Zooomr.com

or why the Jebediah photoblog image is so small

One of the reas­ons I star­ted the pho­tob­log, was to exper­i­ment with the vari­ous web based photo applic­a­tions, to find one I was going to use for the next couple of years. I had to start play­ing with one app, so I star­ted with zooomr. Why because I had to start some­where and zooomr are offer­ing a free upgrade to a pro account to blog­gers, who dis­play their images hos­ted on zooomr with the tag line hos­ted on zooomr.

On the sur­face zooomr is very sim­ilar to flickr and I have noticed a few dif­fer­ences in the first few days: audio nota­tions (I would not use), smart sets based on your tags, Google maps for geo tag­ging (a big plus!). One big dif­fer­ence is behind the scenes in the com­pres­sion used on pho­tos uploaded to zooomr, I ori­gin­ally uploaded a 300k 1200x1600px image only to be presen­ted with a choice of either a 600k 768x1024px or 300k 375x500px image to dis­play on my web­site, sim­ilar images from flickr are 200k at 768x1024px.

While I can see the advant­ages from a pho­to­graph­ers point of view, the image dis­played will be higher quail­ity and less likely to suf­fer from com­pres­sion arti­fice on zooomr than flickr. How­ever, I live in coun­try were most people are still on dial up at home (I am) and those on broad­band are pun­ished either fin­an­cially (up to 10c a Mb) or have their con­nec­tion speeds severly restric­ted if they exceed their monthly limit. So I did not want to have 600k images on every page of my photoblog.

I tried upload­ing a 200k 768x1024px image to zooomr, how­ever it returned a 600k image at the same dimen­sions. It was only after I got my Pro account at zooomr I found that I could access the ori­ginal image I uploaded (note: flickr is the same, you need to upload from a Pro account to access the ori­ginal image). This does defeat part of the pur­pose of pho­toshar­ing applic­a­tion if you have pre­pared the image, both in dimen­sions and com­pres­sion before you upload it, if you want to dis­play the image on a website.

One advant­age flickr has over zooomr is the num­ber of third party tools avail­able (ie Word­Press plu­gins). In the­ory you should be able to sub­stitue zooomr’s API calls for flickr’s and get the same res­ults, but I have yet to test this.

zooomr does offer a little to me in a dif­fer­ent inter­face higher qual­ity com­pres­sion ratio and bet­ter local map­ping than flickr. The free pro account was an incent­ive to use zooomr, how­ever as I have had a few prob­lems con­nect­ing to the zooomr in the past couple of days, I am unlikely to continue.

Update 19 Janu­ary the actual dif­fer­ence in com­pres­sion is dis­cussed in my next post zooomr and flickr part 2

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under blogging, photoblog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.