500px once was a light in the dark, when Flickr stopped evolving, years ago. But 500px gradually descended from its pedestal, as decisions were made against users’ interests.
A fast growing challenger
When Flickr was bought by Yahoo, and then evolved into a family photography sharing service instead of the virtual home for passionate photographers, 500px came with a new gorgeous design, giving more space to photos. As I wrote back in 2015 (in french):
500px photos clearly have more of an artistic vocation (we may not like portraits that are often too retouched, or landscapes that are a bit too HDRized, but that’s not the point) than those from Flickr, which has become a completely generalist, purely utilitarian repository of images.
500px was lacking a few of Flickr’s awesome features at the beginning, but they evolved quickly to add what was missing the most.
Groups
Groups were among these features, but never really got the audience of Flickr ones, it seems. This is an area where UX should be prioritized over visual design, which 500px clearly didn’t understand.
Collections
Collections were another nice feature of Flickr, even if they limited the number of photos we could put in them.
I asked 500px for this several times:
@500px you should let us do curation, like "collections" in Flickr. Could even be used for Editors selections.
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) September 4, 2015
And they did it after a while: Galleries: An Exciting New Way to Use and Experience 500px
Unfortunately, 500px soon removed the action of favoriting a photograph, migrated the existing favorites into a more difficult to use “favorites” gallery, and later changed the behavior of likes, messing with our habits.
It is still impossible to list our likes, making them useless appart from the “Pulse” dance, and requiring us to use galleries instead, with much more steps.
But a lot of issues
Arbitrary photo crops
In the beginning, 500px had real issues with arbitrary photo crops in several pages, which made me mad:
The full photo, the square gallery page crop and the random flow page crop. @500px should stop doing this.
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) August 6, 2015
Now. pic.twitter.com/8Zw3dU5fKr
How could a service dedicated to good photography take so little care of something so important?
@500px@500px_Help really, you should improve the crop you make on Flow. This is https://t.co/iUjjIyW3BL… 😕 pic.twitter.com/cyrQn265pP
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) December 2, 2015
Now you know who to blame for these &€¥$% square thumbnails on @500px ! https://t.co/WVXin0AR9s
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) June 9, 2015
They finally changed the design of galleries, and started preserve photos ratios.
Search
500px also has issues with search, that is not always relevant enough to be useful:
@500px@500px_Help could your search work with quotes?https://t.co/rdqze0GNto
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) May 2, 2016
would not show https://t.co/99vv31rkoz photos.
+@Thanh
Web and iPhone don’t have the same UX
In today’s omnichannel world, it’s really annoying seing a pure player like 500px provide desynchronized experiences on the Web and the mobile app (at least the iOS one).
The app is easy to use, helps adding photos to galleries with a smart mix of latest used galleries and then alphabetical sort (just like Pinterest), while the website keeps all galleries in last use order, up to the very last one, which really doesn’t work well when you have a lot of galleries.
Additionally, buttons colors (for likes for example) sometimes have opposite meanings between the mobile app and the website.
A mess…
Money, money, money
500px has also always been a little too pushy for subscriptions, showing banner even when I got 2 years of subscription in advance:
@500px please stop inviting me to upgrade my account, my "awesome" account already expires in 2 years! pic.twitter.com/kqosIqaKLJ
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) March 23, 2015
500px also launched Prime, a marketplace allowing photographers to sell their creations, but with a really low 30% cut of the selling price. A real shame. 500px later changed it to a better share, but everyone remembers how it started.
Click highjacking
500px thought it was a good idea to adopt a more Single Page App architecture, with traditional links replaced with JavaScript event handlers, but didn’t to it in an accessible way, preventing users to open some links in another browser tab (at least in Firefox, my favourite browser):
@500px@tchebotarev BTW, every Firefox user will hate the new popin behavior of photos because of this bug: https://t.co/9LH4djQDsd
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) October 6, 2015
The REALLY bad
No more RSS
One of the thing I hate the most is that 500px removed a powerful feature I was using a lot for serendipity and photographers discovery: the RSS feeds for galleries:
@500px where are the favorites RSS feeds gone? 😥 This URL for @tchebotarev for example is no more a RSS feed: http://t.co/VkkOmD1Eju
— Nicolas Hoizey (@nhoizey) December 21, 2013
I use RSS (or Atom) feeds a lot, for example on Flickr, and 500px ones where perfect. I never got a clear answer when I asked why they removed them.
Transitioning from a passionate photographers project to a soulless business
500px creators have already left been ousted a while ago (Oleg Gutsol in 2014 and Evgeny Tchebotarev in 2016), but it got worse with the recent acquisition by Visual China Group (VCG), the world’s third-largest visual content provider, a company that has been called the “Getty Images of China”.
No more Creative Commons licenses
All of my photos are shared online with a Creative Commons license allowing people to adapt them freely as long as they share them with attribution, and don’t use them for commercial purposes.
But 500px will no longer allow photographers to license their photos under Creative Commons.
I don’t want to give 500px more power over my photos, so I have to leave.
Hello Flickr, happy to see SmugMug freed you from Yahoo, I’m back!