trying out zooomr pro for one year
Zooomr, a “web 2.0″ website for photos, is in my opinion the most promising flickr competitor around. It shares a lot of features with its well-known big brother that was bought by yahoo a while ago.
As I found out today, since a few months, Zooomr is still handing out “pro” accounts for bloggers that are free for one year. So today I upgraded my free zooomr account, uploading my first high-resolution picture to the service and blogging it in my German blog:
My first impression of Zooomr is that it works very flawlessly and is by all means worth a thought when you decide where to host your photos. While I have set up an instance of Gallery 2 for my own photos, I always had the problem that I needed to scale them down to, say, 800×600 pixels. Otherwise every single photo would eat up around 2 megabytes-or-so of my personal web space, eventually filling up space needed for the actual websites etc.
Also, modern photo sharing sites come with a lot of nice features like RSS feeds, tags etc.; through their photo sharing capabilities, they are much easier to integrate into blogs or other web applications than classic photo tools.
Therefore I will give zooomr a shot for a while now, and eventually I will decide if I want to put all my photos on there or not. A big part of my decision will obviously be how much they want to charge me after the free year. Flickr takes 25 Dollars per year which, while it is not a lot, has kept me from signing up there so far, because I was unsure if I would use it enough to justify the (long-term) investment.
Come on, zooomr, convince me! 
December 1st, 2006 at 9:06 pm
In July they have given Pro4Life to every blogger, who has blogged a picture hosted by zooomr
December 1st, 2006 at 9:12 pm
dang it — I am too late for that
December 2nd, 2006 at 4:15 am
I don’t know about Zoomr, but I tried Flickr and found it very slow (maybe it has only US-hosted servers?). Instead, I found a very good alternative in Google’s Picasaweb (http://picasaweb.google.com/). I particularly like its integration with Google Picasa, unlimited albums (contrary to Flickr), and large web space.
What I miss though are a few of the more advanced features, such as tagging and searching and attaching licenses. For my personal use not a problem, but when I need some photos for something, I go search on Flickr and not on Picasaweb.
~Grauw
December 3rd, 2006 at 3:17 am
Thanks Fred for the tip, I just got a pro account on Zooomr for free!
I agree with Laurens about Flickr being way too slow. If it was free, we could say “you get what you pay for”, but I pay for it, and it’s still painfully slow
Picasaweb is very promising in terms of speed, but is still in its early stages, missing important features like tagging, CC licencing and all that.
December 5th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hey. Thanks for trying Zooomr out. Glad to have you aboard. We will try to offer bloggers free accounts as long as we can. A lot of it will depend on how much it costs us to run the site in the long run though. But at least for a year.
We will likely price our pro accounts at $19.99 per year after that. One big difference at Zooomr though is that even when someone is no longer pro we will allow them to continue showing all of their previous uploaded photos unlike other photo sites that might restrict you to a certain number of photos.
We still have a lot of work to do and are working hard on our next release Mark III. Feel free to ping me with any thoughts, feedback or observations on the site.
Thanks again for giving us a spin.
Best,
Tom
December 5th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Tom, thanks for your infos. I hope you’ll be doing well and I am looking forward to your next milestone
January 28th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
[…] a little while I was checking out Zooomr, a young photo sharing site that happened to hand out “pro” accounts to bloggers when they blogged articles with zooomr pictures in […]