That did not stop me from taking photos each day, I took more photos in the ten days Angie was in hospital than the two months before. The photos were all of the dogs, which I would take into hospital to cheer her up (and it worked). Even after Angie got out, I still manage to take photos almost everyday. I just did not get round to posting them. Even after I got back to work, I was taking photos every day, then I realised that I need to select some 60 photos, process them and post them.

With photos, I am a bit of a perfectionist, I want to display the best image possible. It would take me at around ten minutes a photo to select a photo, make adjustments and cropping in photoshop, before uploading the photos to flickr, zoomr or another service and then write the post. Without ten hours to spare I decided to halt the project and stop taking photos for a time.

It was not till I stop taking photos, I realised how forcing myself taking photos each day had changed my way of looking at the world, my observations skill had improved and I was noticing the little things.

The photoblog will return, I will make another attempt of a photo a day for a year, this time a financial year, starting July 1. And blue merle border collie fans need not worry, I am sure I can find an hour or two over the next couple of weeks to update Willow’s photo set on flickr.

Zooomr on the other hand does reprocess the photo, so if you upload a 200k image at 1024px x 768px, the image available at the large size will probably be around 600k and because it has gone through another round of compression it will be of lesser quality.

Note I have yet to see what happens if I upload a high quaility image to flickr, say a 1Mb 1024px by 768px and see if that is reprocessed.

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

1. to encourage myself to take photos as often as possible and have a place to post them. this blog is not really the place to post photos,
2. to get a better understanding the Sandbox theme for WordPress for the redesign of this site,
3. to experiment with flickr, zoomr, picasa and other online photo apps and their APIs,
4. and to try to catch up to Kay on the number of blogs (all three are hers).

It is a pretty plain looking site, but I did that for a reason, the design should not take the focus of the photos.

I closed the blog done and removed it from the server, I was just not taking enough photos