I mentioned Zooomr before when they were running their Free Accounts for Bloggers Campaign back in July 2006. It irritated me at the time - and it still does. I’ve been using Flickr for a long time now and I don’t think I could abandon it. After using Flickr for a few years you have your photos in there, you’ve made friends and contacts and have a history of comments so deciding to switch would be a very big decision to make. After watching Photowalking with Thomas Hawk and reading his blog, the quite obvious option of using both is mentioned.
So, I decided to have a fresh look at Zooomr to see if it irritated me less than it did last July when I experimented with it. Upon logging in using OpenId (which is a nice touch), I noticed things look different, if a little gaudy - a bit like ITV’s branding in the UK which is just a bit naff. Last July the main thing I liked about Zooomr that Flickr didn’t have was geotagging - but thankfully Flickr implemented that and quite nicely too (save for some poor quality Yahoo maps).
Things that Zooomr does that Flickr doesn’t:-
- Label people in images.
- Add sound annotations to pictures.
- Lightbox view
- Portals - quite nice linking of photos; where Photo B can be seen within Photo A you can have a little window to click on to jump in to it.
- Trackbacks so that you can see incoming links to your photos.
- Smart sets - sets that change dynamically based on a set of entered rules.
Things on Zoomr that I don’t like:-
- It doesn’t look nice.
- The pages seem to be organised in a strange way.
- The uploading tool seems to be a generic third party thing based on Java that leaves a command prompt window open during use and seems quite basic.
- It doesn’t seem too clever when using Internet Explorer - I use Firefox at home and that works fine though.
I mentioned at the top that I signed up for a Zooomr account when they were doing a promotion and when I logged in again recently I noticed that there was a ‘Pro4Life’ icon next to my name. So, that list along with what seems to be a free lifetime account mean that I’ll probably give it another go for a while in parallel with Flickr - I doubt I’ll ever abandon Flickr though. There are too many reasons not to leave it now, and there aren’t that many things I don’t like about Zooomr. I suspect that I’ve become so used to Flickr that I’m blind to some of the deficiencies and work around them without thinking.
My Zooomr page (quite sparse at the moment)
Comments 5
I think you’ve summed up the faults in zoomr pretty well. I took another re-look at it too after watching Thomas Hawk, and came to pretty much the same conclusions as you.
I don’t know how a site that’s supposed to be about photography can look so…..bad. I think it’s the header and footer that does it for me. They’re just so mid-90s Netscape. Ugh.
There’s too much information that’s hidden behind clicks and clicks. On flickr’s front page I get a snapshot of my latest pics, my contact’s latest, new stuff, told that there’s new comments, emails, posts in the groups, etc. - and yet it still manages to look uncluttered and unfrightening. Zoomr, on the other hand shows a tiny fraction of that in a sparse, terrible, uninviting layout.
Most of the stuff zoomr can do is possible in flickr with a little thought - notes can be added to pictures containing links to other photos in particular, and as you say, geotagging is there.
Flickr’s biggest advantage is that it;s open and actively supports other people coming up with great new ideas and uses for flickr. That’s what makes it so vibrant. Zoomr on the other hand seems so….closed. I dunno.
A good case in point is SmartSetr - which provides Smart Sets for Flickr.
So there you go. For me at least, there’s no competition :)
Posted 11 Jan 2007 at 2:24 pm ¶You’re right, it’s facking ugly
Posted 11 Jan 2007 at 8:01 pm ¶Hmm…hadn’t heard of Zoomr before. I have to say I feel like it’s getting a bit old of the names that end in R. Razr, Slvr, Zoomr, and I’ve seen a bunch more sprout up.
After taking a visit over there, I agree, their interface looks like it was designed about 10 years ago. It just doesn’t seem to feel like a good web application. But rather a generic site.
I used to host all my own photos on my server, and moved over to Flickr to free up server space. I’ve thought about going back to my own server, but I really do enjoy the community aspect of Flickr.
Like you I doubt I’d move elsewhere, because I’ve spent so much time into setting this up, and have a good collection up there.
Posted 14 Jan 2007 at 4:25 am ¶I went through the same thoughts as you regarding hosting my own photos - I don’t like having to rely on other web sites for this one to work. Flickr is different though. I actually prefer my photos to be there because it’s part of something that wouldn’t exist if you kept the photos to yourself on your own server.
I think the community side of things is why I’d never abandon Flickr though - I’ve gotten to know a lot of people through Flickr and I think that a log of blogs I enjoy reading I only discovered because I’d read the profiles of some of my favourite photographers on Flickr.
So it’s all tied together quite nicely really.
Posted 14 Jan 2007 at 8:16 am ¶What is so sad about ‘flickr’ is their name and their gay-ish white light-blue purple-pink COLD theme. I want warmer colours for my image-gallery. And preferably on a dark-gray or black background.
Honestly, why don’t they give us an option to bind it with our own domain-names and change the white theme? Photos look so much better in ANYTHING BUT white surroundings!
I don’t have a flickr profile yet, because of the name and the ugly colours they use. “flickr” sounds the same as “flikker” in Dutch, meaning faggot or homo. And as much as I tolerate different sexual preferences, I just can’t put my images under that name because I detest the annotation of it, the sound of it. That really sucks, it’s been a huge mistake to have chosen that for your main product/site name. Why couldn’t they first debate about it with Europeans who are also optionally users of their service?
Zooomr is similarly shitty for a name. The ‘r naming is indeed cheap. Get over it, we’re not 8 year olds just learning to write here, are we?
Posted 21 Oct 2007 at 12:01 am ¶Post a Comment