flickr vs. Zooomr

The battle of the titans, or rather David and Goliath. But will this have the same ending.

I first had a flickr account in 2005 (Feb 14th to be precise, or at least that’s my first upload (see left). It was the start of a new generation - and the first service I paid for on the internet, rather than a product. I’ve watched it grow steadily and slowly, seen the horror in some people’s eyes at being a part of Yahoo! and furore over Tom’s and Rebekka’s censorship. At that point I even halted all of my uploads to flickr.

Now lets look at Zooomr. I remember the sign up to Zooomr - it was back in December 06 (again first shot left - and look how I’ve grown in photography by the way), whilst on holiday in Wales, where I read the pro account for blogging about Zooomr and signed up. I’ve watched and helped as Zooomr has grown, see the Mk3 - even as far as watching the uStream pretty much 24/7 for the time it was down.

So the pros and cons of each. Well on a monetary and archival basis Zooomr wins hand down, as you automatically get unlimited upload, with no size limit on each photo. Even with a pro account at flickr you can’t go over a 10MB limit on each photo. Also Zooomr wins on the accessibility of the site, not in terms of the DDA, but in the easy reach to Kris and Tom, both of whom I’ve been able to literally talk to on the phone at points, and ask questions put to me by family members about the site instantly over Zooomr TV. You can’t say fairer than that.

However there is one thing that led me to re-open a closed pro account at flickr just yesterday - which has been lying dormant for 6 months~. That was the ability to go and do the following fundamental things that I can’t in Zooomr.

1. Upload through an external application - however the main upload form on Zooomr is admittedly nearly perfect.
2. Put photos into sets manually - and even the smartSet algorithm is broken currently NOT = is the same as = in tagging
3. See a proper list of groups
4. Post a photo to a group
5. Have more than 12 sets
6. Amend my profile
7. View a geotagged photo in IE
8. See camera information - when this does work again I hope I can re-upload shots to fill in this information

Now I’m sure these items are on the fix list, but it is extremely frustrating to wait for these to work, without so much as a what’s next list. It’s like Zooomr are a part of apple and are suddenly under NDA on release schedules. But the saving grace for Zooomr is this small word but huge idea

1. community

The group of people on Zooomr (especially the 73 on my contact list :-)) are awesome. I continue to love the freedom of photography and that you have re-ignited my love of photography - seriously if you look at my posting rate from pre and post Mk3 on either site you’ll I’ve taken as many photos in Mk3 as I did in the 2 years before hand.

I will continue to stand by Zooomr, and flickr for their merits, and hope that Zooomr get the bandwidth of workforce to surpass flickr in the ways Kris can’t do by himself.