Zooomr - Without a doubt the worst user experience ever

Recently as in the last few weeks I grew interested enough in Zooomr to give them a legitimate chance at taking over from Flickr. They had brought out lots of new features and it sounded like they were going to continue to do some interesting things still. So I thought, as much work as it is to switch I will consider it.

This post is my brief summary of events from that decision to now.

Week 1
I sniffed around the site and decided to take the plunge. So I went to sign up and try out this OpenID based system of theirs, which I thought was cool (in theory). I signed up put the required demo picture I have and uploaded. Yup no problems so far.

Week 2

Okay I have been dragging my heels and will finally get around to putting some photo’s up and taking advantage of these ‘great’ features such as GeoTagging, Zooomrtations (presentations in Zooomr), and Trackback. I tried signing in and it just kept not working. I checked my email for a confirmation and remember that because of OpenID I hadn’t received one. Okay no big deal its probably something I did anyway. So I signed up again

Uploading was a painful experience (think watching paint dry) because you had to do one at a time and there was no bulk upload features in the web interface and/or desktop software for bulk uploading. Fine, its in beta so I took that as teething pains, accepted it and moved on.

Week 3
Discovered the blogger promo that gives us 2.5GB if you post about Zooomr. Cool, so I did and my account was promptly upgraded. Awesome, a feature that worked seemlessly and quickly. Although I would like to remind you that its damn near impossible to upload 2.5GB worth of pictures unless you pretty much spend 2hrs a day for 30days doing just that or have a 100 MegaPixel camera. So I felt it was more of situation where it was the ‘thought that counted’.

Later that week, I went to log in over the weekend (two days ago actually) and found I couldn’t. Nope it kept giving me an error. Coincidentally the same error when i abandoned my last account e.g. Week 1, except that now I had invested real time and wasn’t very happy. So here I am, logged in accidentally and for no understandable reason to my basic (non-upgraded) account from Week 1 with just my demo picture.