A few days back, I came across an ad on Google Adsense, which read Zoom.in, a new images and photo sharing service, which is currently open to users in India and the US. Zoom.in started it’s service in Jan 2007. So, what’s new with this one when we already have the bosses -Flickr, Photbucket, Picassa, et al. Unlike Flickr, Zoom.in offers unlimited photo storage. That is, you just need to keep on uploading without caring about your online space getting full(more like the Flickr pro account which comes at $24.95 a year).What else? Zoom.in offers 15 free prints for every new account signed in. Of course, haven’t tried creating multiple accounts to trick them.Now to the crux of the matter, is it real Good? Yes and No. Yes, because it’s all for free and unlimited upload. The interface is cool and soothing with the entire Ajax powered Web 2.0 feel.Many features like online editing (as in rotating pictures etc) are available, and pictures can be uploaded to separate albums for faster viewing, and are not featured on a single photostream as in Flickr. Tags and Places are good features included to give Photos a customised touch. Photo Albums can be downloaded to a single Zip file. And yeah, you can import your images from Flickr and Picasa as well.
Now for the bad part. It only supports JPEG. For an image sharing sharing service, that’s a real thumbs down. I upload images, primarily for my blogs, and even the image I have on this post is not hosted on my blog, but is linked from Flickr. Why I didn’t use Zoom.in you say? Because it’s a PNG. Zoom.in apparently has a strong focus on online privacy which is good actually, but can be annoying too. By default, all your photos are set to private and even your albums are. And even if you set your albums to public, you need to set your phoyos to public individually, so as to make them viewable online. The point here is, does the number of images to be set to private exceed that of the ones we want to keep public. It’s after all photo-SHARING, right? And then the worst part, the down time is absolutely sickening. My uploaded images didn’t show for almost a whole day, and my blog had a huge blank space in the post area.
Future prospects: Zoom.in seems to be venturing into Photo Printing services, Accessories like Calenders etc. But to me, they need to improve a lot if they are to carve their niche in a market already ruled by the pioneers. My verdict: I have re-loaded my images on Flickr.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sujoy- I recently came across zoomin and gave it a shot too. I think their best feature right now is the ability to tag photos as you upload them- while the rest of the batch is still uploading! That was a big time saver for me- especially when uploading a large batch. Ouch for you though- re-uploading them all to Flickr? Time consuming! I would love to see more sites create an importer feature like http://www.pixamo.com has. You can “import” your photos from 10 or so other photo sites, tags and all! I use it to store all my photos in one place. I used to have them disbursed among many sites and it became cumbersome.
@ Zach,
The only problem as I suggested in the post, is the
no support for PNG, and of course the irritating downtime. Thank God for me that I hadn’t uploaded much on Zoom. I guess, the service will only get better with time, as and when the uploaders and the members grow, and they take good care of capacity issues. And well, may be in a later version they could include PNG as well. I’d be more than happy to return to Zoom.in then. Have to try out pixamo.
Thanks Zach for the comment.