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Eric Appel’s SmartSetr Seriously Rocks

SmartSetrSmartSetr Hosted on Zooomr

One of the things that I really like about Zooomr is that we have SmartSets. SmartSets are a much better way of building sets or albums than the way that most photo sharing sites are organized. SmartSets allow you to predefine criteria and then use a database to build sets of photos for you.

For instance, let’s say you’ve uploaded 100 photos of Mountain View Cemetery over the past few years, with SmartSets you can simply tell the system to lump all of the photos with this tag into one album.

I’ve built a lot of sets on Flickr but always found the process of going through the organizer and building a set and then adding each and every photo manually to my set going forward tedious. So it is pretty cool to notice Eric Appel’s SmartSetr on Twitter right now.

With SmartSetr you basically just use predefined critera (tags, date taken, date uploaded, etc.) to have SmartSetr automatically build sets on Flickr for you. This is a far more efficient way to do things.

So far I’ve noticed just a few things that don’t work 100% yet. It seems that you can’t build really large sets (I tried building a set of all my photos tagged San Francisco for instance — this is hard to do though and something we still don’t even have down at Zooomr yet) and it appears that the SmartSets are not dynamic. You have to come back to SmartSetr to refresh and update them periodically. At Zooomr our SmartSets are dynamic and anytime you upload a photo tagged going forward it automatically enters it in the appropriate set. Also it seems that the sets are limited to your photos. At Zooomr we allow you to use SmartSets with anyones photos.

One thing I really like a lot about SmartSetr though is that it can present your set organized by interestingness, with your most interesting photos showing up first in your set and descending down from there.

Anyways, hats off to you Eric. This app is one of the best things I’ve ever seen anyone develop for Flickr. Now, if only we could get our API out for Zooomr and have you working on something like this for us 😉

Here are two sets by the way that I just built with Eric’s app, one for Tag Cathedral and one for Mountain View Cemetery.

Update: Eric has more directly on SmartSetr here.

Digg it here.

6 Replies to “Eric Appel’s SmartSetr Seriously Rocks”

  2. So where is the API? Didn’t you say it was finished about 2 months ago and just needed documentation?

    Let us know please and thanks.

  3. I do love Zooomr’s SmartSets, but Zooomr needs a slide show viewing feature like Flickr.

  4. Zooomr sets are “unique” yes, but they do not substitute for allowing single files to be added “freeform” also (without having to add a tag to the photo, etc first). It would be nice with the set pages to be able to choose between just the small thumbnail view, and the larger view with details that you see normally.

    The preview sizes on zooomr need VERY SERIOUS WORK. They are MANY TIMES larger than they need to be (without losing quality). The thumbnails are often in the range of 40-50KB, imagine that for someone on slow-DSL or dialup. Not everyone has 3Mbit+ cable speed. The previews were so large that I had to write a little python script to go through and change my blog images at http://luap777.wordpress.com. The images still link to zooomr for fullsize, but the previews aren’t hosted here now.

    Also, the fullsize image should preserve all metadata (just as flickr does after people asked for it).

    It would be great to be able to set a default “zoom level” for the satellite maps. This would help with the “We are sorry, no imagery at this level, etc” messages.

    Thank you,
    Paul

  5. Well, I really like the way Zooomr manages smartsets, but sometimes it is useful to add each image manually.

    I really admire the speed and quality in Zooomr development, currently this is the single thing i would change.

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