Zooomr Mark III wish list
With yesterday’s announcement that Zooomr mark III will arrive in March, it got me thinking about the things I’d like to see either addressed or added.
I’m not going to do any ass-kissing here, except to say that I’m already happy with Zooomr and I’m very grateful (still) for my free pro account. I just figure the time to try and influence any thinking at Zooomr is now, before they get too big and stop listening to their users. I’m not sure anyone at Flickr would bother with this kind of feedback these days (though I’d like to be proven wrong), but I reckon the Zooomr team are still very eager to please the users. So here’s some straight-up constructive criticism that will hopefully reach the Zooomr team.
Zooomr needs to give users the ability to sort their photos by date taken. If that was the only thing added to mark 3, I’d be happy. The rest of this post would be icing on the cake.
Smart sets are good as a broad brush for selecting the bulk of photos I want. However, I’d like a little more control. Once I’ve used the filters, I’d then like to add or remove individual photos. Currently, I do this by assigning some unique tag to the photos I want, and that works, but it pollutes the tag space. Flickr now has what it calls ‘machine tags’ which are hidden from normal use, but can be used for things like this, or by developers using the API.
While doing my slideshow plugin (plug, plug), I realised it would be good to be able to get more from the RSS feeds. First of all, the obvious omissions are smart sets and favourites, which have no feeds. My slideshow grabs the html from those pages and converts them with xsl, but html content is unreliable, since it can change at the whim of the developers. An RSS feed, on the other hand, just contains the data I need, and no more, and the format is standardized. I wouldn’t need multiple xsl files.
Another RSS feature request I’ve asked for (but not holding my breath for) is some kind of querying via the url, for example:
http://zoomr.com/rss-query?owner=DaveE&sortby=datetaken&page=1&perpage=8
or even:
http://zoomr.com/photos/DaveE/feed?sortby=datetaken&tag=pies&etc…
Basically, any query you can do with a smart set, plus a few extras. This could be a really powerful feature if enough thought was put into it. You can achieve this to some extent already with smart sets, but there’s no feed from a smart set yet. Making it a url query is more powerful, I’d say, and certainly more flexible. You could think of it as a mini api for beginners, or just for keeping simple plugins like mine simple.
Consistent RSS feed urls would be a nice bonus too. I like the way Wordpress does it - just add ‘feed’ on the end of pretty much any page url. Nice and simple.
Wow, you’re still here. You can stop reading now, I’m done. You can comment below if you like, but you’d be better off spending your time emailing the Zooomr (or Flickr) folk if you like any of these ideas.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Yup, I prodded and nagged them about sorting photos by date taken last year till they didn’t want to hear about it anymore.
Let’s see if it makes its way into MarkIII. The new Zooomr API is pretty much done, so let’s see what fun stuff you’ll come up with when Kris puts it out for public consumption.
February 8th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
I’ve got a few ideas up my sleeve for the API when I get my hands on it. I asked for a key a while back, but it must be hectic there at the moment. I’d rather wait for mk III now. My ideas will hopefully become obsolete.