Tuesday, February 06, 2007 4:51 PM
I've been working with Zooomr for a number of months now and have uploaded almost 200 pictures. I never jumped onboard any photo provider because I'm so cheap! Flickr looked cool, but was too limiting with the free account. PicasaWeb is looking much better (very nice UI, awesome integration with Picasa), but still not enough space with a free account. Zooomr has a promotional deal offering "Pro for Life" accounts to bloggers so I decided it was time to give it a try.
It's clearly cloning Flickr in many ways, though it does do a few things better. You must admit that Kristopher Tate is a talented developer, but his vision is a bit opaque to me since creating the initial system. There are a quite a few shortcomings at this point -- some bugs, some missing features -- and no clear idea when this may change. This actually leads to the first issue: no forums or help. Really. Not a single Help link anywhere, no support forums. It's quite mind-boggling. There must be something hidden somewhere, but I don't know where it is. You can post to the Zooomr blog, but there's no promise that it will be responded to.
Here's my list of bugs:
- Email upload seems to be non-functional. It's labeled as being for mobile phones, but I assumed that it was just an email address that would accept attachments. I've used the Picasa email function to my Zooomr address and nothing happens. No bounce comes back, nothing appears on my account. Maybe it only works for one picture, or has extremely low size limits. I don't know, but it removes the easy ability to upload. Grrr.
- File upload is broken. After the first bug, this really steams me. I can't successfully upload more than three pictures at a time (there are up to ten slots). Even with three or fewer, sometimes the upload screen just never goes away. No error has even come back, it just doesn't reliably work. I've seen AJAX file upload progress bars. That would help. Never going to la-la land would help too!
- SmartSets are only partly functional. I love the idea, but it just fails to deliver. The first (unexpected) thing is that it doesn't restrict to your own photos. If you create a set of a given tag it shows all user's photos. It appears that the Owner property lets you restrict by whose photos it is (should your own photos be the default?) but when I set it to my own Zooomr ID it often has no effect. The date selection is also hit-or-miss. Oh yeah, and the Date Taken field only goes back to 2005, yet it goes forward to 2037!!!). To make things worse, even when I have a set that somehow works (they do sometimes) I will see an "X" for the thumbnail and it will report zero images. Later on, it looks normal. Unpredictable and very annoying.
- Tags mostly work great. I can apply tags in Microsoft Photo Info (get it if you don't have it) or Picasa, or set a title and they carry through. Sometimes, however, a tag comes through as multiple scrambled letters: "chicago" becomes "h" , "c" , "o" , "g" , "i" , "a". Strange, unpredictable, and a real pain to correct.
- Rotate just won't work sometimes (example). I click rotate and get a plain white page with the text "An error occurred!". Not very helpful.
There are also a number of features that I'd like to see:
- I'd love a way to apply or remove tags, captions, etc. to a group of images. Flickr has a great Flash-based way to do this (though that could use improvement as well). This should be a pretty basic operation.
- A bulk uploader that doesn't require Java. Actually, specifically I'd love to see Picasa integration but that probably more depends on Google. It just occurred to me that perhaps a photo hosting site could "plug in" by looking like a photo printing service. If that could be extended, it would be a start. The file uploader is seriously limiting my contributions at this point. I should just install Java, but I don't want to. I shouldn't have to.
- API/SDK. Way back when Zooomr came out, it was all about opening up Flickr. They supposedly used the same API. So where is the SDK? Where do I get an API key? Where are the user applications? I'd love to write one. It shouldn't be such a big deal.
- Photo groups. This isn't a requirement, but Flickr has a lot of great groups for sharing pictures of various themes such as events, locations, effects, techniques. Nice to have, but it would make Zooomr more compelling.
- Help and support. Come on! How can this be missing? They need some way to at least file glitches. Google manages this through FAQ's and user-driven support. Actual employees don't even need to step in that often.
As things stand, I'll keep trickling pictures in as I have time, but I have a hard time really recommending the service. It would be fun to work on implementing some of these things, even writing the SDK documentation and samples. It's what I do anyway. I hope that someone at Zooomr sees this. It's not a rant. It's a plea for help! It's a cry for something better. They've shown a great start, but at this point it's just not taking advantage of that momentum. Here's hoping that this changes soon!
UPDATE: I just noticed that Zooomr's blog states that version 3 comes out in March. Perhaps this will address some of my concerns. I sure hope so!