500px updates iOS app to engage user base beyond photographers

500px

Photographers and photo enthusiasts, take note: the 500px iOS app just got a major update.
 

What you’ll find once you’ve downloaded and installed the update is a new, more friendly version of 500px that takes more than one cue from Instagram.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the new home feed, which makes it easy to see any new images photographers you may follow have uploaded.

Perhaps the most interesting addition is to the discovery tab, which now has a feature called “Debut”. This feature surfaces photos from new members of the 500px community. As publications like TechCrunch and The Verge have noted, a lot of these changes are targeted at the service’s more casual users.

500px

That said, there are also improvements that 500px’s longtime professional users will appreciate. There’s a new, more robust uploading tool that allows one to add photos directly to the service from a greater number of sources, including Adobe Lightroom. Speaking of Adobe, the app’s editing tools are provided by the company. Lastly, profiles have been reworked.

According to an interview 500px CEO Andy Yang did with TechCrunch, only 10 to 20 per cent of 500px’s users are actually professionals and enthusiasts. The vast majority of people using the platform are individuals who simply have an appreciation for the high-quality photographs that are shared there daily.

The Toronto-based company is one of the city’s major startup success stories. After starting as a university side project by one of its founders, the company raised multiple rounds of startup funding, including its most recent $13-million Series B round which closed in July.

Download the 500px app from the iTunes App Store. The Android version of the app will be updated later this year, according to the company.

This article was originally published on our sister-site, MobileSyrup.

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Igor Bonifacic

Igor Bonifacic is a Toronto-based writer interested in exploring the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and life.

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