Website Review: Zooomr - The Site That Keeps On Giving

I've been taking photos for a long time, as I'm sure many of you have. Where my story might differ from others is that I've also wanted to share my photos online for a long time.

At first, I tried linking to photos from the pages of my personal site. This was an easy solution, but let's face it, it didn't look that great. Plus, it was annoying to have to manually place the photo in a folder and create a link to it. It wasn't a professional solution. I wanted to be able to present each photo on a page by itself, and display additional data that would make it interesting for someone to view it. But all that would have required lots of work for each individual page, and my time was limited.

I then tried using the web gallery options that come with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. This still wasn't what I wanted, but at least each photo got a thumbnail and its own page. Plus, the HTML pages, thumbnails and photos were all packaged nicely in a single directory that I could upload to my web server. This worked for a while, but still, I wanted more. I wanted to display more of a photo's meta data (exposure information, date taken, camera used, etc.)

I never got into the Flash photo galleries I see on so many photography sites nowadays. I found the navigation was always annoying, and I was disappointed to see people lock their photos in Flash so site visitors couldn't download them. That's like keeping books locked in libraries and only letting people read them there. People should be able to save photographs to their own computers and use them as desktop backgrounds, or put them in screensavers. They should be able to enjoy good photography.

Then I tried Gallery 2. This was an all-in-one, database-based solution that required an install on one's web server. It was a pretty comprehensive solution at that: it allowed one to upload photos through several methods, to create web albums, to decide on the presentation of the photos in various sizes, etc. It even allowed site visitors to rate the photos, and they could choose to create their own accounts and share their photos on my site. Problem is, I found it hard to customize, it was complex and it had too many options. Plus, it ran slow. And, as I used it more, I found I really wanted to have a community of people that would readily see my photos and would interact with them. Well, I could have chosen to build that community myself, which again, would have required time and effort, which were and always are scarce, or look for another solution.

Article Author: Raoul Pop

I'm a web developer, blogger and photographer. I write daily about technology, photography, travel and other interesting things on my site. I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow my work.

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