Points are earned as you interact with the site.  Uploading photos, creating and participating in groups and forums, commenting, etc. all earn various points.  You can always see you current point balance on the "My Account" page.

As you accumulate points, you can spend them in the Rewards Gallery. The link to the Rewards Store is also available on your My Account page or the previous link.  We have a few items in the Rewards Store now but will be adding quite a bit more as time goes on so please check back regularly.

*Points do expire if your membership remains inactive for over 1 year and only Gold members can accumulate or redeem points.

A follow-up to the points.  You can always see what points are earned for what action (and your current balance) here.

Also a few caveats to the point system based on feedback (and to clarify some unclear items) so far.

• Points in the photo gallery are decremented if a photo is removed or duplicate-matched.
• Points in the photo gallery are decremented if a photo is removed for being low rated. (The system culls low rated pix automatically and approximately every 6 months for pix that have been in the system for at least 6 months, have been viewed at least 1000 times and still rated poorly.  The exact cutoff rating depends on a statistical analysis of the distribution of ratings in the system at the time (but is looking for weighted 1's and 2's all things being equal).
• Points in the photo gallery for comments only count for meaningful comments ("nice!, cool!, hot!, etc.") are not being counted.  This is to reward those who take the time to actually write a comment and discourage those with a tendency to cut and paste.  (Note: this is of course not retroactive and any points accrued before the change are still valid).
• Any changes to how we calculate points or for what actions points are allocated will only apply to future accrual and will never (except demonstrable fraud) be imposed retroactively.  Like many new features of the site, the point system is evolving and as we notice issues, we'll address and report on them in the forum.