YuviSense: Codin Kid

Bye Zooomr, Hello Flickr

September 24, 2007 | 6:30 pm

These are some of the images taken during after-school hours while practicing for Teacher’s Day Dance (don’t worry, I’m not being cruel to the world by participating). About 75 usable images out of around 150 total images. I should really be getting a better ratio…

And, these images aren’t on Zooomr: They’re on Flickr. Yes, I’ve switched to Flickr from Zooomr. And, moving away actually made me feel guilty, which talks mountains of Thomas Hawk’s Marketing

So, why did I switch? I stuck with Zooomr through a lot of trouble, even when it was offline for a long time. But,

There’s no API
Which means no good Uploading Tools (last time I checked, jUploadr can’t hold a candle to Flickr Uploader)
Slow. Slow enough for my friends to complain.
Did I mention slow?
No manually tweakable sets.
Not many people have Zooomr accounts = Not many people can comment
I didn’t feel it till now, but having something like Organizer on Flickr beats beating around for organizing.
Small Community. It’s a Very Tightly Bond Community(believe me, the passion on the chatrooms run high), but small.

Things that would have made me stick with (evangelizing and using) Zooomr?

Better Tool support. Kris made a fantastic move towards this by making the Zooomr API compatible with the Flickr API, which means Tools just have to change a few configurable strings and boom! It supports Zooomr! But, the API is far from complete now, which sucks.
Make it fast. Much easier said than done.
Add manually modifiable sets. Smartsets are cool, but, sometimes, I want to just remove a single photo from a set.
Allow a bigger userbase to comment. Comments moderated by the user? I still have this gripe with Flickr, but atleast a lot more people have Yahoo accounts.
Allow Flickr as a mode of authentication. As Zooomr now has OpenID and Email auth, adding Flickr as a mode of authentication shouldn’t be hard. And, it means that the thousands of flickr users immediately become Zooomr users as well. Easier said than done, as Flickr is demanding a full API implementaiton on Zooomr’s part before it will give it an API key.

However, these are suggestions by an idiotic, stupid, inexperienced, schizoprenic, epileptic kid (that’s me), so it may or may not be a good thing for Zooomr. But, I wouldn’t have left if these were there. My POV.

So, Bye Zooomr, Hi Flickr, Sorry Thomas. I owe my photography to you, Thomas: I think I have improved a quadrogazillion times in my photography since I’ve talked to you, so you could guess my level before he talked to me. Someday, I aspire to him. And, if I’m able to get the resources (server, bandwidth, Windows, etc), the first thing I’d do is to write a service that’ll *mirror* your photos on Flickr so that I can enjoy them at full speed (yes, Zooomr’s speed is that bad, especially at my place. I know that this partially has to do with my location as well as my connection, but Flickr isn’t slow)

I’m trying to post the best of the 22,000 unbackuped photos that have accumulated in my ageing hard drive (hope it doesn’t crash), and it’s proving to be quite a task. I’ve got about a 100 up so far, and hope to post process (I do that a lot, improves photos a LOT (Thanks Thomas for showin me that!)) and post atleast 50 photos a day.

So, cya at http://flickr.com/yuvi!

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5 responses

One of the big reasons keeping me at zooomr are

John | September 24, 2007 | 8:08 pm

One of the big reasons keeping me at zooomr are their free unlimited upload accounts. As long as flickr still has an upload cap, im still a zooomr fan

@John: That was the thing that bought me there, and

yuvipanda | September 24, 2007 | 8:10 pm

@John: That was the thing that bought me there, and the other features (and Thomas Hawk) kept me there. The force is just not enough now I’d guess: Photosharing is worth more than $25 a year to me now…

Flickr = Limited Uploads, High Priority Censorship Zooomr = Unlimited Uploads,

Mathias Pastwa | September 27, 2007 | 5:27 pm

Flickr = Limited Uploads, High Priority Censorship
Zooomr = Unlimited Uploads, a lot of Photo Friends

I can’t get Pro on flickr without creditcard. That’s the fact! You right more users on Flickr but who want to be censored?!?!! Not me. I can’t see a lot of pictures when i use a german yahoo ID. This sucks! And why all the people wich switch (back again?!) tell this on public zipline. Move on it’s a free world. Get stuck with these anti-user yahoo managment. Sorry but Zooomr is new and needs to grow. That’s some problems on Zooomr but i remember the time back on flickr with my free account (deleting every month some pictures to get new photos online)

no more yahoo i said and i never switch back - NEVER! I think when Zooomr is completely online many people will switch again from flickr to zooomr. Its not only my word, this is a fact.

Well i will miss you on Zooomr.

Bye Bye!

Hey Yuvi Pal! Everybody has to make their online

Thomas Hawk | September 27, 2007 | 5:53 pm

Hey Yuvi Pal! Everybody has to make their online choices for their own reasons. Yours are certainly valid.

I used to post at both Flickr and Zooomr for a while. I thought I always would actually. There are some things that I really like about Flickr. Their organizer as you mention really is top notch. The speed is the same for me here in the U.S. but of course our servers are here in the U.S. We hope to add more outside the U.S. in the near future.

What do I miss about Flickr? Mostly some of my friends there. A bunch are at Zooomr now too but some still there. So I probably miss that.

For me though I stopped posting over at Flickr mostly for political reasons. Mostly having to do with the incessant constant censorship. Me being censored, my friends being censored. I’m pretty sensitive to that though and it’s not an issue for most people. But I’m more political than most people.

Another big one for me was the resize issue. Flickr capped my file sizes at 10MB and many of my images are much larger than that. That’s probably less of an issue for you now, but in the Digital SLR world it’s a problem. I want perfect duplicates of my photos online as back up and with Flickr I could only save down sampled resized photos. If my house burns down and my drobo is dead and I have to as a last resort go back to my online backups I hated that my copies on Flickr were inferior than the originals that I keep on Zooomr.

I also find that I like the community at Zooomr better. In general, in my opinion, it is a smaller community with more talented photographers. I find myself as a photographer being pushed harder and driven more by the talent that I find on Zooomr than what I found on Flickr in general. That’s just a personal thing though and there are some amazingly talented people on both sites.

But you will do fine wherever you are my friend and should go with whatever works best for you. The important thing is to participate in *a* community. It doesn’t matter where the community is. It could be at Flickr. It could be at Zooomr. It could be at SmugMug. As long as you find the right community and find the feedback I think you’re doing well. The give/take of photosharing is a big part of it. Always give and always take. The love you make is equal to the love you take. The love you take is equal to the love you make.

Community goes hand in hand with shooting every day, processing every day, producing ever day. The art above all is what is important.

Rock on brother and see you around.

The best photographs it the world have yet to be taken!