500-wide, an Aperture Plug-In for 500px.com
500px.com is fast becoming an extremely popular website for sharing your best work. I think one of the big differentiators between 500px and anything else out there is that you’re encouraged to only share your best images here. Lately though I have stumbled upon a few collections where users treated it more like Flickr, uploading 20 similar photos, and that may be the fault of 500px’s new pricing strategy. Even though I’m not a big user of 500px myself (I only recently started uploading photos to it), I hope it can stay true to its roots and focus on great photography, not mass consumption of every “it’s in focus so it must be good enough” photo out there.
An Aperture Plugin for 500px
500-wide is a new Aperture plugin from Blue Crowbar Software that honors the original idea of 500px — it’s only for your best. I say this because the plugin only allows you to upload a single image at a time. While I was originally resistant to this idea, I have come to appreciate it’s simplicity. When the plugin restricts you to selecting a single shot to share, it’s telling you to really focus and pick only your best. It does mean that when you’re first uploading your portfolio-quality images you’re probably going to skip the plugin and use the 500px web interface, but that’s fine. When you get into the routine of sharing just your best shots here and there, the plugin works perfectly fine.
Once installed, the plugin is found with the rest of your export options under the File > Export menu. The interface is pure and simple.
The upload interface for Blue Crowbar’s 500-wide Aperture plugin for 500px.com
The title is taken from the Title IPTC tag, which I don’t believe is very widely used. Most users may be expecting the title to be pulled from the Aperture Version Name tag, as it is for most image sharing services, however once again I appreciate this step. I don’t like changing my Version Names to anything other than the original Master Name, with perhaps a unique identifier at the end. This allows me to have a Title and my separate Version Name and never the two shall meet. The Description field is pulled from the IPTC Caption, as expected.
You can also choose a Category for the photo from this interface. If you set any category other than “Nude”, the images will be tagged as “Safe for work” automatically on 500px. Conversely if you select “Nude”, the photos are tagged appropriately.
All relevant IPTC and EXIF data is uploaded to 500px from the plugin, however the location is not. But I don’t believe this is a 500-wide issue, and think it’s in fact a 500px bug. I’ve uploaded several photos to 500px with verified embedded GPS locations and not one of them has shown up on the map.
Once uploaded, all relevant IPTC and EXIF data is visible
Once uploaded, there is one hidden feature to be aware of. The plugin won’t automatically take you to the web page where the image now lives (it can take a minute or two for your photo to show up on 500px, and so if you go there immediately after uploading you’ll get a “no photo found” message), however the URL is automatically placed on your clipboard. This feature was added by ApertureExpert’s request to the developer, so thank you Blue Crowbar!
This is a simple and elegant plugin which I can see getting quite a bit of use out of.
Download 500-wide from the developers website for $3.99. There is also a free trial.
iOS version of 500-wide
There is also an iOS version of 500-wide, available on the App Store [500-wide for iOS — 99¢]. I haven’t used it yet myself as I don’t think my iPhone photos belong on 500px, but of course that all depends on how you use the service.
More from Blue Crowbar Software
The software company makes a variety of other apps and plugins as well. I’ve been using MiniShadow on this site for a few weeks now, a nifty app that replaces the massive shadow from OS X screenshots with a smaller one (and adding shadows to shadowless screenshots), allowing me to post larger images with smaller shadows on this blog. I really like the look of it!
Show us yours…
Are you a 500px user? Feel free to share your gallery in the comments below. There’s some amazing work on that site; let’s see what you’ve got!
Comments
on April 25, 2012 - 12:41am
I’ve been waiting for this for a while - I have a number of images I’ve been planning to upload to 500px but just haven’t had the time to export, login, upload, and so forth.
www.nicknieto.com / Portland, Oregon
on April 25, 2012 - 12:48am
here’s my 500px page: http://500px.com/thomasrboyd
on April 25, 2012 - 12:59am
I use this plug in and like it a lot! Much easier than the normal uploading process! Here’s my page: http://500px.com/Jdenham
on April 25, 2012 - 1:32am
There’s also 500px-Aperture-Uploader, currently free.
Not too sure what the differences between them are, if any.
(Not sharing my 500px page yet as I’m rubbish compared to you lot!!)
on April 25, 2012 - 2:31am
500px-Aperture-Uploader is freely available and can upload more than one image at a time. I have used it in the past and most probably will in the future. Saying, I am just too lazy to try the other one.
It takes the image title not from the IPTC field, which I use. I guess, it would be nice to select this in the preferences…
But Thomas made a good point with carefully reviewing your image to be uploaded. I am not very happy with some of mine at the moment and will remove them. But I will take it easy, so it might take a while…
Oh, btw, http://500px.com/belimbach
on April 27, 2012 - 3:01am
Gents, not that I am any amazing photographer, but I would also like to bring to the attention of all who come to this amazing website that Joseph is running that while 500px is definitely good quality, in my opinion nothing comes close to www.1x.com. There is no plug in for that website either but I just wanted to throw it out there. Great work Joseph!!!
on April 28, 2012 - 3:36am
@Jan:
That’s correct, 1x.com is very impressive, though I have not looked at it for one (long) time. The main difference is that image uploads of 1x.com are screened by curators. Acc. to their web site just 1/20 of all uploaded images will be published. At 500px you can immediately upload an image without a screening. 1x.com wants to ensure that their quality is of very high standards. There’s nothing wrong with it, absolutely not.
Probably I gave up too early there…
on December 22, 2012 - 8:16am
This plugin no longer works for me. I uninstalled & reinstalled ~ still isn’t working. I found it strange that after reinstall, it didn’t ask me for key number and my 500px account information.
At this point the plug in acts as if it completed the export, but the provided link to the image is a dead 500px link and the photo does’t appear on my 500px page
on December 22, 2012 - 10:27am
same here. plug-in doesn’t work.
Wombat // Photography
www.wombatsnap.com
on December 23, 2012 - 3:57am
Update:
Last message here is missing so this is the email reply I just received from the developer.
I’m seeing the same problem now. The photo is uploaded, but it only shows up in the Library section of the Organizer page. It’s as if the photo is marked as private. Something must have changed with the 500px site. I’ve sent them an email to ask for help, but unfortunately I got an out-of-office reply saying that they’re closed until January 2nd. I’ll keep you posted if I learn anything…
Steven
Blue Crowbar Software
http://bluecrowbar.com/
Twitter: @bluecrowbar