Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Zooomr

[Disclaimer: zooomr is offering free 'pro' accounts to people that link to their pictures hosted on zooomr]

I've been using flickr for quite a while to share pictures, but there's a new upstart on the block called zooomr. Zooomr has just launched version 2.0 which has some nice touches - my favourite after a quick 5min skim is the ability to easily geotag pictures and to see nearby tagged pictures in the normal zooomr picture view.

Here's a picture of the Camel Estuary taken from a friends flat in Padstow:


padstow
padstow
Hosted on Zooomr

In the Zooomr screen shot below you can see the map that shows where the picture was taken as well as other pictures in nearby locations:


zooomrscreenshot
zooomrscreenshot
Hosted on Zooomr

which is really, really, nice. I'd pretty much given up on geotagging stuff pending a better (easier) way of doing the tagging.

Zooomr first caught my attention because of a reported disagreement with flickr over zooomr automagicaly exporting data from flickr to help people move accounts to zooomr. My concern on the flickr side was around metadata - any hint that flickr might tighten up on exporting metadata gets me nervous.

Unfortunately, Zooomr trips over on metadata. Last time I looked consistent support for metadata between different applications and online services was messy to say the least. On first inspection, Zooomr is worse; not only does it not export tags etc when you download images (i.e. when exporting from zooomr) but it doesn't even handled tags in images that you upload. That means that if, like me, you tag images with metadata prior to uploading to an online service, when you use zooomr you'll need to do it all twice - once locally and again when you've uploaded.

Another problem with Zooomr is the lack of an API (or at least an API that I can find - reportedly Zooomr are working on one) so for now, although I'm glad to see the competition, I'm sticking with flickr...



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posted by aiddy @ 5:56 AM, permalink   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 1:25 PM, Blogger Thomas Hawk said...

Hi aiddy. Thanks for blogging about Zooomr. If you already have meta data in the EXIF fields on your images this should come through without your needing to retag images. If it is not for you let me know and I'll look into it, it could be be a bug.

In terms of exportability of photos and metadata, yes, that is something that we plan to do as well as have a complete API in order to build the import/export tools necessary for users to have complete portability of their data. We are very committed to this portability.

We haven't got there yet because right now it's just a very small team trying to get things functioning as quickly as we can. I will tell you that the API is a big priority though and we are looking forward to getting this completed.

Thanks for taking the time to check out Zooomr and thanks for letting us know ways that we can improve the service for you.

Tom

 

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