Well, I’ve been blogging a lot about Zooomr recently. I think they’re actually very interesting. Like Flickr were originally (before Flickr got gobbled up by Yahoo), they are a small independent start-up (to the best of my knowledge).

Zooomr are similar to Flickr in the fact that they are both photo sites, but Zooomr does quite a few things better:

• They don’t have ridiculous restrictions on what is and isn’t a photo – put what you want on there (within reason, of course)
• Geotagging is awesome (when I have some real photos to test I’ll get a better look)
• Trackbacks on photos (Flickr are almost as slow as Blogger are on getting trackbacks on blogs, come on Blogger!)
• Flickr has RSS feed support – but Zooomr really pushes it and I think RSS is available to syndicate a lot more things than Flickr can
• Tagging – Zooomr’s implementation is just slick and appears absolutely everywhere
• Uploading is great – I love the fact that multiple uploads are handled so intuitively
• Integration with Google Maps API is everywhere, I love it

However, they could work on:

• Speed – at times Zooomr is painfully slow, when Flickr is fine. Yes, this must be difficult to afford the server & bandwidth capacity when you haven’t got Yahoo behind you, but still it will drive people away
• The interface of Zooomr personally I don’t think looks as nice as Flickr’s – Flickr looks and feels friendlier to the new user
• I can’t see anything along the lines of a set creator or something like Flickr’s Organisr. This functionality would be nice
• Something like (or better than) the cool Flash animations and little HTML snippets that show your recent photos – I’d put one on the sidebar here!
• Publicity – Zooomr’s great, but hardly anyone knows about it. I suppose the free Pro accounts (and people like me blogging about Zooomr) will help them, but without product awareness, they’ll never beat Flickr
• Innovation – not to say they haven’t innovated already, they have, but they need to work on some really awesome features that leave Flickr’s in the dust (feature wars anyone?)

Anyway, I hope this helps the Zooomr team try and increase their popularity – I think it’s nice to see the small players win sometimes. Zooomr – I think you won me over with the free Pro account. One question – how would you have upgraded to Pro if you didn’t get upgraded for free? I couldn’t see the option anywhere.