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The faltering economy has claimed the life of another small business today. I received an e-mail from the Editor in Chief of JPG Magazine announcing that on Monday they’re shutting their doors for good. I only got the e-mail because I have been a registered member of the site for some time and although none of my photos ever made it into the magazine it was always something I wanted to be more serious about.

I guess I missed the boat.

JPG Magazine was a publication, both electronic and print, entirely supported by user submissions. JPG would suggest a series of “themes” and users would submit images that they thought suited the subject. Through a voting process, the best-liked images floated to the top and got published in the magazine. It was a great way for any photographer to get their name out and for the magazine to spread inspiration and thus collect subscription fees.

I’m not sure what their exact business model was; I never subscribed to the print magazine. Perhaps their philosophy was too open and too philanthropic to extract the necessary payments from their members to stay afloat. That’s only conjecture.

Still, it’s a shame to see such a wonderful resource go away. I could spend hours browsing the published photos to find inspiration, and inspiration I did regularly find there.

So now what?

You can go view the published photos on JPG Magazine’s published photos page until Monday (the 5th of January), but after that, it will be gone.

Download PDFs.html of previous JPG Magazine issues (also until Monday). That way you’ll have all of this great stuff right there on your hard drive.

If you’re looking for inspiration, you can always browse PhotoSIG’s highest rated photos which are basically mind-blowing 100% of the time.

Check out The Unofficial JPG Magazine Group on Flickr. There are lots of awesome images there, too.

Of course you could always view my gallery