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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.