ArticlesThis post is part of the Online Photo Database project documentation. Learn more about the project’s current status.
Which requirements does Zooomr meet?
| Id | Pri | Requirement | Pass? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GEN1 | C | Accessible by a typical web-browser | Y | |
| GEN2 | I | Active development of new features | Y | |
| OWN1 | C | Ownership of photos is retained by me. | N | Need to keep backup locally |
| OWN2 | C | Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours | N | Need to keep backup locally |
| OWN3 | I | Ownership of meta-data is retained by me. | N | API offering coming? |
| CAT1 | C | Photographs grouped into albums by event | Y | Smartsets are the equivalent; a filter by date, tag, geolocation, etc. |
| CAT2 | C | Photographs tagged with people | Y | |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | Y | |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | Y | By “awesomeness” which is a heuristic based on interest. |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | Y | |
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | N | |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | N | |
| CAT11 | D | Areas or points of photograph tagged | Y | |
| CAT12 | D | Simple contact management of subjects | Y | |
| CAT13 | D | Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people | N | |
| CAT14 | D | Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching | N | Could be done by convention |
| CAT15 | D | Corrections to names update everywhere | N | |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | Y | |
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | N | |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | Y | |
| S+L2 | I | Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. | N | |
| S+L3 | I | Link to other photos with same tag across my albums | Y | |
| S+L4 | I | Search of tags by keyword | Y | |
| S+L5 | I | Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. | N | |
| S+L6 | D | Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites | N | |
| S+L7 | D | Search of album names by keyword | N | |
| S+L8 | D | User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword | N | |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | Y | |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | Y | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | Y | |
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | ? | |
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | ? | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | Y | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | Y | |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | Y | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | Y | |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | Y | Yay! |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | N | |
| PQ7 | D | Support for long video | N | |
| PERF1 | I | Quota > 0.5 TB, if any | Y | |
| PERF2 | I | Low-cost | Y | |
| PERF3 | I | Fast response time | Y | |
| PERF4 | I | Scale to thousands of tags | Y | |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | Y | |
| PERF6 | D | Free | Y | Less features though |
| UI1 | C | Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. | Y | |
| UI2 | D | Slideshows | ? | Can’t get SmartSets to work to test |
| UI3 | D | Display of many thumbnails at once | Y | |
| PRIV1 | C | Their email address should never be published on the web. | Y | But it actually emails them! |
| PRIV2 | I | Registration and logging in not required for general use. | Y | |
| PRIV3 | I | Robust privacy features for photographs | N | Only four levels: Me/Family/Friends/Public |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | Y | Filename appears too prominently 🙁 |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | N | |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | Y | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | Y | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | N | Coming? |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | N | Coming? |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | Y | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | Y | Can count views |
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N |
Summary
Zooomr, despite its over-abundance of the letter O in the name, has a certain amount of potential.
Again, there is a strong push to be social networking tool. The more I think about that, the more I realise that I don’t want to have to add all my FaceBook friends to yet another site.
However, the feature set here is pretty strong.
It was let down by poor documentation (including old promises of an API coming soon) and an interface that was a bit cryptic.
Albums (or “SmartSets” are created with a filter criteria) but no matter what I chose, the album appeared empty. Probably user error, but not a good sign.
It didn’t seem possible to tag a person without a valid email address; I guess I would be creating lots of fake addresses!
The privacy settings seem a bit limited.
Overall, if I can get access to the API, this one may have legs.
Comment by John Y. on August 16, 2008
I’m a casual photo-sharer, with much less comprehensive requirements than you do, and I have used both Flickr and Zooomr (I guess one way to make a site more Web 2.0ish is by adding and removing vowels to deconventionalize spelling).
Anyway, I haven’t been a serious Zooomr user, even though I was one of the relatively early adopters (free “proitization” (upgrade to Pro status) for anyone with a blog), because it has been too buggy and inadequately supported for my taste. Zooomr seems to try to be a free, large-capacity, large-bandwidth superset of Flickr, but Flickr’s polish is vastly greater. For most of its existence Zooomr has had only the one developer (who gets a few bonus points for enthusiasm, effort, and extensive use of Python), and for all I know still is the only developer.
I do hope that he eventually gets Zooomr to rival Flickr in robustness and mindshare (I had a very annoying time opening my free Flickr account, and it seems almost oppressively proprietary and commercial (don’t know how much of that came about when it was acquired by Yahoo!)), but in my opinion it will be a while before Zooomr is good enough for prime time. (Hey, if you’ve got a severe programming itch to scratch now that you’ve given up your day job, maybe you can offer your services and help make Zooomr get there faster!)