Getting into the flow with 500px

A while ago, photo sharing site 500px.com launched their new interface. Where Flickr hasn’t updated their interface for years (that’s decades in internet time), it’s nice to see 500px set an example of where things might be going in the future of online photo sharing. The new interface looks decidedly fresh and has a couple of things I really like:

Flow

500px took a good look at what makes for a compelling presentation for images and came up with “flow”. Just like Facebook’s timeline, it’s based on the idea that a stream of information doesn’t necessarily look very compelling when presented in a straightforward grid or list. Instead, they use a dynamic layout that shows images in different sizes and aspect ratios. In this format, you get a nice presentation of your own images mixed with the ones you liked. But it doens’t stop there, which brings us to the next topic...

Curation

Online photo sharing is great, but there’s always the question of how to find photographers and images you really like among the millions of mediocre uploads. There has to be some mechanism to filter the good stuff from the rest. And not just the good stuff in general, but the stuff that’s good according to your personal taste.

500px has traditionally been very good at curating interesting images. There’s a page where you’ll find a selection of images hand picked by the editors. But there’s also page displaying a “flow” of images that the people you follow liked or commented on. This is exactly what I always used to do manually in order to discover great work: go to one of my favorite photographers, see which images they liked, check out the photographers who took those images, check out their favorites, and so on. The stream of images always extends one level beyond the people you follow, but since you like those peoples work, it’s likely that you will also like the images they like. That way you always get to see a fresh stream of new content that will probably appeal to you.

As a side effect, your perception of the quality of photos uploaded on 500px changes. Because of this filtering mechanism, you generally get to see only high quality images. This in turn makes you think twice before you upload your images to the site. I often hear people saying that they use 500px for their best work, and sites like Flickr for the rest. As a result, the overall quality of uploaded material improves in a virtuous circle.

Stories

Another aspect that I really like about the new-and-improved 500px is the concept of “stories”. Stories consist of a small collection of related photos. You can add a title and description to the whole series, but also to each individual image. Personally I like to think in terms of series of images, not just when creating them, but also when it comes to presentation. You can use the stories for whatever you want. Perhaps you want to show some behind the scenes images of a photo shoot, or create a little photo reportage about a given subject or event. I’m thinking of using this feature to create little “making of” articles for some of my images, where you can follow along with each step in the creation of the final image.

Room for improvement

Nothing is perfect however and there a few minor things that would make the 500px interface really amazing.

When you click on an image in one of the “flow” views, it will open the page for that image. So far so good. When you go back to the flow however, the images are now rearranged, which is slightly disorienting. The first time you look at the flow, you might make some mental notes of two or three images that you might like to open after the one you’re currently looking at. But by the time you get back, they have moved around. Perhaps a single page interface would be a solution here, where the image and related information opens up in an overlay over the flow. That solution would also avoid having to reload the flow once you’re done looking at a particular image, which makes browsing a little smoother.

Secondly, I wish I could see larger versions of the photos. Especially on a site like 500px, that’s all about visually stunning presentation, it seems awkward that the largest size you can view an image is about 900 pixels wide.

One last thing is that if someone you follow decides to take the afternoon off and fave or comment on 200 images, they are going to take over your entire flow. It would be nice if there would be a maximum to the number of images that are filtered into your flow via one person.

I’ve already noticed some improvements on the site over the last few weeks, so I’m sure the 500px developers are hard at work to continually improve the experience. If you havent done so yet, now is the time to check it out and create a free account.