Photography sharing and community website 500px has announced support for both Google’s WebP format and wide-gamut images, as well as the ability to search based on color profile. According to 500px, the additional support reportedly reduces bandwidth usage by up to 25% while simultaneously enabling the service to offer images that are “truer to the photographer’s original vision.”
Until now, 500px’s image hosting service worked by converting uploaded images, when necessary, from their non-sRGB color profiles to sRGB. The rise of wide-gamut displays, though, has paved the way for expanded color profile support. As of this update, 500px can deliver photos in sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB.
“Though sRGB has been standard in our industry for many years,” said 500px VP Kelly Thompson, “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.”
As far as WebP support goes, 500px explains that it has been rolling out support for this format on Chrome browser over the last month. The format reduces file sizes while offering comparable or improved image quality. The newest version of the 500px Android app features WebP support.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)