Ok, so it looks like Zooomr is giving away free pro accounts for kicks (and publicity). Not one to turn down something free, Here is my Swirling Light photo presented as part of my showcase, but hosted on the Zooomr servers.

Now. I’ve been thinking about whether I should host the photo’s from the showcase on Zooomr or whether I should host them on my own Gallery website. Here’s the Pros and Cons of using Zooomr as far as I can tell so far.

Pros

• Photo’s will be discoverable by a much larger audience of people. I’m not one to turn down recognition, and I’d love more people seeing my work.
• I don’t have to worry about looking after gallery software on my website. Not that it takes a lot of effort as it is.
• Nice UI. Looking forward to Zooomr 2.0 to see what new stuff it brings to the table.

Cons

• I was planning on showing full size original images in my showcase. Zoomr does not support this.

• Zooomr seems to create a bunch of intermediate sizes for viewing, but these sizes are not normal expected sizes, and as far as I can tell, not customizable. I’d love to be able to have common desktop resolutions so people can use the photos as desktop backgrounds.

• Can’t seem to alter the titles of images. The title is inherited from the filename of the image. I want to be able to keep the filenames as generated by the camera, but be able to title the image differently. [Update: Ok I figured how to do this. you need to click on the title to edit it, unfortunately there is no indication that you can click on the title to edit it. Not really very user friendly, but it works.]

I can’t find any documentation on the site as to whether the cons are addressed by having a pro account (ie original size support), or whether they will be added with Zooomr 2.0. I’m willing to try it out for a while. I wonder how easy it would be to bulk upload all my old photo’s into it.