Review: 500px
Score:
81%
When I wrote earlier this week about Flickr's lack of support for Windows Phone, I suggested that the space was open for another service to step up and become the social app of choice to show off your photos. Could 500px be the app of choice?
Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0
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Launched in October 2009, 500px (pronounced 'five hundred pixels') is an online photo community based in Toronto and now sports two and a half million registered users. This official client will help you navigate the social network, interacting with your friends, and browsing through the popular and recommended images uploaded by other members.
What it won't do, strangely enough, is upload any images from your Windows Phone. This is pretty much a 'one way' in terms of your images. While this partially fits in with the ethos of the site, which is more focused on displaying really great photos as opposed to acting as a storage locker for every image you take, it does seem like a strange omission. Perhaps the thinking is that great photography only happens after a tweak in Lightbox or Photoshop?
500px's website does have an HTML5 upload option, but unfortunately it doesn't play well with Windows Phone's Internet Explorer either.
On reflection, I'm okay with this. Sometimes the best applications come from restrictions and limitations - imposing a 'view mode' on the 500px client puts the focus on navigating images and discussing them, which makes for a wonderful experience for the end-user.
Just before I go on, it's worth noting that even though the site is called 500px, it is not limited to images with a dimension of 500 pixels, uploaders are encouraged to use as high a resolution as is practical and to have widths on the order of 3000 pixels if possible.
So, what do we have as we open the application? The default Windows Phone panorama view, backed up by a curated image taken from the 500px archive. Your personal screen opens up the panorama, allowing you to navigate through the photos on 500px, your personal profile details, and a few more settings relevant to the application. With only three menu choices it does feel a little bare-boned here. I might have been tempted to add a search box along the top to emphasis the 'look around' nature of the application and create a better visual first view of the app.
As it is, search, along with refresh, is on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.
Swinging along the panorama screen, you have flow (the timeline of pictures from yourself and your friends on the service), following (the people who you are, well, following), and your favourite pictures. These are generated by the social network and are personal to you, but the next two options - the popular images and the editor's choice - are curated, which provides some stunning images.
Naturally the 500px image viewer is reminiscent of the built-in Windows Phone image viewer, so you can scroll around the image with a finger slide, and use the two finger pinch-to-zoom to get up close to the subject. But 500px also provides far more detail about the image. First of all you have your social interactions on the network, so comments, and thumbs up voting, are all present. You can also click-through to get the metadata of the image (such as the camera used and the lens settings), as well as more statistics on how well-loved the image is.
It is these statistics that drive the 'popular' images section, so you can see how popular an image has been, the pulse (how interesting it was), and how many overall views a picture has had.
It's all very niche, and wonderful, at the same time. This is a network, and an app, that genuine loves photography for what it is, both the images and the technicalities behind the images.
But even with a wide circle of friends to follow their images, even with a steady flow of images and notifications, and even with a list of your own personally marked favourites in the app, my favourite part of the app is the lock screen integration.
I've been a big fan of Bing's Image of the Day, and it takes a lot to get me to switch away. 500px's choice of images might just tempt me. If you're looking for a handful of stunning images each day, then having a large pool of images and some smart heuristics to pick out the popular ones from the chaff will go a long way to choosing the best lock screen image.
500px is deliberately very limiting in its scope. It wants to help you be proud of your pictures, and find new pictures that other people are proud of. It does this task very well. No, it's not a full on replacement for an upload storage/share model of application, but for displaying pictures and interacting it's hard to see how it can be substantively improved.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at