My favorite photo sharing website, Zooomr, is now live after weeks of being down. The two-man website had upgraded its services to Mark III, a new version that had been months in the planning and contains a lot of new features.
Among the features of Mark III is the ability of users to sell their photos and set prices for them. Users get to keep 80 percent of the sale.
WHAT’S THE PRICE? Zooomr allows photographers to set prices for their images. The photo-sharing website will soon be launching a marketplace where people can buy photographs.Zooomr founder Kristopher Tate had attempted to upgrade the site previously but rolled back when the downtime took too long. In this last attempt, the downtime took two weeks but most of its users were still very supportive of the service and its two-man crew: Tate and chief evangelist Thomas Hawk.
For days, I was among the many loyal Zooomr users rooting for the upgrade to be successful, visiting the site daily to check for updates. I was among those who regularly watched the live video feed of Kristopher working on the upgrade and taking the site back up. I partly shared their disappointment when, a few minutes after the upgrade went live, it’s database server crashed. I say partly because no one can be as disappointed over the crash as Kristopher and Thomas, who gave so much for the upgrade to work.
The site is now back up, thanks to the help of Zoho, Sun, Dell and various groups and people who answered a call by Robert Scoble for the community to help Zooomr.
The passion Kristopher and Thomas have for Zooomr is contagious. Not only are they giving a lot of their time for the product, Thomas even took a second mortgage on his house to fund their service. Now that’s commitment.
Some of the new features aren’t implemented yet such as the ability to change your log-in from Open ID to an e-mail and password combination. The site is also a bit slow and bulk uploading is still disabled.
One thing that I’ve noticed with the new version, though, is that the photo pages no longer give a direct link to the image location. All it providers is an HTML code that you can use to insert your photo in your website and blog. The code links the image to its photo page.
I use Lightbox JS to load larger images of photos in this blog (go ahead check it out). For this to work, I need to have the URL of the images. Although you can get the image location from the HTML code Zooomr provides, the previous method of providing the URL of the image is easier.
Although I can understand why Zooomr would want people to link to the photo pages, Kristopher did say that linking photos to their larger versions is perfectly acceptable. He said people can just provide another link to the photos page by displaying links in the sidebar. Which reminds me, I need to display my Zooomr photos in the sidebar.
Max is a journalist and blogger based in Cebu. He has written and edited for such publications as The Freeman, The Independent Post, Today, Sun.Star Cebu, Cebu Daily News, Philstar Life, and Rappler.
He is also a mobile app and web developer and co-founded InnoPub Media with his wife Marlen.
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