As far as I know, Zooomr doesn’t offer any neat “photostream” widgets like Flickr does, but they do provide an RSS feed of your photos, so naturally, it was only time before a Zooomr Wordpress Plugin came around that took advantage of that RSS feed to offer photostream-like capability to your blog. I decided to give it a try, and was quite impressed. It’s simple, but works well, as you can fully control the format in which your photos are displayed. It’s a nice workaround/solution until Zooomr decides to implement something themselves.

So why do I not use Flickr? Well, it basically boils down to cost - Flickr’s only really good if you have a Pro account, which costs money. Being a cheap student, I have limited cash right now - but don’t get me wrong, I do think Flickr rocks. In fact, in terms of features, I do believe Flickr has Zooomr beat, despite my willingness to switch. With Flickr, it’s far easier to edit a bunch of photos, to change their tags, titles and other metadata using the drag & drop batch edit mode. Flickr also has more intuitive navigation within sets and some other small differences that make the user experience better. But that’s enough; I don’t intend for this to be a Flickr vs. Zooomr entry, as there are already posts about that available.

I do hope, however, that Zooomr continues to improve as it moves out of beta. (And possibly into gamma!)

My conundrum

I’ll have to admit, my willingness to try Zooomr was not only motivated by a curiousity for all that is cool things on the web, but also because I’ve been trying to find the right photosharing site for my needs. For the past little while, I’ve been using Flickr for my photosharing needs, but was approaching a sort of fork in the road - the basic free version is very limiting in terms of the number of photos and sets you can have active at any one time, which strikes me as somewhat unusual, considering the beta of Yahoo! Photos (the company that owns Flickr) offers unlimited uploading and storage, albeit without any sort of provisions for blogging. The Pro version of Flickr costs about $25 USD a year - which isn’t a lot, but being a student, I have reservations about paying for something that I’m not even sure I’m going to use to its full extent.

Zooomr to the rescue

Zooomr offers a free account that’s a bit less restrictive - no limit on storage, but a 50 MB monthly upload limit, which still beats Flickr’s 20 MB limit on free accounts. However, the free Pro account offer for Zooomr was what got me really interested - all you have to do is own a blog that you’ll be using Zooomr on (the main reason I was interested), and a Pro account is yours, for one year. This raises your monthly upload limit to a staggering 2.5 GB. I don’t think I’ll ever take that many photos in a month; heck, I don’t even think I have 2.5 GB of photos that I care about.

Trying it out, I’m very impressed. The feature set is basically everything that Flickr offers, and then some. In many ways, it’s a superset of Flickr in terms of features, and the interface is very “Flickr-ish”. In fact, I’m guessing many of the features were copied in order to ease the transition for Flickr users - after all, why bother to fix something that’s not broke?

This has the added benefit of targeting Flickr users for conversion, who are the main target of Zooomr. Let’s make no mistake - Zooomr’s directly competing with mainly Flickr in the photosharing arena. The type of people who like Flickr for its liberal support of web 2.0 features will also be impressed by Zooomr’s extensive and perhaps better support of the same features. As I mentioned before, these web 2.0 sites may not be popular outside of a certain niche of tech-saavy users, but within, they are all the rage - and these users are a hardcore group where news spreads fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zooomr were bought by an interested third party. After all, Flickr was bought for an estimated $30 million or more, so buying Zooomr before it’s big at a good deal may seem like a good decision.

Not so fast

One area that Zooomr loses out in is community. Flickr is loved by its users not only for its features, but also for its dedicated community, some of whom produce professional photos and are willing to help out newcomers with tips on picture taking and camera work. One need only look to see the great number of Pro users on Flickr, all of which have been willing to contribute money for access to the full features of Flickr. A paid service is most definitely the exception in today’s web 2.0 world, and it shows that Flickr was right on in targeting the right niche with their service. Even with its feature list, Zooomr does not yet have the level of community that Flickr does - but I say “not yet”, for I can see Zooomr growing quite fast in the next few months. Whether the community that develops at Zooomr is of the same level as that of Flickr’s, is another story.

Additionally, as of yet, there’s no downloadable tool for making photo uploads as easy as drag&drop, and you can only upload 10 photos at a time using the web-based form. (But I expect a drag&drop tool to come along)

Zooomr also has had some growing pains. The site seems slower than Flickr’s, and will only get slower as more users sign on, if they aren’t able to keep up with this accelerated growth rate.

I also have a few complaints about the site’s interface. It almost seemed as if they tried too hard to copy Flickr’s interface, and while I can understand this from a conversion point-of-view, it doesn’t make sense in some respects. For example, I didn’t like having to click “All sizes” in order to get the HTML needed to link to and display and image offsite. Zooomr kept this the same - again you have to click “All Sizes” to get to the HTML snippet. While this helps in keeping things consistent, sometimes you need to innovate.

However, they have added a bunch of neat things like photo trackbacks, allowing to see where your image has been linked from. I guess since it’s still in beta, (Flickr being in “gamma”) there will be continued improvements. The aforementioned trackbacks feature was apparently added within an hour of the idea being floated - one of the advantages of a small operation!

A parting note

Well, I can’t leave without showing off some Zooomr photos, now can I? Here’s one of the first I uploaded.

It’s a picture of the sky over Temiscaming I took back in May, the last time I’d be there, calling it home.