David Naylor: Blog

After having spent many, many hours keywording all my photos using Lightroom, I have now uploaded all the photos to Flickr. (Here’s why I didn’t go with Zooomr.)

Obviously I had to get a Pro account for unlimited uploading and storage. With the dollar being so cheap though it was a steal at SEK 160.

The uploading of my ~4,600 photos took roughly four whole days and nights on my … umm, modest Internet connection. (2 Mbps down, 256 kbps up.)

Now I have a wonderful, searchable, keyworded archive of all the photos that I’ve taken with my dear EOS 30D. Here, for instance, is a search for leaf:

Both Flickr and Zooomr have pretty nice AJAX style uploading. Flickr’s would only (?) take 400 or so photos in one go. I uploaded the photos as private, but allowed friends to see them all. I have then gone through them all and (so far) selected 673 photos that I’ve made public.

One really nice thing is that I can write captions for the photos in Lightroom, and when I export the photos the caption is saved to the IPTC info, which Flickr reads and understands. Three cheers for standards and compatibility!

Even though I had already paid for a Pro account at Zooomr, I ended up going with Flickr for my online archive/backup.

I usually go with the underdog, which would be Zooomr in this case. Mainly because the underdog usually works harder and more often thinks out of the box in order to win people over.

Zooomr does have free, unlimited photo hosting. And you only pay once to get a Pro account, not anually as with Flickr. But Zooomr has a few annoyances that put me off it.

1. Zooomr doesn’t cope with Swedish characters (å, ä and ö) in the IPTC tags of uploaded photos.
2. Zooomr doesn’t display EXIF data in a readable way.

When half the point of uploading the photos was to make them searchable, those bugs are pretty serious. I’ve spoken to Kristopher, the founder and developer behind Zooomr, and it didn’t sound like the EXIF bug was very high up on their to-do-list. So Zooomr will have to wait for now.

If and when they fix those two bugs (which were the only bugs as far as I could see) I might decide to make a second backup on Zooomr. The (future) possibility to sell photos on Zooomr (Marketplace) definitely sounds interesting anyway. Until then I’ll at least be following the Zooomr blog closely. The upcoming Zooomr Mark IV (aka 2008) release might be just what I need. Who knows.