More Zooomr on TechCrunch. Yay! “We’ve covered Zooomr since launch” is an understatement.

More than the innovation, it is the “18 year old founder Kristopher Tate” that impresses me. Way to go.

Ages ago I posted a poll to judge peoples thoughts on flickr v zooomr. Here it is:

http://www.alastairjames.me.uk.....-the-poll/

considering that the vast majority of flickr pro users don’t even come remotely close to hitting their monthly upload limit, this is the sort of feature that looks good on paper but really only plays to a very niche group of users.

sort of like most of the “we’re better than flickr” features on zooomr. they make for great demos but are of little actual utility.

@4

kinda agree but its market thats going to get interesting broadband gets faster and cameras start to take massive sized files. Normal tech savvy folks will just compress them but joe public will most likely upload them from their camera…

‘###########

I like the fact that zooomr have not been phased by the first mover in the market.

Are they the next target for google? pics.google.com :p

@striatic

Considering that some features on flickr also make for great demos but are of “little actual utility”, I find your comment a little harsh.

Features like zooomrtations, portals are not of little utility but allows users to do things with photographs that cannot be done elsewhere. If all Zooomr did was copy Flickr features, we would be in for a boring ride and what Zooomr is doing is a little more interesting than what Flickr is doing currently.

On the monthly limit, I’m guessing that a large portion of flickr’s free users hit their monthly limits every month. With Zooomr’s 100MB limit, this raises that bar considerably for the person that is just looking for a place to store and share photos. The 25MB limit from Flickr is going to look pretty small to new users coming to the scene.

Regards
Ray

Zoomr’s new limits are generous compared to flickr, but not necessarily compared to some of the other new sites in the space. Pickle (www.pickle.com) offers 200MB/month for the free Basic accounts which is double Zoomr’s new limit.

This sounds like a Chinese “all you can eat” buffet advertising as “now with TWICE more than you can eat!” What’s the point?

can we please get over the mr. tate’s age? every time zoooooooomr is mentioned on TC you gush over how amazing he is because he’s “only” 18. lots of kids know how to program. get over it. focus on the business.

A minor feature bump gets a TC post - if you’re Zooomr. Must be nice to not have to pay for advertising….

[Disclaimer: I am the Evangelist and CEO for Zooomr]

“considering that the vast majority of flickr pro users don’t even come remotely close to hitting their monthly upload limit, this is the sort of feature that looks good on paper but really only plays to a very niche group of users.”

Striatic. How have you been my old friend? I find your comments with regards to Zooomr’s increased bandwidth limits disingenuous at best. You admin Flickr Central and have even been the technical editor a book on Flickr. You and I both know how it works.

The reason that most Pro accounts on Flickr are not surpassing their 2GB max limit is because Flickr limits the size of photos uploaded to 5MB for free accounts and 10MB for Pro accounts. This means that almost any photo shot at full resolution on today’s digital SLRs must be reduced in size and degraded in quality before being uploaded to Flickr. This is not ideal for online archive or backup but you are right certainly makes it harder to reach the 2GB limit.

Most Flickr Pro users do not even realize that this is happening as the bulk uploader offered by Flickr resizes images automatically.

At Zooomr we don’t put 5MB and 10MB limits on our photos. We allow users to upload any photos up to 50MB. This limit will accomodate most digital SLRs even when shooting in high resolution and RAW format.

Certainly megapixel and file sizes are only going to get larger, not smaller, but as long as Flickr caps photos at 5 and 10MB then yes, you are right, most people probably are not going to need more than about 2GB. I’m sure this saves on the bandwidth bill.

And certainly you’d concede that many of Flickr’s free account users bump up against bandwidth limits and even more so the limit of only being able to have 200 photos online (which you conveniently leave out and which is not a limit at Zooomr)

With regards to features being “of little actual utility”(I think that was the phrase that you used). Tell that to the people in China who are using Zooomr in their native language — one of 18 languages that we offer. Localizing Flickr, again as you are well aware, has been brought up many, many times in Flickr forums in the past. Right now Zooomr is getting more traffic from China than anywhere else in the world — giving our users a unique international experience and hardly a feature of “little actual utility.”

In fact I think it was you yourself who once said about localization, “it does concern me that this might get back-burnered due to the time and effort required to set up support structures, especially because the idea has a lot of potential.”

Of course Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake recently mentioned (in a Spanish publication of all places, I think she said Asia comes first — go figure) that Flickr now might also be considering localizing too — so maybe after they do you will not feel that this feature is so useless anymore. Kind of like that little geotagging thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Flickr. I use it every day. I’ve had my photos viewed over a million times on Flickr. Flickr still has many many cool things. But trying to deride Zooomr’s features and saying that higher bandwidth limits, higher files size limits, higher number of photo limits “looks good on paper but really only play to a niche group of users,” is laughable.

Instead you should see these higher limits as good things. Competition is good. It would be very very good if people could put full high res copies of their photos of Flickr for backup (and if allowed they would in fact burn through Flickr’s 2GB limit). In the end, users most of all benefit from competition.

Mike … any change that you (or someone else) could give a comparison of all the different photo sharing sites (Zooomr, Flickr, PhotoBucket, etc.) with respect to the “PRACTICAL” benefits of each?

It’s easy to get lost in all the minutia - I only speak one language, and so it doesn’t matter if one service caters to 120 different languages (I’m not discounting that other languages are not valuable to numerous others, its just that it adds no additional benefit to me personally).

Perhaps a “ranking” of the top 5 photosharing sites, with an explanation as to why you would “PRACTICALLY” choose to use one over the next.

Isn’t competition a good thing?

With Zooomr adding features like they are then surely Flickr are going to have to bring features themselves to stop people migrating to Zooomr. I have a Flickr Pro account and a Zooomr Pro Account. In fact, I got my Zooomr Pro account for free as did many others.

The only reason I’m not using Zooomr more is because I prefer the user interface over at Flickr but the way things are going it’s getting more and more likely that I’ll slowly cross over to using Zooomr more than Flickr.

Man, I love competition! I really hope to see Flickr add more space to their monthly limit, especially because PayPal is not supported in my country, so I can’t purchase a pro account.

Zooomr does have some good features but there email upload isn’t one of them compared to Flickr and I personally use that feature.

Phillip, we do offer upload via email.

At present there are three ways to upload to Zooomr.

1. Email
2. Through our web form.
3. By bulk uploading through Juploadr (this works great and is how I personally uploaded over 8,000 photos to the site).

We’ve recently added more servers due to the increased demand load on the site and should have better uptime in the future. We are a small company with just two guys though so as growth ramps up we will need to try to stay ahead of this better in the future and probably hire some more people at some point. Between the two of us though we try to watch the site as close to 24 hours a day as we can.

Norbert, I noticed your TechCrunch ID linked to a blog. If you blog one photo from your Zooomr account we’d be happy to upgrade you to Pro for free. This offer stands for all bloggers. We think that in general getting bloggers to try out our service and blog about it — good or bad either way — is a great way to spread the word about what we are trying to build.

We also offer trackbacks. This way when you blog a photo from your Zooomr account it will show a link to your blog on the photo page. This helps drive traffic to your blog and also as a photographer helps you keep track of where your photos are being blogged and posted to the internet outside of Zooomr. This is something that to my knowledge no other photosharing site is doing today.

On the couple of occasions when I took a look, I found Zooomr’s website to be maddenly slow. Giving me more of whatever isn’t of much value if their website is too slow to be of much use. And yes, I have a high-speed internet connection (Roadrunner).

On the couple of occasions when I took a look, I found Zooomr’s website to be maddenly slow.

James, you may have tried it a number of months back before we added more servers online. We added even more on Monday and hope to get another one online today. Check it out now. I think you will find it every bit as fast (and in many cases faster) than any other photo sharing site out there today. Kristopher has done quite a bit of work in the past few months optimizing the site for speed performance.

Thank you, Thomas. I’ll take another look!

Thomas & Kristopher .. you two guys are lucky to get on techcrunch once again. Congratulations.

> Are they the next target for google? pics.google.com :p

Dude. picasaweb.google.com

I don’t have any silly upload limits, just a storage limit. I keep photos on my hard drive, where they belong, but upload to share with friends. Google wins hands down. Again.

Hey Molly. I’m familiar with Flickr’s upload by email option. You get an email address unique to you and you can put the title in the subject part of the email and then tags in the body.

You can do the exact same thing with Zooomr.

If you have a Zooomr account you just go to your account page here (you have to be logged into your account to use this feature):

http://beta.zooomr.com/account/email_upload

You are then given a unique email address that can receive your photos at Zooomr. On the account page you can set up default tags to use every time or you can simply put the tags in the body of the email message.

This is obviously helpful when uploading from your cameraphone or other hand held device remotely.

Maybe we are not doing a good enough job at promoting this feature if you are not aware of it. Kristopher uploads photos to the site with his cameraphone all the time.

I’ve had pro accounts at both sites for a while now, and I have to say that the features added by Zooomr have been more interesting, expressive and fun for me than the ones at Flickr. Smart photo albums, for one, so that I never have to go back and re-group my albums. I can even make albums for myself of other people’s photos, which is interesting and cool. And the Zooomrtations let me do things like post a photo of my instrument and a clip of me playing it. It’s a much more dynamic experience and I have a lot of fun on Zooomr. As soon as they give me an easy way to migrate my photos over, I’m in for good.

Also, to the person above me who wished we’d talk more about Zooomr’s business than about Tate’s youth: OK. So let’s point out that the (until recently) one man team at Zooomr has built a site to rival and eventually surpass Flickr in a relatively short amount of time.

I don’t care how old he is. That’s amazing enough to be newsworthy to me.

~Thaumata

but the documentation on it is Shizen Houzen and there is no indication if you support using the key word “tag” in the subject to add tags or even if you have additions to the email address to set privacy level? Is there documentation that I am missing or a spec on it to look at?

Molly good points. We need to in fact do some significant rewriting of our FAQ. And we certainly need to make more people aware of how easy it is to upload to Zooomr by email including tagging and setting privacy through email.

We will try and get this better documented here shortly, and thanks for using Zooomr.

http://www.smugmug.com

so zooomr now offers additional utility to people who are content to upload 50mb RAW files out of their DSLRs.

i think that would make a much better headline for this post.

I’ve a pro zooomr account (being a blogger). I’m not a photographer, but store a lot of photos and don’t really share them. I agree with you Thomas, since with my free Flickr account, I couldn’t upload pics bigger than 5MB. I find this insane. What is a storage service when it is not in your terms? Does this mean that I store compressed pics on Flickr and use another service to store the uncompressed pics. Why do I need Flickr then :D?

I’ve been impressed with Zooomr and already started porting my pics to it after juploader came. In fact, now I’m adding frills and sharing the pics on my site through zooomr

abby, you don’t seem to have any originals on zooomr that are above 600k

so zooomr now offers additional utility to people who are content to upload 50mb RAW files out of their DSLRs.

i think that would make a much better headline for this post.

This is not something new Striatic. 50MB has been our limit from the start.

@striatic

Cmon! because Abby doesn’t have any originals above 600K means she couldn’t upload anything bigger than 5MB on Flickr?

I sense a “not moving out of my position” bias on your part and your comments are reflecting this.

“Cmon! because Abby doesn’t have any originals above 600K means she couldn’t upload anything bigger than 5MB on Flickr?”

my point is that unless you have a digital SLR, it is extremely difficult to even create a 5MB photo file in your camera.

my point is that zooomr is a niche service. doubling the upload limit should be put in the context of who it benefits.

it benefits a very specific type of user with a very specific type of camera.

of course, the top post frames the feature in terms of a challenge to flickr which is ridiculous.

do it mention that smugmug offers unlimited storage?

no.

do they mention that this additional upload capacity would only be of any consequence to a very small percentage of digital camera owners?

no.

if this is competition, it is competition for a niche section of the market.

but even then .. if you are a DSLR owner this is sledgehammer to thumbtack for photosharing or even printing.

my point is that unless you have a digital SLR, it is extremely difficult to even create a 5MB photo file in your camera.

Striatic. Really. To saw that Digital SLR owners are a “niche” section of the photosharing market is patently ridiculous. While there are people with small point and shoots where 5MB is not an issue, The 5MB limit is a problem for virtually *every* person who uses an SLR at best photo setting.

Let me point you to this article that references the top 10 cameras used on Flickr (generated by Yahoo Shopping) http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2.....on-flickr/

1. Nikon D50
2. Nikon D70
3. Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. Canon EOS 350D Digital
6. Nikon D70s
7. Cybershot
8. Canon Powershot S2 IS
9. Canon EOS Digital Rebel
10. Nikon D200

How can you say that SLR users are a “niche” area for Flickr when they represent such a huge part of what is being uploaded?

You don’t see photos over 5mb and 10mb on Flickr because they won’t allow them. I’m not saying that uploading full high res photos is always the best way to go. But for the people who want that give them choice.

When you say things like SLR owners are a “niche” area when the most popular cameras on Flickr are all SLRs this just makes you look like a biased Flickr apologetic who will say anything possible to try and defend Flickr.

Again, competition is *not* a bad thing. If only a “niche” group on Flickr would benefit from higher file size limits then why does Flickr have them there in the first place? If it nobody were to use higher file size or bandwidth limits then why doesn’t flickr simply increase them? Why have 5MB and 10MB limits in the first place?

Maybe when Flickr started out this was adequate, but SLRs sales are exploding. They are now not only what the top photographers are using, they are what the mainstream is using. To deride SLRs as niche is really a stretch Pal.

“How can you say that SLR users are a “niche” area for Flickr when they represent such a huge part of what is being uploaded?”

because that list is skewed.

DSLRs have a longer shelf life and there are fewer models than point and shoots.

DSLR users also upload more photos per individual than P&S users.

so the niche is over-represented due to the resulting consolidation. the accurate metric would be to consolidate the cameras producing files under 5mb, and the cameras producing files over 5mb, then count by number of cameras rather than numbers of photos.

“Why have 5MB and 10MB limits in the first place?”

to save on bandwidth costs, obviously. while you guys are still in the “we’re giving everything away for free” stage [flickr used to give free pro accounts away too] flickr is expected to be sustainable. letting people upload and download 50mb RAW files has a heavier cost than the benefit it provides.

essentially, they’d be having a small number of users drive up the costs for the other users by using flickr as a hard drive backup service, which is extremely high impact [with very low benefit].

now look, would i rather flickr increased its bandwidth cap? sure! call it ‘mega-pro’ and charge people in proportion to the space they’re filling. would it make any difference AT ALL for me or the vast majority of flickr users?

no.

i mean, is the ability to upload more than 5mb ANYWHERE on fd’s poll?
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/beta.php .. hm .. can’t seem to find it ..

.. and people complain about the upload cap with extreme rarity in the flickr help forums .. heaven knows they complain about everything else. the reason why you don’t see those complaints very often is because the overwhelming majority of flickr users, including DSLR users, never hit the cap.

DSLRs have a longer shelf life and there are fewer models than point and shoots.

DSLR users also upload more photos per individual than P&S users.

Striatic, you are not going to convince me that digital SLRs are a niche area of the photo sharing market. Try as hard as you want. If it were a niche part of the photosharing market Flickr would’t be teaming up with Nikon and putting free new digital SLRs in the hands of Flickr users in order to build a promotion and marketing campaign.

Go to a Flickr meetup sometime and see what people are shooting with. The are shooting with SLRs.

flickr used to give free pro accounts away too

Yeah and flickr used to charge $59.99 a year for flickr service as well. I still don’t see your point. You yourself note that if they wanted to they could charge users more to offset the higher limits resulting in no financial impact to Yahoo! whatsoever. In fact, for a couple of guys without Yahoo’s deep pockets, you might argue that this impacts us a lot more than it does Flickr.

the overwhelming majority of flickr users, including DSLR users, never hit the cap.

This is because the overwhelming majority of people *think* they are uploading full size originals to Flickr. The files are reduced in size by the flickr bulk uploaders and yet the photo still reads “original” size on flickr. It is not the original size that came out of the camera and if you polled people on flickr and asked them if they thought their original size images were being storred they would tell you yes. It’s a mistake people make when they think that original photos are being saved on flickr and many people make it thinking of flickr as a suitable archive or backup resource.

When you cap file sizes at 5MB and 10MB it will be very hard for users to hit the 2GB limit. Further, image sizes are only getting larger and larger. You will soon begin hitting the 5MB limit even with point and shoots. Rather than see this as a threat, Flickr should see this as an opportunity to better serve their customers.

I’m still blown away that you see digital SLRs as a “niche.” You really should look at some of the sales numbers coming out of Canon and Nikon.

“Go to a Flickr meetup sometime and see what people are shooting with. The are shooting with SLRs.”

i ran flickr meetups in toronto for years, and i visited flickr meetups all around the US last year. DSLR use was about 10%, and this is among the hardcore of the hardcore.

i just checked out some figures in the Time Europe article that pegs digital SLR growth as 4% currently, and predicted to go up to 5.5% by 2010.

http://www.time.com/time/europ.....-2,00.html

those are really heavy hitting numbers.

“You will soon begin hitting the 5MB limit even with point and shoots.”

and yet the average internet connection will be only marginally faster and the average screen resolution will be only marginally larger. the bottleneck isn’t the camera, it is that photosharing has an upper limit on the number of pixels it is actually useful to upload and share on the web.

and besides .. photography meetups DEFINE ‘niche’, they’re hardly representative of the full spectrum of people putting photos up on the web.

I think you both are right.

First, i love flickr so much that i actually spent 75$ and bought my PRO account. YES 75$ is what costs me here in argentina, not dollars, pesos, but they are as hard to get for me as it is for you to get one dollar, so for me, Flickr costed 75$, not 25$.

I discovered Zooomr.com some time ago, i browsed it, read about it, found a very stupid login form, and forgot all about it.

Now after this post i am actually using zoomr for a couple of pictures, there is no way i am moving out of flickr, and i will give you the reasons:

First, flickr is about GROUPS, zooomr doesnt have them, so unleast im only in for HOSTING pictures, its not really for me.
Second, flickr’s interface is CLEAN, really, its like the google of image hosting, while zooomr (why the hell three o’s? i always mistype them!) is a very confusing mashup, the menus are hard to understand, the translation is certainly not complete (i use the spanish interface), and the amount of choices you have is overwhelming even for a pro user like me.

I just shiver when i think about my parents trying to use it!, its too hard and unintuitive to use, you will not win traction until you realice this and do a very through interface check, like flock did (and that certainly helped them a lot)

In any case, zooomr has got me with a few of its innovative features, like the photo tracking, for example, i am using zooomr to host my blog logo even tough i have better methods to analyze hits (like hittail.com or google analytics).

Now, stop fighting about this subject, its really silly, flickr will be more mainstream as long as zooomr keeps being as counterintuitive and “dirty” as it is today, plus the social features in flickr are what drives most users.
If zooomr wants to compete with flickr, compete in the field flickr is strong, that is COMMUNITY, there are bigger and better hosting sites arround, like photobucket or imageshack.

Think about it, if joe user wanted to host his picture for a forum, he would just go to photobucket wich has a bulk posting tool.
Now if i want to share a picture i took and get comments, i will go to flickr. Where does zooomr stays this time? Its not good as a hosting site, nor is good as a community site…

And flickr could implement some new features likes SPANISH INTERFACE, or trackbacks, probably improve the forums since they actually suck, but i believe this simplicity is what makes it strong (although adding some WYSIWYG to the textboxes would be nice)

Well thats just my 2c

Thanks for the feedback Wally. We will be adding Zgroups and forums to Zooomr very shortly. Kristopher put out a video log entry about this last night.

http://blog.zooomr.com/2006/11.....p-zgroups/

And you are right about our needing to clean up our interface. We are working on this every single day. We will strive to get to the point when Zooomr would be intuitive enough for your parents.

I like photo sharing sites as much as the next guy… but I also like to invest in businesses that make money and have clear paths to profitability.

As a business person I am gettins sick of reading about all of these sites with great features, blah blah blah….. It is hardly all that entrepreneurial to essentially do something that someone else is doing, but adding a few new features, which in turn can be implemented by your market leading competitor. First mover’s advantage does still apply in the online world…. and I’ll be impressed when the first mover finally breaks even.

Zoomr to me seems like a business with one goal… to be aquired.

Tom,

Zooomr very much does have a business plan. But like many small companies we’ve focused the last 6 months or so more on building out our technology and our community.

Certainly like other photo sharing sites we will generate revenue through advertising (we already are actually and have recently begun talks with an advertising powerhouse to work with Zooomr), subscriptions, and the area that we are most excited of all about, something we are calling Marketplace.

Marketplace will be a place on Zooomr where advanced amateur photographers can sell their photos through stock, fine art prints, books, etc. and we will share revenue with our photographers.

Kristopher and I met with a large stock photography company week before last and plan on implementing a stock photography option for our users in the near future. Right now you have the Getty and the Corbis’ of the world that are very exclusive and on the other side you have the microstock businesses that pay very little for a photo. We think that there is a market in between and we think that many of the best amateurs these days are putting out work that is very very close to what the pros are doing.

Because our costs are very, very, low (we don’t have a big staff of people like other photo sharing sites and neither Kristopher or I take a salary from the company) bandwidth and servers is our primary cost. By keeping these costs low and finding ways to partner with our photographers by sharing revenue we think we can be profitable in very short order. Even if our goal *was* simply to be acquired (which it is not, our goal is rather to build the best way to share, search, store, and market your photos online) we certainly would be more valuable by being profitable than not.

Profitibility is very important to Zooomr and equally important, and I say this as a photographer myself, is to build the most kick ass photo playground on the internet.

Tom, your talk of Marketplace sounds amazing. Certainly a different way of doing photos on a site like Zooomr. I’m very interested in this option. Wow!

Tom, I hope to hear more and more about Marketplace. Definitely interested in it. Let me know if I’ll need to upload my photos at full resolution, or if there’ll be a photo replace feature for those photos that I’d like to list in the Marketplace, so I won’t lose the photo views, geotags and other descriptors by uploading the photo afresh. Keep up the fantastic work!

After all the breathless Zooomr coverage here, I finally went to check it out, and even signed up. Then I couldn’t get something to work. No problem, user error I’m sure. But wouldn’t you know, there’s not a single way to request help, submit feedback or bug reports, or otherwise engage the people behind the curtain. That’s not very social of them, is it

I probably broke all manner of protocol posting a comment to the head honcho’s blog, but exactly where else are users supposed to go?

Say what you will about Flickr, they seem to “get” community.