500px Supports Searchable Wide-Gamut Images and Google’s WebP Format

GaryPageau
TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE) — 500px, the world’s largest global photography community, today announced full support for wide-gamut imagery, searching by color profiles, and WebP format image delivery. With recent wide-gamut adoption growth in displays, smartphones, and laptops, 500px is now able to stay truer to the photographer’s original vision, delivering better-looking images and reducing bandwidth usage by up to 25 percent. Previously the company had converted non-sRGB images to sRGB for the broadest display compatibility – the industry norm – but now delivers images with wide-gamut profiles (such as Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, and Display P3) in their original forms. Users looking for wide-gamut images can filter by color profile during any image search on 500px’s website.

For more on the strategy and technology behind these shifts, read this post on ISO by 500px’s vice president of Strategy, R&D and Community Management, Kelly Thompson.

“Though sRGB has been standard in our industry for many years, with today’s broad adoption of iPhones and wide-gamut displays we can finally showcase each image in a more true-to-life way and allow searching by color profile,” said Kelly Thompson, vice president of 500px. “Our flexible image resizing and delivery system renders WebP compressed files to browsers and apps that support the format, further enhancing the experience with smaller file sizes and quicker downloads. As more efficient file compression options arise, we’ll be leading the way delivering those formats to our members.”

sRGB was a good solution for image delivery in the past, but with widespread use of wide-gamut cameras and displays by the general population, the standard is showing its age.

Wide-gamut imagery offers deeper, richer colors across the spectrum, delivering colors not previously reproducible on standard sRGB displays.

The 500px image delivery system is flexible enough that as new technologies in color and file format are introduced and become mainstream, 500px will be on the forefront of adopting and integrating them.

Rolling Out WebP Support

For Chrome users, 500px has been rolling out WebP support for the past month. Preliminary tests show similar or better image quality combined with on average a strong 25 percent reduction in file sizes. WebP support has also been rolled out to the latest version of the 500px Android app, further enhancing the mobile experience.

Tips for 500px Photographers When Uploading

Wide-gamut image uploads are encouraged. For those using the 500px iPhone app, images uploaded from an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus are already Display P3 profile images and will look great when delivered to the wider 500px audience.

About 500px

Launched in 2009, 500px is a global online photography community and the world’s foremost photography on-demand platform. Images on 500px represent the work of over twelve million professional and hobbyist photographers. Through 500px for Business, 500px works with Fortune 50 companies as well as thousands of creatives who use community-sourced images in their campaigns and products.

500px is venture backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Visual China Group and ff Venture Capital and headquartered in Toronto, Canada. For more information, visit 500px.com.