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I mentioned on Twitter that the app I was most disappointed not to find in the initial App Store selection was a good, simple notes app with web-backed storage or synching to the desktop of some sort. A slew of people asked me what was wrong with Evernote. I’d say pretty much everything.
On the left, the editing UI for a new note. That's me typing "This UI is horrible". On the right, that's what you see after saving the note and then opening it to read. Yes, you can two-finger zoom to actually read it, but you can't actually edit the note again. You can't even edit the title or the tags. Useless.
Important keyboard shortcuts for 500px (Note: for a PC cmd=ctl)
cmd-click (to load a page in a tab in the backround)
cmd-w (to close a window)
f (to fave a photo)
L (to like a photo)
cmd-option-arrow key (to move between open tabbed windows)
My two favorite photosharing sites at present are 500px and Flickr. In this post I'll try to explain how I browse photos on 500px to find and uncover great photographs and also how to navigate the site. You can see the companion article How to Browse Flickr Like a Pro here.
500px is one of the most exciting photosharing sites on the scene today. It's a stark contrast to Flickr.
Flickr is a slow moving slow innovating behemoth owned by crappy Yahoo. 500px is a scrappy, fast moving, weekly innovating startup that just received over 500k in VC financing.
Flickr's community managers / staffers are abusive with their users and ban and censor people and ridicule their users. 500px owners are nice and pleasant and actually interact with their users on their site, Twitter, etc.
500px has a fresh new elegant photo page design. Flickr still looks like a tired old website from 2004.
500px seems to actually care about great photography. Flickr could care less (the quality on flickr declined dramatically overall when they turned it into a dumping ground by integrating Yahoo photos into it a few years ago and has gotten worse and worse).
500px is not frightened by the artistic female form. Flickr is scared to death of the female form (they censored this photo of a painting I took of a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago -- ridiculous).
It's exciting to see people that actually care about photography and photographers in charge at 500px. And it's been great watching so many of the best flickr accounts migrate over there over the past several months.
So where do I go to find great photos on 500px? All over the place.
For starters (like flickr) I go to my friends most recent uploads. Unlike Flickr (who will only show you the last 1 or 5 photos by your contacts) 500px shows you all of your contacts most recent uploads. The first thing I do here is cmd-click all of the paging icons at the bottom. This opens up the photo thumbnail pages in background tabs that I can tab to later without wasting time while they load. As they load in the background I'm cmd-clicking other photos on the page most recently loaded where I want to see larger photos. 500px gives you nice big thumbnails on this page in contrast to flickr's tired old page.
After browsing my friends most recent uploads to 500px, next I move on to my own recent activity page there. They just started paging this page this week and so now you can see all of your recent activity (like Flickr). Here, similar to flickr, I'll cmd-click the names of people who have interacted with my photos to load their photo pages in background tabs. From their I cmd-click the photos that I like on their page to open them up bigger and so that I can interact with them. If I like the photo I'll use the keyboard to quickly press "F" and "L" to both fave and like the photo.
Next I go to 500px's version of Explore (called Popular Photos). Here you will find some of the best photographs being published on the web today. I'm not kidding. 500px's Popular Photos page BLOWS flickr's Explore page out of the water. And 500px doesn't even need a secret "magic blacklisting donkey" algorithm to produce it.
Along with Popular Photos, 500px also has Fresh Photos, Upcoming Photo, and a staff curated section called Editor's Choice.
On each of these pages I'll cmd-click thumbnails to load photos to interact with in background tabs. Further, 500px allows you to filter these sections by subject, landscapes, people, nature, fine art NUDES! (did he just say nudes? don't worry folks, you have to check a NSFW tab in order to see these -- can you imagine FLICKR actually giving people an option to see the most popular nudes?)
By using the techniques described above, I can find some really amazing photos by some really amazing photographers on 500px. By relying heavily on the cmd-click function, I can more rapidly and efficiently navigate the site, allowing load time to take place in background tabs, leaving as much time as possible for me to actually spend appreciating and interacting with a photograph.
As a bonus tip, on other thing that I'm starting to do on both Flickr and 500px is curate photographs with Pinterest. I've just started doing this, but if I especially like a photograph on flickr or 500px (or anywhere on the web really) I'll pin it to a gallery on Pinterest. Here is a gallery I've started called "So This is America" which includes interesting and compelling photographs of America and here is another gallery that I've started of some of my favorite photographs by one of my greatest inspirations, American photographer William Eggleston. Pinterest is really what Flickr's own galleries should have looked like if they hadn't of done it so half-ass and with so many restrictions and limitations.
I found old screenshots. It was taken at the first release of the excellent Grim and somber ENB. I still find them good.Unfortunatly my video card don't allow to run this enb cause i need fps for playing. If my video card was better, i would use this enb
! For sure!
Timoni West, a designer for Flickr, is out with a post detailing how broken what she calls "the most important page on Flickr" is. It's refreshing actually. I can't remember the last time I saw someone from Flickr actually dare to write a post that was openly critical of Flickr in public. Generally speaking Yahoo/Flickr does not handle criticism very well (have I mentioned that I'm banned from their help forum for life simply for respectfully criticizing Flickr in the past?)
Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch reported on the post last night here and Kotke reported on it yesterday as well here.
The page that Timoni points to as the most important page on Flickr is in fact pretty important, it's the page where you go to see your contacts' most recent uploads. I would disagree with her about this being *the most* important page on Flickr (that would be the recent activity page), but it probably is the 2nd most important page on Flickr and it's been languishing for years.
Basically the problem is this. When you go to view your contacts' photos on Flickr, unless you actually go to their url *specifically*, there are only 4 ways to view your contacts' photos. You can filter these photos by contacts vs. friends/family and you can filter these photos to show you the last single upload or the last 5 uploads.
That's it.
Everything else gets buried.
So every day, the system buries much of the content that you really do want to see the *most* on flickr -- the content you are absolutely most likely to engage with. The current page is quality agnostic and will show you the crapiest possible camera phone shot by someone that you barely know, just because you've made them a contact -- at the expense of possibly showing you a photo of your own child losing her first tooth or your favorite rooftopper's latest urban adventure (really click through on that one, you won't be disppointed).
To compound the problem, the less frequently you visit flickr, the worse this problem becomes.
Apparently Timoni put a pitch in last year to rework this page, but we've yet to see anything tangible come out of this.
From Timoni:
"The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.
The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back."
Spot on Ms. West.
So the question now becomes, how in the blazes do you fix this page? Timoni has some good ideas I think, but I'll throw my own ideas in here too. And feel free if you have ideas on how to fix this page to comment below.
1. Flickr needs lists. Flickr's current system of dumping your contacts into two buckets (contacts vs. friend/family) is sooooooooo 2004. Maybe even 2003. Flickr needs to understand that we naturally value our contacts differently. There will be a handful of people that I do not want to miss a *single* photo of. There will be some super important people in my life- my wife, my mom, my boss (joking), my dad, my best friend from when we were eight. While I have a lot of "friends" on Flickr, I need to be able to create a list of "super friends."
I may also want to slice and dice my flickr contacts up (did I mention I like knives? again, totally joking Flickr do NOT delete my account).
What about a list of San Francisco photographers? What about a list of people that are in my Hot Box Group (the best group on Flickr by the way -- join here now)? What about a list of people that I've actually met face to face? What about a list of graffiti photographers? What about a list of neon photographers? You get the idea.
By allowing us to create lists, and then filter our contacts photos by lists, flickr helps us design our own optimal customizable experience. Twitter did lists a long time ago. Flickr needs to get with the 2011's.
2. Use Interestingness to show me the most interesting photos of my friends. Flickr has an internal system that effectively ranks every photo on the site with a hidden score. It's pretty simple actually, the more faves, comments, tags, notes, views, external links, etc. a photo gets, the higher the score.
Basically the crowd rates every single photo on the site. They then do two things with this data. They pick out 500 high ranking photos each day and dump them into Explore (that is unless you've been blacklisted from Explore like I have after I wrote a blog post critical of them). And they also use that data in their search engine -- to help you find the most interesting photos that you might be looking for.
There is no reason why interestingness cannot or should not be applied to the contacts page. Mediocre camera phone shots or other photos that people dislike, should not be shown at all. On the other hand if 10 people fave a shot and it gets lots of comments, then maybe people want to see that shot more.
Flickr should give me the option to see not only my contacts and friends/family photos this way, they should also allow me to see any of my lists this way. And they should give me 5 options on how to view these photos (the last 12 hours, the last day, the last 2 days, the last week, the last month).
Having this sort of a view will allow me to quickly uncover the best photos by the people that I want to see, not just the most recent photos randomly.
3. Have a "Fresh" section. Another option I should have when viewing my contacts photos should be called "fresh." Fresh sounds so refreshing doesn't it? Not stale like 2004.
This view would filter out all of the photos that I've either hid or have already interacted with. If I've already seen a photo in a particular view and faved it and commented on it, why show it to me again as a thumbnail? Or if I find a photo that I hate, why not let me hide that photo (or even that entire photographer's stream without having to drop them as a contact). "Fresh" would be a new way to view only the photos that I haven't hid/interacted with.
I will leave *what* the UI should actually look like to the Pros like Timoni. But the above functionality could turn Flickr's tired old contacts page into something so much greater than it is.
I hope Timoni doesn't get in trouble for writing something critical of a page on Flickr, by the way. I think it's really great that she's being transparent about what's broken. Having people like that on the team is an asset. And engaging with the community to both talk about it and talk about how to improve it is a *good* thing, not a bad thing.
Speaking of which, someone really should make Zack unban me from the Help Forum one of these days. Heather's long gone now. It's petty and counterproductive.
Oh and totally unrelated, all of the best Flickr accounts are currently setting up accounts at 500px as well. If you are not already on 500px, you are so missing out -- the quality of the photography there is mind blowing and totally blowing flickr away. You can follow me on 500px here. Check out the list of Flickr Pros who have already joined and add your own 500px url to the list as well.
Competition, such a beautiful thing!