This day in 2006:
There is always something happening in Covent Garden. This guy was one of the regulars. Interestingly though, a few days after I took this, one of the street performers got banned for scaring the shoppers. I am pretty sure this is the guy: 
Want to take hundreds of photos a day and upload 20+ photos each day to Flickr/Zooomr but don’t have the time. Thomas manages it somehow.
Have a look at his post where Thomas Hawk talks about his workflow and how he manages to fit this into a normal day:
Check out the post for details on each step.
I have to announce that I was wrong. In my previous post I said Zooomr were focusing on mobile features and moving away from being a true photography site. Kris (founder and CTO) even posted a comment to say I was wrong. Little did I know that 2 weeks later, they would release 3 new features aimed at the photographers.
The new features are:
New Navigation from new header bar: This makes it much easier to navigate around the site.
Discover and Undiscovered: Discovered in now paged so you can see more of the best stuff. Already seen all the best stuff … then go to undiscovered. This shows the best photos from people who you don’t follow and those that you haven’t faved. This is a great way to see new stuff while ignoring all the noise of the photos you have already seen and faved!
Awards: Sick and tired of adding the fav10 keyword when your photos get recognised. Now it will happen automatically. And they are looking at adding new awards like highest views in a day etc. A bit of fun but a great initiative for a true online photography community.
Take a look at the video of new features:
Other blog posts on the new features:
Zooomr Blog, Thomas Hawk, Photographr, Jeremy Brooks
I have seen a few blogs recently which say that Facebook has finally surpassed Myspace in the US (Techcrunch and Andrew Chen). In New Zealand, Myspace was never the main competition. Bebo has always been the top social network in New Zealand.
As you can see, Myspace has been on a gradual decline with Facebook quickly jumping past it nearly a year ago. Since then Facebook has nearly caught up to Bebo but cant quite get there. Bebo’s unique visitors are lower than last year but do seem to be reasonable level.
Personally, I am only on Facebook and my usage has dropped significantly since I first joined.
The iPhone is coming to New Zealand. This was first announced by Vodafone UK and many say it came as a surprise to many an Vodafone NZ.
Steve Job then announced the iPhone 3G at the WWDC conference. Vodafone NZ then announced that they were going to get the new iPhone and that it would be released on the worldwide release date – 11 July. Interestingly this means that NZ will be the first country in the world, all thanks to our geographic location.
So if you want to be the first in the world to get the iPhone, register here.
Unfortunately, Vodafone has not released how much it is going to cost, or how much the call and data plans are going to cost. In the US, they are being provided with an unlimited data plan for $30 – in New Zealand, you are lucky to get 200mb for that cost. Just to push home the expensive cost of data in NZ, Rod Drury has a great post about a guy who racked up $900 in data costs in one month.
I want to get one. My cell phone is starting to fail and my ipod is a 2G version so is well past its used by date. Hopefully I will be able to comgine the two devices for a reasonable cost.
I am also interested in GPS. Hopefully there will be some apps developed that will enable geo-sycning for photos – I think it is inbuilt for photos taken by the iPhone but I want to geo-sycn photos taken with my 20D.
I will keep you post when I here more.
I currently use Zooomr as my photo sharing site. It has some very good features. However, I am thinking of moving my photos over to Flickr and using that site instead.
Zooomr started off as a Flickr clone but with a lot of good ideas. It offers unlimited uploads and unlimited storage. It has a pro account but this has very few benefits other than supporting the site (I think non pros have ads on their pages whereas Pro accounts get a cleaner interface). However, it was coded by a single person and features always took longer to come than promised. Then money ran out and a move to Japan was made which resulted in a change in focus. It became more mobile friendly – they always had what they called a Zipline (a 140 character mini blog like twitter) but the latest version has a whole range of new mobile features that I have never used and am unlikely to. With this as their focus, the development of photo related features seems to have slowed. In addition, because it doesn’t have as large a following as Flickr, the development of thrid party applications is slow. As a final blow to Zooomr, Thomas Hawk, “Evangelist and CEO for the photo sharing Site Zooomr”, seems to prefer Flickr.[EDIT: Thomas Hawk apparently uploads full resolution images to Zooomr and lower resolution images to Flickr. However, the majority of his interaction appears to be at Flickr (he links his flickr photos, not his Zooomr photos)]
Flickr on the other hand limits features to its users unless they have a pro account – ie. limited uploads and only the last 200 photos can be viewed. At $25 a year, a pro account isn’t that much (plus I get a free account due to my parents Internet account). It also has a lot of third party applications which I like. My favourite is Piclens, a firefox add on. Piclens is probably one of the best way to view photos on the web. Go to its homepage and look at the demo video, it really is the fast and that smooth. While Piclens works on Zooomr, it works a lot better on Flickr. It also has search support so if you want to view photos on a particular item, just search for it and all the photos come up, which you can then glide through quickly and effortlessly.
The other option is Picassa, but unlike its Googles Gmail account, Picassa is currenlty limited to just 1GB. In addititon, it doesn’t have the same community feel to it that Zooomr and Flickr have.
If I decide to change, it will be a big effort to transfer all my photos across. There are tools to do it like “Migratr” but that will eat through my data plan which I will have to investigate first (I dont have unlimited data anymore).
Is it worth moving my photos? What is the best site?
