So here it is, a Flickr InfoWidget that lets you link a Flickr photo ID to your Zooomr photo. Once linked, you can synchronise Title, Description and Tags from Flickr into Zooomr. As always, Firefox and Greasemonkey are needed. Get the script here .

Check out the demo once you’ve got the script installed. You will only be to synchronise the metadata if you’re logged in as the owner of the photo in Zooomr.

If you’re interested in writing InfoWidgets as well, take a look at the sample Mood InfoWidget source or mine. Happy coding!

• Zooomr Enhanced Thread Paging – adds another row of paging links at the start of a thread [script link]
• Zooomr Buddy Icon Reply – adds a reply link to each comment which will generate the buddy icon code or bold username code in the add post textarea [script link]
• Zooomr Fanmail Compose Fix – fix for a Zooomr bug where the “To” field doesn’t get auto-populated properly [script link]
• Zooomr Zipline Sidebar Plus – adds a couple of extra links in the Zipline sidebar [script link]

I’m sure this sounds a wee bit ridiculous but this is from the perspective from an old skool Zooomr v2 user looking at Flickr for the first time. Flickr is obviously THE photosharing site for alot of people for long time and has lots of time to refine their features. Zooomr, on the other hand, is really the new kid on the block who’s a little wet behind the ears but tries to make up for it with buckets of enthusiasm (and very little sleep).

What I Really Like in Flickr

1. Search is great. Zooomr’s search is currently limited only to tags, maxes out at 5000 results, and to be honest, really really basic. I also prefer Flick’s search result display. Flickr Clusters, showing photos from commonly grouped tags, are very useful.
2. Sets work perfectly. Although not quite as “smart” as Zooomr’s, I can’t say I’m dreadfully disappointed. Zooomr’s SmartSets have been really a hit-and-miss for me. I like Flickr’s Collections too; being able to group your sets into Collections. I can see this working well for organised freaks people.
3. Tags are flawless. You can replace tags, delete tags across your entire collection very easily. I hate that the tag cloud in my profile page in Zooomr shows all photos instead of just my photos with that tag.
4. Photo management. Flickr scores a knockout when trying to work with batches of photos. The ease at which you can edit multiple photo attributes, put them into sets, etc, is awesome. Fantastic user experience.
5. EXIF information is more complete. Hi ISO, I missed seeing you in Zooomr and it’s nice to know that 0.003 sec is really 1/400. EXIF info is also retained in the high-res download from Flickr.
6. Navigation is intuitive. I like the fact that Flickr retains the context of your navigation path, i.e. when you’re in a set, the previous/next links points to the previous/next photos within the set. Zooomr previous/next links always points to the previous/next photos within the main user photo stream. A real pain to navigate through sets this way.
7. A gadzillion groups. Groups are not available in Zooomr v2 but are slated to show up in v3.

What I Really Like in Zooomr

1. Geotagging with Google Maps. Too bad Flickr is Yahoo property so I don’t see any hope of ever using Google Maps in Flickr. Google Maps kick Yahoo Maps butt big time for now.
2. Localisations. I’ve only used Zooomr in English and so it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference for me, but knowing that Zooomr takes cares of that warms my geeky mushy heart. I’m not sure what to make of Yahoo’s intentions to launch a Chinese version of Flickr just yet. Hmm.

There are of course dozens more feature differences between David and Goliath Flickr and Zooomr but these are just some of the ones that jumped out at me. I like Zooomr, really I do. Look at how much I written about it. But is Zooomr still Flickr on Steroids? Not v2 for sure, but maybe Mark 3… when it arrives. I’m going to explore more of Flickr while waiting for Mark 3 to get out the door. Can’t wait.

[Edit]: Had to fix the post title, which explains the weird post slug. I meant Flitting, not Flirting. Doh.

EXIF viewing/editing in Mark III?

Marketplace Tagging

A few interesting points to note:

• New Logo Colours
• Site is now predominantly white
• Upload link is now directly accessible, next to the ZMail link
• Thumbnail navigation finally gets backward and forward links
• More language options: “Arabic”?
• New disclaimer: “User-posted content, unless otherwise implied, is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.” – WOW, great for the commons but what would the users think?
• InfoTags for MarketPlace?
• Tags are now Labels?
• Zipline
• Groups

Looking good! But when will it all be released?

Sure enough, when I logged on…

Great work, Zooomr! It’s alway nice to see such quick response from the dev team. If only you guys could get that change log out, it would be that much easier to gush over all those new features and bug fixes…

So here’s my mini-review anyway.

What’s Hot

» Geotagging. The ability to tag your photos with geographical coordinates. Coupled tightly with Google Maps, it is a very interesting feature which, I suspect, can eventually be spun into a multitude of 3rd-party applications. TagMap is probably a good Zooomr example.

» Zooomrtations. Audio annotations for your photos. No online real-time recording feature currently but you can upload audio files to be attached to your photos. Like geotagging, this has potential for spin-off applications.

» People tagging. You can tag your photos with fellow Zooomr users, making photos part of the online social webbing that is so popular these days. A rather innovative concept that may take off with the MySpace/Friendster crowd. Earn your 15 minutes worth of fame by getting on the Zooomr Most Famous listing.

» Navigation. Zooomr has integrated the Lightbox user interface into the site, allowing you to view a specific photo without leaving the the main user listing page.

On top of that, Zooomr also provides a sweet-ajaxy Inspector interface, which lets you call up the meta attributes of the photo in the current window.

» Trackbacks. The ability to see who’s linking to your photos. Can’t imagine why nobody else thought of it. Simple but great feature.

» Localisation. Zooomr comes in 16 languages currently. A very nice nod to a global user base. Not nearly enough sites out there cater for an international audience, so thumbs up to Zooomr.

» Blogger-friendly. Free pro accounts to bloggers is a brilliant way to score publicity and brownie points for a startup. Getting users hooked on pro-only features early is a sure-fire way to get them to sign up for a paid account later. Unlike Flickr whose move to discourage screenshots kicked up a storm in the blogsphere, Zooomr has no such restrictions.

What’s Not

» SmartSets.The ability to build dynamic sets of photos based on a pre-defined metadata-based criteria was, for me, one of the highlights of 2.0.

However, I never got it to work quite as expected for me. Initially, the smartset only picked up photos uploaded after the set was created, but after some patches, the smartset stopped working altogether. Re-creating the smartset didn’t work either [link to my travel smartset here].

» User Tags. I can’t seem to find a way to browse my own tags. The tag cloud in the Profile page links to all photos in Zooomrverse instead of my own photos. A nitpick perhaps, but I was hoping to browse using my own tags to troubleshoot the problems I was having with SmartSets.

» Signing Up. By default, Zooomr encourages you to sign up using a OpenID account. In fact, the sign-up page sends you to an account sign up page on MyOpenID. There is an option to authenticate using Google but it’s not at all obvious on the sign-up page.

If you created 2 accounts like I did, one with OpenID and one with Google, you are supposed to be able to merge the accounts. However I wasn’t able to do so successfully and ended up with a rather spartan looking error message.

» Community & Feedback. Short of posting a comment on the Zooomr blog, there isn’t any way of submitting a bug or any feedback. Frankly, I’m a little surprised at this. With Thomas Hawk onboard as Chief Evangelist on the Zooomr team, I would think building proper community feedback channels would have been a key priority since Thomas is known to be pretty big on community-building.

This brings me to another surprise that 2.0 didn’t bring any specific community-building features. No interest-focused groups, no forums. Puzzling.

To sum it up…

Zooomr 1.0 was pretty interesting to explore initally, but 2.0 was a little disappointing. Smartsets was something I was really looking forward to in 2.0 but the execution has been buggy and a bit of a letdown. To take a contrarian view, without taking any credit away from Kristopher Tate and the Zooomr crew, I would say that Zooomr still has some catching up to do with Flickr on the little things that make online photo management such an ease.

Still, it’s early days yet, and I look forward to more good things ahead.

I’m keeping my Zooomr accounts for now, all two of them

[UPDATE] 25th Jul: My SmartSet problems got fixed!

I bought the Canon 50mm f/1.8 recently and have been testing it out. Amazing result for a S$130 lens.

Oh and I’ve just started playing around with Zooomr (with a triple ooo), it’s looking promising so far. Version 2.0 is set to be launched this week but no word on the features. If I can get off my lazy ass, I will probably write a short review (if no one else has already done so).

PS: Zooomr loves bloggers