To be perfectly honest, I’d never heard of Zoomorama until they commented on this post about the upcoming Web Trend Map from Information Architects. I was planning on doing a review of the web application soon, but now a new, similar online tool called ClosR landed in our inbox, giving me the perfect excuse to test both at the same time.
Both ClosR and Zoomorama enable you to upload images and transform them into zoomable widgets, which comes in handy when you need to embed or share very large, high-resolution images. The difference between both services is that ClosR is quite rudimentary while Zoomorama has added some nice additional features to the mix that complement the experience well.
Essential for this type of service is the speed: the time it takes to properly load an image when you zoom in or out should be down to an absolute minimum. I found that both applications perform well in that regard, although ClosR did feel a tad faster at times (note that the difference is negligible). Both apps enable you to zoom in on images using your mouse wheel or an unintrusive overlay, and allow you to switch to full-screen mode with just one click. Dedicated URLs for uploaded images are available for both, and there are plenty of sharing options available (ClosR uses ClearSpring, while Zoomorama seems to have developed this in-house).
But ClosR is quite basic, although it does what it has to do pretty well. Zoomorama on the other hand offers lots of bells and whistles, like for instance the ability to comment, favorite and rate images. Its interface is also a bit more intuitive and I find that the company made the right choice by using dark backgrounds for the website. Finally, Zoomorama also comes with a desktop application called Zoomcreator that I wish I’d known about before, since it allows you to create full resolution photo albums on your PC (Mac version coming soon) and enables you to publish them to the Web straight away. You can choose the lay-out, add captions and even insert videos from your computer or from YouTube. Definitely worth trying out!
To conclude: if you need a basic app that allows you to upload large images and make them zoomable, ClosR would be the first one you should try, but if you need more features and /or are a sucker for great UIs and social elements, Zoomorama takes the top prize by a long shot.
Web Trend Map 4 on ClosR:
Web Trend Map 4 on Zoomorama:
I’m sure there are more web applications that allow you to generate zoomable, embeddable widgets for images, and I’m happy to learn about them in the comment section. (Zoomify is one of them, Zoomery is another)
Zomorama also wins for the name which is easier to remember.
Perhaps if closr.it was renamed into something like Letszoom.it or Upoad.it, it would be better, but otherwise, I don’t quite get the closr.it name …
HDView by Microsoft research is similar, although it’s a proprietary plugin (although well worth installing).
We at 360cities use a “zooming” tile-based viewer although currently it’s only for spherical images.
Seadragon ajax is closer to the above examples.
http://livelabs...seadragon-ajax/
Sound link pornware.
Zoomable photo widgets
It will be more interesting when they both bring out zoom versions that can be integrated into eCommerce sites. Hopefully then they’d be able to give Adobe Scene 7 a run for their money.
I’d be overjoyed if someone actually DID make a serious effort at giving Scene7 a run for their money. A strong API, and a true -united-nations-of-images solution that included tiff format and cmyk and LAB color spaces, could put those guys on their heels. Millions of cos with print-ready IP would use it.
Go!
http://www.zoomify.com came out years ago… almost out dated now
Thanks Robin for mentioning Zoomorama. We appreciate your post ! Yes it’s great for Erotics but you’d be surprised to learn that we have many many more baby pictures uploaded. It’s also great for Magazines online, for e-Commerce, and for Blogs (Grade A Entrepreneurs).
Zoomorama comes from Panorama, we are not just about zooming but about creating a new browser for Broadband where you don’t care about screen size, image size or video format. The main difference with DeepZoom or any other service out there is that we mix HD images, Videos (YouTube patch coming soon), Vector Text, and soon Music and Vector Graphics. We also offer the ability to create albums of multiple pages.
Three products: ZoomExpress for a quick upload/conversion to paste into your blog, ZoomCreator for playing with layouts and texts, and the Facebook app ZPhotos for albums of full resolution images viewable within Facebook (silently launched yesterday – would appreciate feedback).
UPCOMING Zoomcreator will be compatible with Mac, Linux, and will have lots of Bug fixes. Please be forgiving at this time with the current version. Zoomcreator is built in Mozilla’s XUL, so we be able to have extensions and lots of great features.
Upcoming announcements for businesses in June. I guess you caught us a little early, but we are glad for the exposure. Thanks again !
First of all kudos to Zoomorama, a great service that finally gets the attention it deserves!
There’s also OpenZoom, an open source solution for publishing high-resolution images on the web:
http://gasi.ch/...ge-replacement/
Example: The New York Times
http://gasi.ch/...cement/nytimes/
Disclaimer: I did a summer internship at Zoomorama last year.
If you are willing to adventure into Silverlight, may I recommend taking a look at http://www.zoomery.com? Our first publicly available product, Zoomery Gallery allows you to create searchable Deep Zoom galleries with slideshow functionality from any folder on your hard drive. Also, take a look at http://summitr.zoomery.com to see how an online service would look using the Zoomery framework.
Thank you for your time!
Sorry, not willing to venture into Silverlight, thanks!
(but no thanks)
exactly, even the big name companies are dropping that buggy piece of MS crap for flash…
You rock Zoomorama!! I could see real applications for this especially in the area of memorabilia. I am a numismatist and would love to zoom and see details of coin strikes. Ok… so being a numismatist doesn’t get you chicks but hey it can be a great learning experience!!
As well as the Seadragon Ajax http://livelabs...seadragon-ajax/ there’s Photozoom http://photozoo...mslivelabs.com/ which uses Silverlight (a fairly generic plugin that opens up a bunch of scenarios) – Photozoom actually takes advantage of the Deep Zoom capabilities built into Silverlight that power sites like http://memorabi...ia.hardrock.com and (not quite as safe for work) http://playboyarchive.com
Zoomorama rocks indeed!
And the tech engine behind the curtain really is powerful, I can tell from having seen the inside.
Can’t help for june.
Great to see this zooming stuff moving forward. You might also be interested to see my research on Pad++ back from 1996 that led to some of this stuff:
http://www.yout...h?v=68lP1gRLmZw
http://www.yout...h?v=rZVtJHVyrxI
– Ben
P.S. Hi Franklin.
Hi Ben. Indeed it throws us back a few years. But as you see I stuck it out. Thanks to you and Ken Perlin for the inspiration about Zooming. Its been already 12 years that we met and imagined the future in Zooming.
In the coming weeks Zoomorama will come out with an entirely new version, with DOM and Javascript scriptability. Very close to your original vision of Pad++. Let’s see what we the world will do with it !
Prezi does this, but they are not limited to pictures. They can do text, video, etc. They think of themselves as presentation software with a twist — they do not do pages/screens. They have an infinite space with zoom in and zoom out and navigation. I am not sure the quality is or is not as good, but they are more flexible than these two systems.
Hello,
first of all thanks for sharing your ideas, suggestions and feedbacks on ClosR.it.
We do really appreciate it.
We are just out in a public beta from less than 2 weeks (some Bugs are still occuring) and we are working on new features requested by users: we are planning a roadmap together with them.
We are really thankfull to the InfoVis researchers and professionals worked in the past years on ZUIs, such as Pad++ or Piccolo (thanks Ben for your great work in the past).
Thanks very much for your contribution,
Daniele Galiffa
Wow, this post has really brought out the who’s who of zooming! It’s actually quite a robust community, but it’s rare we’re all together like this. In fact, I’ve started a community site for that purpose:
http://grou.ps/zooming
Come on down if you’d like to continue the conversation!
–Ian
test
Lila.io (www.beta.lila.io) is a new player offering a Zoomable Rich Media Blogging platform.
i dig Prezi, because the interactions are more like continuous instead of digital.
i.e. zooming
I don’t have to click and click and click on the plus/minus button to zoom in/out.
instead
if i hold down the ‘z’ and move the mouse i do a nice continuous zooming
hence, i have control on the overall system and i feel better
Our newest zoom tool recently launched in beta. It’s called Magic Touch:
http://www.magi...com/magictouch/
It’s similar to the examples above except you don’t have to upload your images – we fetch them automatically from your website.
Try it out our free beta version now. A range of subscriptions will be available later.