Tried Zooomr tonight, a photo hosting and sharing website – here are my first impressions:
- When I sign up I need an OpenID. Or something like that. I wanted a Zooomr login, not a login for some other place.
- After signing up, whenever I go to Zooomr I get the home page. I’m spoilt by Flickr on this which’ll automatically redirect me to a place where I see my photos and contacts. If I want the same on Zooomr I need to go to the WelcomeMat apparently.
- What’s a Zooomrtation? Apart from a really odd looking word. I click it. It shows a load of photos. I don’t know why, or what the relevance of these photos is since there’s absolutely no explanation.
- I tried uploading some photos and they were slooooow. It needs a progress bar of some kind.
- The ‘ultra convenient and fast’ jUploadr is a 4.4Mb ZIP that doesn’t tell me what to do with it. There’s a README file (if I delve into the folder structure of the ZIP), but it’s got something about double-clicking the BAT file which I really don’t fancy doing inside a ZIP. Why isn’t it in the Start Menu like everything else at this point? Where’s the friendly installer?
- How many ‘o’s are in the name? I have to keep making a point of correcting myself from writing Zoomr when I do this (which happens to be a completely different photography website)
- The Geotagging doesn’t appear to support the wheel mouse. I got used to this in the normal Google Maps and now it’s not working.
- Ok, so I’ve added a photo which seems to work. I see somebody else’s photo so I click on that. Looks nice and all. Now I go to add my second photo and it doesn’t work — why not? (I look and apparently I need to click Start Geotagging again to continue – I thought I was already doing that!)
- What are the three colours in Geotagging supposed to do? Red Green and Blue are meaningless.
Right, that’ll do for now. Despite sounding like an arsey git I do actually quite like Zooomr. I’ve read good things about it, and I was being particularly picky about the interface (I do know what OpenID is all about, for instance ;). But that’s the thing about Zooomr, while it has a ton of features and is undoubtedly very clever under the hood, the interface is not entirely intuitive and actually a little counter-productive in places. I’m sure it’s the sort of thing you can get used to but unless there’s something compelling and unique about the service it simply will be ignored in favour of a competing service.
On the plus side, I did have a few views on my photos within a few minutes of uploading. That never seems to happen on Flickr, for instance. Somebody even added a photo as a favourite within a minute of upload. Maybe this is what Zooomrtation is about? (I genuinely don’t know what that is about; somebody care to enlighten me?)