500px does nothing new, it just does everything a little better, a little cleaner, and a little clearer. It’s not complicated, but it’s really hard to do.
You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
500px does nothing new, it just does everything a little better, a little cleaner, and a little clearer. It’s not complicated, but it’s really hard to do.
Joe
on 06 Dec 12what’s going on with the tiling visible below the water in the photo? is that some kind of artifact or is it really in the original photo and if so what is it?
Mike
on 06 Dec 12@Joe I believe it is the tiling of the floor of an infinity pool.
Marco
on 06 Dec 12Not that I’m an expert photographer but consider myself pretty decent and I hope 500px doesn’t get overrun with not so talented photographers. Nice having a place where most of the photographers post very good photos.
Anonymous Coward
on 07 Dec 12Cannot agree with that. Organizer is awful, you can never tell which photos has been moved to sets and which don’t. Sets are designed in such a way that you never look at them when browsing some user’s profiles, as the link ‘Sets’ is always displayed on profile page, even if there are no sets at all for that user.
This is one of the projects where you understand from first usage days, that due to overall simplification dev team is not going to fix interface flaws anytime soon.
Main reason I use 500px is the community, which has been organizational success from the start. But it has little to do with ‘does everything’ or ‘does nothing’, and more with how the team managed to promote their project among photographers.
Harry Llewelyn
on 07 Dec 12What Flickr could have been…
no
on 07 Dec 12yep read the book “simply better”
Pym
on 08 Dec 12I just wanted to try it out and “Username must be between 4 and 35 characters”. This is so disappointing…
S
on 08 Dec 12@Pym: unless you are DDH, in which case, they’ll bend the rules for you :)
Tommi F.
on 08 Dec 12I was initially really impressed with 500px, but behind the gorgeous facade lies a horribly underwhelming experience and tons of poorly finished features.
Especially the upload process is a crash course in tedium. I do a lot of live music photography and a core pattern I have is uploading ca. 10 photos with near identical metadata at a time.
But 500px’s uploader tool doesn’t allow any sort of batching, setting the same metadata for several images or even copying metadata in a simple fashion. So I have to tediously copy/paste through every single image. Not to mention that the (tiny) map tool for setting geodata has no address search so basically you have to zoom in from the whole world view for each image separately.
The insult added to injury is that they only allow you to upload 10 photos at a time so if you happen to have a solid set of 12 images from a show, you’re forced to do them 6+6 or 10+2 or something just to make copy/pasting that much more difficult.
Then there’s the portfolio feature which I had high hopes for. I wanted a truly 2010s high class HTML5/CSS3 rich media interface with RWD and the works. Instead I got template after template of mediocre jquery-galleries with barely adequate mobile handling.
Better than Flickr? Yep. Worth the hype? No.
Keeping my fingers crossed for significant improvements in the near future. Otherwise I’m canceling my paid account pretty soon.
machbio
on 09 Dec 12I really love 500px for the design and all the features on site.. for me to switch from flickr to 500px, they need to give me some way to batch upload the photos from my desktop PC.. or even may be a tool to migrate from flickr to 500px..
Priya Sri
on 09 Dec 12I think 500px is a winner only because its UI is a lot cleaner, and they ‘focus’ on the content i.e. the photograph as you can see here .The UI is neat & simple! That’s it!
Chris
on 12 Dec 12@Tommi, I think you are missing the point of 500px, in my opinion they don’t want you uploading a dozen photos of the same thing or anything half ass, the limits are there to try and get you to really think about what you are uploading & only submitting your very best. At least thats how I interpret it & the main reason I enjoy perusing the photos on 500 vs. the noise on flickr.
This discussion is closed.