It’s been almost a week now since Zooomr has started the transition to its Mark III version which loaded with over 250 new features. I stuck to Zooomr because it has way lots more to offer than Flickr and it’s all for free. Nothing personal against Flickr though, but Zooomr has done something that is definitely worthy of praise and patronage.

Honestly, I’m beginning to be a bit impatient but this is because of the excitement I felt ever since watching the demo video of the Zooomr Mark III.

Sure there were plenty of dead moments and live bloopers in the clip but it offers a taste of what the new Mark III version has to offer. Deep Jive Interests has a rundown of what’s in store for us in Mark III:

• Logins: You can now login with a proper email / password process that is familiar to everyone — in addition to openID
• Smart Search: you can search with some unusual features like “most awesome” and “near location” (such as “near starbucks”)
• World Through Photos: this is a feature that Kris spent a *lot* of time talking about, in that you’ll be able to use a mashup of GoogleMaps to search for place names, using their proper names. For example, hitting in “Eiffel Tower” will take you to where it is on GoogleMaps (and presumably some photos as well)
• Discover: Best Hundred — you can discover the best one hundred photos over a given time period, whether it be over the past year, past month or what have you at a glance
• Groups: Think Google groups, but centered around photos, allowing you to create messages and what not around specific photos.
• You: There a lot of slick Ajax to create a rich user interface with respect to viewing your own photos and profile
• Widgets Within Photos: Even though Kris demonstrated this, I still had a hard time understanding what he meant — perhaps that you would be able to syndicate information *within* photos through different media as widgets, such as tags, and so on. In fact …
• People Tagging: You can tag people in photos, like what is already offered in Facebook, and then send a message to them about the photo that you took … a viral feature for photos.
• Instantaneous search: Through the magic of Ajax, things look fast without loading times
• Marketplace: Kris didn’t share to many details other than it will be easy, you can charge ridiculous amounts (if the market will bear it), and there’s 90% share for users
• Comments / Messaging / Dialogue: There is a sophisticated messaging system for each photograph allowing you to have a conversation with different people underneath each photograph — it will also let the photographer know so as to include him the conversation:
• Search by color / palette: You can add in hexadecimal colors to search for different photos
• Portals: Creating a photographic link to another photograph on someone else’s photograph (a “portal”)
• Zipline: You’ll be able to see at a glance, and in reverse chronological order what your friends are doing, saying, and their photos

All these features plus unlimited storage and the ability to sell your photos while keeping 90% of the sale. Of course all these, is still for free. Who could resist such an awesome service?

Let’s hope the transition period finishes real soon, I’m sure the other Zooomr users are itching to dive in create new things with their photos.

• Google+ the wrong way to compete with Facebook (0)
• ShareThis launches new Share Widget Beta (1)
• My thoughts on RockMelt the social browser (2)
• Have you claimed your own Facebook username? (0)
• PhotoHunt: Hope (11)

Some days ago, I wrote about my dilemma on what photo hosting service to stick with now that I have a decent tool for taking photos. I was torn between Google’s Picasa Web Albums and Zooomr.com

Flickr was out of my list because I don’t have the means and money to pay for PRO account and besides, Picasa and Zooomr were excellent free alternatives. Again my problem was, which service to stick to from now on.

Here’s a recap of the basic pro’s and con’s of either service.

Picasa Web Albums

Pro’s

Easier and much organized way of organizing your photos into albums
Control on which albums are accessible to the public or not
RSS feeds
Link to photos in various sizes
Integration with my Google Account

Con’s

Limited storage space to 1GB even though Google says it will keep on growing
Limited to storing .jpg images

Zooomr.com

Pro’s

Unlimited storage, bandwidth, and image resolution uploading.
It’s FREE
It allows for some fancy image effects as used by Max Limpag
Has a bigger community compared to Picasa
Offers a way of earning from your photos by selling them
Has added features like Geotagging your photos etc.

Con’s

Photos are dumped in one ‘place’
Organizing photos into ‘albums’ is quite tricky

The last negative point I raised about Zooomr is that organizing your photos in to ‘albums’ or sets, as the site refers to it, is not that straightforward. Instead of choosing which photos to be included in an album by simply click-and-drag method, Zooomr does this by creating ‘smart sets’ which are like filters that sort images according to the criteria set by you the user.

I originally asked Max Limpag on how to create ‘albums’ or sets in Zooomr since he has been using it to host his photos with snazzy effects on his award-winning blog. Just recently, he made a post on how to do just this in Zooomr.

When the photos have been uploaded, click on the Build a SmartSet link on the sidebar, under the Things To Do heading.

You will be taken to the page that will help you build the set. Once there, you have the option to group photos according to: their tags, the time they were taken or uploaded, the owner of the photos, the people in it, the photos’ geo-tags, and even the number of views.

Max even created a cool screencast on how to master this neat feature of Zooomr. I can’t believe it was that simple! So now that I know how to organize my photos in Zooomr, I’ve finally decided to use it as my ‘default’ image hosting service while Picasa would be relegated as my ‘back-up’ or secondary image host.

I still have some minor gripes with Zooomr’s smart sets though. Every time I create one, the photos that were supposed to be included does not immediately appear in it. The SmarSets appear empty when you first create them, I simply logout and then login back again to see that the right photos were included in the right SmarSet. Even though the images were tagged properly and I’ve selected the right criteria, maybe Zoomr’s servers are now under some considerable load given that the service now caters to a growing community enjoying its amazing benefits and features all for free!

Now to showcase once more what Zooomr can do, here are some photos from today’s quickcount operation of the PPCRV‘s provincial headquarters in De La Salle University – Dasmariñas to which my self and my fellow Lasallian student volunteers offered our help.

The first day of counting had a slow start but I’m sure the pace will soon pick up in the coming days as we rush to count the votes and see who’s won the recent elections. More about this, including photos in the coming days.

• Photo hosting: Zooomr or Picasaweb albums? (7)
• Back to blogging (2)
• iPad Lego (0)
• New Year, new blog: Passion for Books (3)
• Blog updates January 2010 (7)

Ever since I started using photos to enhance my blog posts I’ve wanted to use one photo hosting service that provides me with the following:

1) plenty of space to store photos, 2) reliability, 3) the ability to create different sizes of photos such as thumbnails, smaller versions etc., 4) creation of folders or albums to sort photos, 5) ontrol over which photos or albums can be viewed publicly or not, 6) RSS feeds, 7) an easy way of uploading photos and 8 ) an interface that is simple yet elegant and very usable.

In my quest to find such photo hosting service that has all or at least the majority of those features I ended up signing up and using one photo hosting service after the other. I started with ImageShack, then moved on to ImageCave.com which I use for the bulk of my photo hosting needs. This is because back then, I didn’t have a decent digi-cam to take my own photos so I scoured the free sites for photos I could legally use for free on this blog. (Well, most of it.) Since they were not my own photos, I didn’t need to really take care in choosing a photo hosting service, as long as it hosts the images or photos I want to use and allows me to do so then it’s fine with me.

Why not use Flickr?

Of course convention would dictate that I go get a Flickr account. I do have one but I have the following gripes; it’s free version is limited and I don’t have the money and means to pay for a “pro” account and second, it requires me to have a Yahoo! ID. Why I scorn a little about using a Yahoo! ID is because ever since I moved to using Gmail I’ve steadily moved away from using Yahoo!’s services save maybe for the IM client but that’s for non-blogging and mainly personal purposes. So thanks to Flickr, I still maintain a few Yahoo! accounts but I’ve been keen to drop those.

Flickr is great, it has all the features that I need. The price tag is just what keeps me from using it.

Zooom in the alternative.

The beauty of the internet is that there are almost a thousand alternatives to one particular site or service you want to use but not willing or able to cough up money for it. This was my case with Flickr so I went on the search for an alternative that not only offers the features I want, but wouldn’t go after my wallet. After all, some the best things out there are still for free.

Thankfully, I found Zooomr.com which has all the features I want and need, and the best of all, it gives away PRO accounts for FREE. A more welcomed development over at Zooomr is that they have now removed account limits in what they call Mark III version which sports over 250 new features and which offers users the ability to sell photographs and keep 90% of the sale.

As Best Technology Blogger of the recently concluded Philippine Blog Awards and fellow Zooomr user Max Limpag says:

For bloggers and independent web publishers, Zooomr is a better option not only because 1. it now offers unlimited storage, or 2. it doesn’t limit free accounts to the last 200 photos in users’ photostreams, but more importantly 3.) it allows you to link photos to their larger versions.

Zooomr is great and I thought it was the final solution to my photo hosting needs. I have one problem with it though, I just can’t find a way to organize my photos into albums and set which ones are public and which ones are not.

Seriously, I need help from anyone who uses Zooomr with this one.

Organize, organize, organize

The reason I want such feature is to organize my photos and other images I upload in the internet via Zooomr or any other similar service. Simply because some images are not worth sharing to the public, I want to present my images as albums because they are related and represent a particular mood, theme, moment or event I experienced. It’s good to see photos of friends mixed up with images of screencaps I took and used for a recent blog post tutorial. Which is the state of my case in Zooomr right now.

I almost gave up on Zooomr because I can’t find a useful Help or Support or FAQ section in their website that will answer my questions and fix my problems. So I went on the look again for an alternative.

Google to the rescue

So I decided to give Picasa Web Albums a spin. It is now owned and powered by Google so all I needed was my Google account and viola! I now have a Picasa Web Album which comes with a free 1GB of storage and Google says it’s still growing much like Gmail’s storage space which is sweet!

The look and feel reminds me a lot of Flickr but I’m more comfortable and feel more in control of everything. It has the standard features like organizing photos into albums, allowing to link individual images from my blog posts in various sizes, it has an RSS feed for each album and allows me to set which album is available to public via search or not.

I’ve been using it as my default image hosting service and the images in the most recent posts here on The Four-eyed Journal were hosted and pulled from my Picasa web album. A big plus is the Picasa application which is a photo organization, manipulation and uploading suite to compliment your Picasa Web Album. Google Tutor gave a review of the app good and fair review. As for my two cents’ worth, I’d simply give this application 4 out of 5 stars.

So what now?

I’m torn between sticking with Picasa Web Album or going back to Zooomr once I figure out how to organize my images into albums. Flickr is currently out of my list because of the price tag on its full features. All the while this dilemma goes on, my images remain scattered across 4 different image hosting sites. I’m such a messy geek.

I need help guys and gals, which one should I stick to? Does anyone know how to organize images into albums in Zooomr? Any help here would be much appreciated.

• Election quick counts and sticking with zooomr (2)
• Back to blogging (2)
• iPad Lego (0)
• New Year, new blog: Passion for Books (3)
• Blog updates January 2010 (7)