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?
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7 comments:
I would go with Flickr.
I think that Zoomr is moving away from being a true photo site.
Hi there, thank-you for taking the time to write about Zooomr!
I wanted to let you know that we have no intentions of moving away from photo sharing. It's definitely a MAJOR part (almost all of) of the Zooomr site.
Thomas Hawk uses both Zooomr and Flickr and I would suggest that you try-out both.
Also, it seems like you have a good number of people following you on Zooomr -- perhaps it would be a good idea to start following them, too. You'll get a lot more interaction from your photos that way.
You can see everyone who follows you here:
http://www.zooomr.com/cjphoto/fans/
Zooomr offers unlimited photo sharing -- something I can guarantee that you won't find elsewhere. It's true that we are a small team, but as you mentioned, we've moved operations to Japan which has allowed us to find more employees and investment -- we're growing. :)
I appreciate your use of Zooomr. I've tried to make Zooomr a community, along with allowing people a place to share their photos. That's why we have innovative features like Zipline.
kristopher tate
cto & founder - zooomr
I am not sure Kris. There are a lot of features that a broken or missing. I am sure you are working on it but how long do we have to wait. A lot of the latest features were mobile specific.
CJPhoto, thanks for your reply.
To be honest, the last set of feature have been only photo specific. Mobile hasn't been touched in over 7 months.
We released Mobile in 07, and then released Zooomr 2008, which gave users a number of great new features and enhanced speed on the site.
We've been true to our word on being a completely no-limit photo sharing community.
Mobile is important to us, but I can't see how you can have Zooomr without Photos? Providing solid no-limit photo sharing is a huge priority for us.
I hope this provides insight,
kristopher
Kris, I guess I can argue with you on what has been implemented since you are the guy doing it all (most of it?).
I guess you could argue that movies for Flickr is a similar distraction as mobile is for Zooomr. However, I just feel that Flickr is a more complete product at the moment (for example, I dont beleive you can create sets in IE. Similarly there use to be (still is?) an upload problem with FF).
For the time being I think I will stick with Zooomr. One of the reasons I joined was the smaller community feel, a perfect of example of which is the way Kris (CTO and founder) responds to comments (not just blogs but on the Zipline and emails with bugs).
Kris - any chance of PicLens integration?
I love and use both Zooomr and Flickr. Piclens support in Zooomr would be awesome!
Thanks for your comment Thomas.
The thing is I only want to be on one site. So it is a matter of what is best.
Some useful reading on the web - Lifehacker did a top five photosite survey and Zooomr didn't feature:
http://lifehacker.com/395900/five-best-photo-sharing-web-sites
But with the founders of Flickr leaving Yahoo, this blog popped up on Friendfeed:
http://www.inquisitr.com/1095/6-alternatives-to-flickr-now-yahoo-is-in-full-control/
Note: Kris has said he will start blogging more now that the site is now stable and they start moving forward. Hopefully we will see Zooomr improve more.
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