This morning, photo sharing site Zooomr rolled out some new features, improving their already excellent photo sharing experience.
The navigation bar at the top of the screen is now much cleaner, and includes drop-down menus for accessing features:
Discover has undergone some major changes as well. The algorithm has been tuned to better represent shots that are truly awesome. Discover is now paged as well, so you can see more than just the first 100 photos that show up. There are also alternate Discover views available, including Pro and Undiscovered. The Undiscovered view is particularly nice because it allows you to find photographers that you have not yet interacted with. Here’s an example of some of the great shots that I found using Undiscovered:
The latest release of Zooomr has introduced the idea of “Awards”. Many users on Zooomr have been tagging their photos with “fav10″ when they get 10 faves from other users. The Zooomr team have taken this idea a step further by automatically adding an award tag when photos get 10 faves. All the awards given to a photo will show up under the “Awards” section to the right of the photo. Awards are just tags, so they can be used to create SmartSets and can be used in searches:
Another recent feature is the ability to share a photo on popular social networking sites with a single click. Underneath each photo is a “Share this with Friends” section that lets you send the photo to Facebook, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Pownce, and more. This is a great way to leverage the social aspect of photography:
In addition to these very obvious changes, the Zooomr team has been improving the back-end processes that keep the site going. The last few months have seen substantial improvements in the speed and reliability of the site. Uploads are now working as expected. The API is working, which allows third-party applications such as JUploadr to work with the site again. The site is smoother and faster overall.
Thanks to Kristopher and the Zooomr Team for all the hard work! Zooomr is getting more awesome all the time!
This is my first upload on Zooomr 2008. So far the new site is looking good!
This was by far the best Zooomr rollout ever. The downtime was roughly 10 hours, and when the site was brought back up it was smooth and responsive. Uploads worked right away, and there were no errors during any of the uploads.
Some other good things about Zooomr 2008:
* EXIF/IPTC data is now parsed and displayed correctly for my photos
* You can now manage your account settings
* Twitter/Zipline integration is now available
* You can now delete your messages from Zipline
That said, there are still some things missing, such as API access, the ability to set the default license model for your photos, and bulk change/delete operations.
I’m still exploring the new release, but all in all I am quite happy with the changes I have seen so far. It will be interesting to see what develops in the next year. Congratulations to Kristopher and Team Zooomr on a smooth rollout!
If you haven’t checked Zooomr out for a while, this is a good time to see whats new. See you on Zipline!
I spend a lot of time over on Zooomr, posting photos, looking at other photos, and chatting on Zipline. There have been some pretty consistent complaints about uploads not working over the last few weeks.
Most of these problems were solved last week, but some people were still experiencing either intermittent problems uploading certain photos, or problems uploading ANY photos. I had two shots that I could not get uploaded, no matter what I did with them. After much frustration, I narrowed the problem down to some metadata that was giving Zooomr problems.
The problem area is the IPTC Caption field. Photos with any data there will not upload properly. However, it is easy to fix this when you are editing your photos. If you use Aperture, look for data in the Caption field. It will look something like this:
Just delete the data in the Caption field.
If you use Photoshop, click the File menu and then select File Info. In the IPTC Content section, look under “Description”. If you see any data there, delete it. It will look something like this:
Once that data is gone, the photo should upload correctly and appear on Zooomr. Note that any data there — even blank spaces — will cause the upload to fail, so make sure there is really nothing there by clicking in the field and hitting delete.
I hope this will help any of you that were having problems uploading certain photos. Happy shooting!
I like to take a screen shot every so often of the photos that I have marked as favorites on Zooomr. Here is a capture of my favorites, sorted by awesomeness. There is so much great photography happening over on Zooomr, it almost seems unfair to only show a small portion of it. But if you want to see more, just click the photo to get to Zooomr, and start exploring.