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Zooomr’s “Release Mark III,” first announced two weeks ago, has been plagued with a number of well-documented server problems - it eventually went live this weekend. Now that the worst seems to be behind the two-man photo sharing site, we thought we’d take a look at how the service stacks up against market leader Flickr.
Storage
Despite being part of Yahoo, Flickr still offers only a modest 100MB of storage space to free users. On the other hand, Zooomr lives (and seemingly dies at times) by the motto of “No Limit Photo Sharing.” While Zooomr’s bold promise may be contributing to their current reliability issues, if you want a lot of space without paying, they currently have Flickr beat.
Advantage: Zooomr
Organization Tools
Zooomr lets you organize photos using a feature they call SmartSets. The premise is that rather than manually organizing your photos into a category, you can provide criteria such as tags or the upload date and have Zooomr automatically organize your photos for you. However, the same functionality exists on Flickr, while still offering the option to manually add and remove photos from a set of pictures. For example, I can search for geotagged photos containing “New York” and then drag and drop the ones I want into a set called “July 4th Weekend.” Zooomr is convenient, but Flickr is more flexible.
Advantage: Flickr
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Upload Tools
Currently, the only way to upload photos to Zooomr is via their Web interface. In addition to the Web, Flickr offers a desktop client for both Windows and Mac, upload by email, and upload via mobile.
Advantage: Flickr
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API
While it has been reported that Zooomr Mark III includes an API, it is yet to be opened to the public. Meanwhile, Flickr has a well-established and documented API with dozens of applications built on top of it. You can learn more about Flickr Services and the cool apps built on them by going here.
Advantage: Flickr
People Tagging
Much like Facebook, Zooomr allows you to identify people within a photo and tag them. This additional level of tagging functionality allows you to see all photos of a person across many different user's albums. While Zooomr is still relatively small (50,000 registered users reportedly), this is functionality that Flickr currently lacks.
Advantage: Zooomr
Community Features
Flickr and Zooomr take similar approaches to community features, providing both tools for keeping up with your friend’s photos and different ways to explore the public pictures that have been uploaded to the respective sites.
Zooomr let’s you look at popular photos from the past hour, day, week, month, or year, while Flickr has a similar tool that also let’s you go back to a specific point in time. Both sites also offer geotagging, with Flickr having the advantage of being a much larger community, and thus having a more complete map of photos. Zooomr has also released a feature called Zipline that is sort of like a hybrid of the Facebook News Feed and Twitter. Similar functionality can be found on Flickr by going to the ‘Contacts’ page.
Advantage: Tie
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Widgets
Flickr offers a widely-used tool for creating widgets. You can create a “badge” that displays photos from one of your sets, groups, or elsewhere on Flickr. You can choose either an HTML or Flash version. Widgets do not appear to have made it into the Zooomr release yet.
Advantage: Flickr
Order Prints
Flickr has partnered with companies like Imagekind and Zazzle to allow you to order printed versions of your photos on everything from posters to stamps. Hopefully Zooomr will form similar relationships once their API is ready, but for now, Flickr has a big advantage here.
Advantage: Flickr
Sell Your Photos
Zooomr is launching a “Marketplace” feature that looks to allow photographers to sell their work for commercial use. Currently, you can assign a price to any of your photos, but the actual Marketplace for browsing available photos will only be made available once there is a meaningful library built up, according to Zooomr’s blog. Flickr does not appear to be playing in this aspect of photo sharing, instead encouraging users to offer their work through a Creative Commons license.
Advantage: Zooomr
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