Authintic Andrew Cherwenka (CEO) and Christopher Berry (Chief Science Officer) of Authintic

Photo-sharing startup 500px not only wants to ban bad stock photography (down with “women laughing alone over salads!”), it wants to take photo discovery to a new level.

500px just announced that it has acquired analytics technology company Authintic to help it make personalised recommendations to anyone sifting through its database of 37 million photos.

Just like Netflix suggests movies you might be interested in, 500px will recommend photos based on prior searches, the kind of photos you’ve used in the past, and the potential virality of pictures on file (500px tracks engagement on all of its photos).

The company wants to make it easier for advertisers, publishers, and marketers to discover (and buy) amazing photography without relying as much on their own search terms, 500px Managing Director Andrew Cherwenka — originally the CEO of Authintic — explains to Business Insider.

Last fall, 500px raised $US8.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others to start more aggressively working on selling the millions of photographs in its database (though we don’t have specifics on how much 500px paid for Authintic). Earlier this month, the company launched its Authintic-powered licensing site, 500px Prime, for that purpose.

500px Prime sells all its photos for a fixed fee of $US250 for universal rights and Cherwenka expects that the recommendation features enabled through Authintic will help make it much easier for people to find pictures they want. The site also has a rather unheard of licensing policy, in that it gives the photographers a hefty 70% cut of sales (if you sell your photos on Getty, for example, you might only get a measly 30% commission).

“The photos are beautiful, we’re using data in new and better ways, and the we have the utmost simplicity throughout the whole process,” Cherwenka says.

Here’s an example of some of the photos you could find on 500px:

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