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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jul
12
(2006)
Trying Zooomr
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: Flickr, photography, zooomr.
I’m trying out Zooomr – it’s a photo sharing site similar to Flickr, but with some cool new features like Lightboxes and Inspectors. It’s lacking all of the communities and contacts that keep me coming back to Flickr several times per day, but they’re doing some cool things at Zooomr.
Not only does Zooomr drop the “e” in “er”, they also throw in an extra “o” or two. These silly Web 2.0 names are getting to be a pain, but what are they going to do, with all “normal” domain names taken long ago?
The Zoooooomr interface feels clunky and awkward compared to Flickr’s simplicity. I’m sure part of that is familiarity, but things seem to be hidden/buried unnecessarily.
The geotagging feature is pretty cool. I might actually use that. I had to google to find out that I had to click “Lightmap” on the page. Intuitive. How about renaming that link “Geotag your images” or something. Also, I expected a utility on the photo details page to add location, not a generic map view where I can add images to locations. Seems kinda backwards, and could be kinda funky in a workflow with several images.
Here’s my first upload to Zoomr:
Kananaskis Lake FishingHosted on Zooomr
One big flaw in zooomr… If you delete a photo the original and resizes still reside on their servers and are still accessable via a direct link. The images just don’t show in your album any longer. So you can never really remove one of your photos from the site.
Check out a Greasemonkey script for geotagging/browsing in Flickr: http://webdev.yuan.cc/gmif/
Boris – I’ve been playing with that. Very cool, and works better than Zooomr’s Lightmap feature. Flickr’s got nothing to worry about. Now, if only they’d roll it into the app itself
Glad to read such a nice piece of information.
I'm trying Zooomr too… the geo-tagging and the "pictures close to this one" are fascinating and already lead me to interesting discoveries. I like some of their interface features– the shortcuts in the lightbox view, for instance– while others seem obscured. But I'm also a huge flickr fan and it's easy (too easy) for me to think that something which isn't where flickr would put it must be in the wrong place
I do like the fact that Zooomr has no problem with drawing and screenshots and I might end up using it just for that!
Just realized there’s a huge flaw in zoooomr – no way to set licenses for images, or default licenses for everything I upload. Oops!
And I can’t get past the interface. It’s just sooooo clunky. Flickr’s spent a lot of time/effort (or had a LOT of luck, or both) in getting things just right. Should be interesting when the Flickr development embargo is lifted after the scalability rebuild is done…
Hi D'Arcy. Not sure if you've had a chance to test out geotagging since we launched Zooomr2, but hopefully it's a lot easier and more intuitive. And the community stuff is coming. Groups, etc. All this is in the works in the background now.
Thanks for blogging about Zooomr!
Best,
Tom