1x or 1x.com is an online photo gallery and a community website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 for photographers

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

. Anyone can register an account and upload photos, but only images selected by the site screeners/editors will be visible in the gallery which makes it different from most other photo communities where any uploaded photo can be viewed by the members instantly. The site has a photo critique section and a forum about photography.

Membership

There are four membership types on 1x as of july 2010. "Basic membership" is free and allows you to upload 1 photo per week and use all community features. "Bronze Premium membership" is a paid membership with 5 uploads per week. Paid membership also comes with a personal homepage on a separate domain that can be used to upload any photo without screening process. 1x previously had a "Bronze Membership" without the homepage but it was removed in early 2010.

"Silver membership" and "Gold membership" is awarded to active and talented members and cannot be purchased separately.

The membership level is visible on the color of the name of the photographer.

Screening process

Screening of uploaded photos is done by anyone of the 8 official photo screeners. Photos can be screened by one person only (called "instant publish" or "instant rejection"). This generally happens on the really good or really bad images. Average quality images are reviewed by the more than one screener and sometimes also by the members in a process called "member screening". Any member can vote on images in "member screening" on a scale from 1-6. This information goes back to the official photo screener who always takes the final decision.

Screening is not anonymous which has sparked controversy in the forums a few times because of the risk of bias

Bias

Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of alternatives. Bias can come in many forms.-In judgement and decision making:...

. The member screening however is completely anonymous.

Photo critique

Any photo uploaded to the site can be posted in the forums for photo critique. All members can contribute with critique but the moderation is very strict and short/shallow comments are instantly deleted by a team of moderators. There is also a team of "Senior critics" which are selected by the moderator team for their good abilities to provide photo critique.

Forums

The forums are primarily photo related but there is also a subsection for off-topic discussions.

History

The site was founded as "Onexposure" on 16 February 2007 by Jacob Jovelou and Ralf Stelander from Uppsala, Sweden. At that time, all screening was done by Jacob and Ralf. It took almost a year until the first non-founding screener was appointed on 2 January 2008.

Name change to 1X

On 21 September 2008 the site crew announced that the name of the site would change from "onexposure.net" to "1x.com". The name 1x.com was chosen because it is shorter, a com-domain and that it matches the original name (1 = one - x = exposure).

Growth

1x has over 5500 published photographers. The exact number of members is unknown, but looking at the user id from newly created members suggest that it is over 55000 members.

Traffic

The site had an Alexa rating of 2973 as of June 21, 2010. No exact visitor amounts are released from the crew but the most visited photo on the site has almost 1 million unique views.

Hosting

Site is hosted in a data center in Uppsala, Sweden and running on lighttpd, memcached and MySQL. All servers are named from Swedish towns.