Comments on: Flickr Increases Upload Bandwidth for Photos

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:20:00 +0000

I have had issued with zooomr with my T1 line. The uploading of flickr photos has been an issue. Is there a fix?

By: range

range — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 17:28:00 +0000

Hey Thomas.
I was using flickr before I started using Zooomr. Main reason, free pro accounts, more upload capacity. Though I never hit it until this month. You see, I got myself a Nikon D200 and I have hit the 4GB limit easily this month. In fact, I still have 300 photos I want to upload and no more bandwith to upload them anymore.

My question is this, when will Zooomr be offering unlimited uploads for its Pro accounts? It might make my life easier.

By: Dan Oines

Dan Oines — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:59:00 +0000

I had 800 photos on a flickr free account. Everything was tagged with my username so they could be retrieved and sorted by date or interestingness. Once flickr added multiple tag searching, sets were irrelevant. I simply used category tags then linked to the saved search URLs from my profile page.

The biggest problem with flickr is that it's stickier than super glue. The costs in time, tagging, and tracking feedback eventually became higher than the benefits of using the site.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:50:00 +0000

I love Thomas' photography and enjoy his blog, but his often "all or nothing" comments just make me smile and shake my head. Same for the voracity by which he defends these statements in the comments. Though I will also admit that this approach certainly generates more controversy and, therefore, more pageviews, notice, and more syndicated ad revenue, so I can't say I blame him. As to this post's comments, I agree with others here that the 10MB size limit is hardly a problem for the majority of enthusiasts out there. I shoot in RAW, postprocess to PSD, and only save out to JPG when I want to print or post. In that case, I set the resolution and compression to satisfy the particular medium. Even if I maxed out all my settings, with the photos from my 30D, I never hit 10MB and, optimized for the web, am usually much, much lower. I agree the limit may be a problem for a small number of users and is largely unnecessary on Flickr's part, but hardly warrents the "virtually every digital SLR..." statement.

Now, on the 200 photo limit and the 3 set limit, I agree that both of these are pretty small even for free accounts. It seems clear that Flickr is more aggressively trying to monetize its user base through the upgrade to Pro accounts. Hopefully, competition and a broader monetization strategy will open up some of those limits.

Davis, Flickr absolutely gives you the html to embed in your blog posts. Just click "All Sizes", select the size you'd like to embed, and the html will be under the picture.

Last, I would say the huge advantage Flickr has right now is the established community. Thomas' photo "Shot to the Moon" has one comment on Zooomer and 15 comments on Flickr. In the world of social media, the best feature set doesn't always win.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:57:00 +0000

Flickr still restricts free-users to just 3 sets. I’d like to create lots of sets & slideshows but I can’t because of this restriction.

I can understand charging more for bandwidth but for sets? This is free to them. Clearly they’ve put this restriction in place for the sole purpose of driving pro-memberships. While might make sense from a business perspective it seems petty.

By: Greg Furry

Greg Furry — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:43:00 +0000

Thomas,

I did a little experiment. In photoshop I opened RAW file shot with a Nikon D80. Not quite as large as the 5D but all I have. I brought it in via Apple's Aperture and the original file was 10.2MB.

I then opened it in photoshop and saved it as a PSD file. The PSD is 57.9MB. I saved it out as a jpeg. All settings as high as they go. The jpeg out of Photoshop is 9.6MB. Not a great savings over the RAW file size. (and an answer to the why 10 MBs is and issue for you on Flickr)

I then went back to Aperture and saved out as a JPEG. The file was only 5.5MB. I opened them both up in photoshop and they appear to be the exact same pixel dimensions and resolution. I guess this is a side question. Why all the overhead in the Photoshop JPEG? Is there a way to save out of photoshop as a jpeg and get a smaller file without losing quality? Maybe this is a question you can't answer. If not hopefully someone from Adobe will respond.

By: Bruce Anderson

Bruce Anderson — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:12:00 +0000

Dead horse to flog here… I really dislike OpenID. I choose Flickr over my (free pro) Zooomr account every single time because…well…I don’t have to log in to Flickr every time I close my browser and then come back to the site. It’s irritating as all get-out. Why can’t Zooomr use some other, less intrusive authentication system?

By: nathanus

nathanus — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:07:00 +0000

Despite what others may think, I have always hated Flickr. It never made sense to me. I hate that it has to be linked and run by yahoo. I gave up on yahoo along time ago and the last thing I want to do is sign up for them just to use a photo sharing service when Zooomr is much better.

I have had nothing but excellent service with Zooomr. Again, the only thing that could be improved is the speed, but besides that it makes much more sense to me then Flickr. I feel Flickr is much more cluttered than the way Zooomr is designed.

By: Angel Marquez

Angel Marquez — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:18:00 +0000

Thomas,
In line with most of the comments above, I think that while the 10MB per file limit isn't really much of an issue right now, though I anticipate it might be so in the future. In fact I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum and would be a fan of an option to have Zooomr chunk my original picture and only provide square through large versions of my photos. Though I love using Zooomr to share I'm also the kind of person who would like to know when someone wants the full sized version of one of my photos. Resizing locally before sending to Zooomr right now is a bit of a chore.
At the risk of contributing to a flickr vs zooomr aspect of these threads, I've been using zooomr as my primary photo repository for sharing photos since receiving my for-bloggers pro account and have come across a few places where I've found zooomr a bit lacking. Mainly small things, but we all know the small things can add up. That said, my biggest quesiton with regard to Zooomr right now is how do I send in suggestions for improvements/feature requests or notify you of problems? I guess that I could send Zmail to Kristopher or you. But how does your casual photo-sharing user know to do that? Where are the "Contact us" or "Send suggestions/Comments" or "Report a problem" links?
Leaving the biggest for last: I think the biggest problem I have with Zooomr right now is one of community. How do I get my photos noticed by others? In Flickr I can join groups and submit my photos to like-minded individuals. If there is similar functionality in Zooomr I've yet to find it. The groups in Flickr foster a sense of community which I find lacking here.

-Angel Marquez

By: Baron

Baron — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:05:00 +0000

Ahh thanks – I was unable to download the full size because I uploaded my other photos before my pro zooomr account was activated. New photos uploaded allow me to download the original size. That’s unfortunate that you have to re-upload photos after you get the pro account to have them stored in full resolution.