producer of photographic content.

I'm looking for somewhere where I can learn and grow, and where I can share my photos as they were meant to be seen. Where is it?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not recommending it, but I kind of enjoy Facebook's vr style panaromas where you have to manually pan, or on the phone literally wave your phone to rotate the view of the panorama like a gleefull idiot.
posted by TheAdamist at 5:45 PM on August 24, 2017


I'm interested to hear what others might suggest as well. I have occasionally looked into Insta-alternatives but haven't tried any out yet.

Here's an article from April listing 5 other photo apps. Looks like Flickr is the only large scale competitor, and they say that they've improved the mobile app, but it's still a desktop oriented service. I'm intrigued by Polaroid's SW/NG app but as far as I can tell that's still iOS only; I found a press release from last October saying an Android app was close, but nothing after that, so, not available to me.
posted by mannequito at 5:58 PM on August 24, 2017


Response by poster: A clarification: it doesn't have to be an app-based community, or even necessarily have an app. A solid mobile browsing experience would be sufficient. In fact, the desktop experience is more important than the mobile experience, it would just be nice if it worked well on mobile also.

And yes, Facebook does handle panoramas very nicely, although obviously it's not what I'm looking for on the whole. You'd think that since they own Instagram…
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:15 PM on August 24, 2017


Check out 500px. It's not for everybody and has a very particular character (not unlike MetaFilter) but it ticks several of the boxes you mentioned. It might be a good fit.
posted by cribcage at 6:17 PM on August 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


If you haven't already, you might check out Instapan for turning panoramic photos into panning videos for Instagram.
posted by exogenous at 9:18 PM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


I have no personal experience with it, but I have a good friend who does photography as a hobby and he swears by DeviantART, and there seems to be a good amount of interaction and feedback exchange between (encouraging) strangers, so it migh be worth checking out?
posted by ipsative at 10:07 PM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


I assume that eventually Instagram will sort their panoramas out but till then I use Swipeable for panoramas. It uses their carousel features to make swipeable panos. I've been very pleased with the results. Example here.
Works in app only, but might be of interest?
posted by tardigrade at 2:35 PM on August 25, 2017


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