500px Photo-Sharing Network Partners With About.me

Online photo sharing community 500px announced on Monday integration with about.me, the personal web presence service.

For those who aren't familiar with the site, about.melets users create a single platform to link multiple online identities and external sites, including popular social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. If you want to share all your contacts it's easier to just share a single about.me page than to share each one individually.

On the other hand, 500px has emerged as a popular photo sharing network among professional photographers, and also among hobbyists. While sites like Facebook and Google+ make it easier to share albums of pictures taken with your friends, 500px is seen as a place for professionals to submit their best work - and when the site first started, only moderated photos which were deemed "high quality" would be published on the site.

On about.me, members can now add the 500px app to their profiles, and share their photography through the site.

Thanks to the Partner Program agreement, about.me members can install the 500px app on their about.me profile, and use it "to discover professional caliber [sic] photography on about.me", according to the site's blog.

With Monday's announcement, other about.me members can also now use photographs from 500px in their Web profiles. This is restricted to photographs that uploaders have opted in for 500px's Partner Program, which lets uploaded photos be shared with third parties, including Bing and Yandex. The goal of the partner program, 500px writes in its blog post, is to provide photographers' works with greater exposure.

There are several new backgrounds from 500px which are now available for about.me users - and while the site reiterates in the blog post that a photo of "you is the ideal way to present yourself online", it adds that "new backgrounds photos will help you keep your page looking fresh."