I do have a bone to pick with them. They are still not caching images properly! Run any Zooomr hosted image through the Cacheability Engine to test it and you’ll get a report like the following:

http://static.zooomr.com/images/2403982_586b90d879.jpg
Expires 1 day from now (Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:04:14 GMT)
Cache-Control max-age=86400
Last-Modified 2 hr ago (Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:04:14 GMT) validation returned same object
ETag -
Content-Length 65.4K (66953)
Server lighttpd/1.4.15

It makes no sense for the image to be sent again. Your browser should be allowed to cache the image. Besides the caching issue, the image is still slow to load and it’s only 67k.

Way back in December I asked, Is Zooomr slow for you too? and was heartened when Kristopher Tate said he was working on a fix. Hopefully the fix is part of an as-yet-unreleased part of Mark III. Without it, using Zooomr for image hosting is really not recommended. Please fix the caching. I really want to like Zooomr!

Now, if only Robert would evangelize fixing their image hosting I’d be a happy camper!

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From: FlickrHQ
Subject: Update for Old Skool members

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

It seems that everyone is up in arms about recent changes at Flickr:

• Flickr and Yahoo! accounts must be merged into a Yahoo! login. If you have multiple Flickr account then you’re logging in and out of Flickr all the time, now do it with Yahoo! Surely you do most of your Flickr work in one account anyway, so why not make that the one your main Yahoo! account?
• Tags and Contacts are going to be limited. I see that this would affect a tiny minority of the userbase on Flickr, unfortunately for Flickr it’s likely to be the most active (and vocal?) membership. I also feel for Thomas with his Where I’ve Been Lately image because a lot of those tags will be removed but does anyone else have more than 75 legitimate tags on a photo? I’m sure I only have 15 at most on mine. Limiting contacts will hurt the most prolific users of the site such as Thomas Hawk, but others are probably just spamming the system.

Yes, the changes to tags and contacts will hurt a tiny minority but for almost everyone on the site it won’t make any difference. Yes, the change to using Yahoo! IDs will mean Yahoo knows about your photos, but if they know about your email and stock portfolio already what are you worried about? They’ve got more than enough demograpic data to go on to market to you!

Unfortunately I can’t recommend Zooomr either because their service is so slow – images take an age to download, and when they do download, they aren’t cached by the browser. It’s really frustrating using Zooomr.com when it’s so slow as it has so much potential and the people behind it are so smart and full of ideas! Fix the slow connection, caching and add a “blog by email” feature and I’d be over to Zooomr faster than you can say “Flickr sucks!”

There are plenty of pissed off Flickr users, but I’m not one of them. Have a nice day!

Update: Treasa is as upset as I am! Oh Lordy!

Update 2: Richard isnt worried either. Definitely a storm in a teacup.

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1. It’s 241k, but it downloads on my fast shiny broadband connection like it’s ten times bigger. Brings me back to the good old days of dialup and a modem connection. Remember how that was? Oh, there’s the connection made, first bit of the image, oh oh, a small bit more, half way there, yawn, zzzzzz. I’ve fallen asleep.
2. It’s not cachable. Every time you reload that page the whole image has to download again. Go check out what the cacheability engine thinks.
   

   *

   http://static.zooomr.com/images/265853_8ec115b6db.jpg

   Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:30 GMT
   Expires -
   Cache-Control -
   Last-Modified -
   ETag -
   Content-Length 241.9K (247754)
   Server lighttpd/1.4.13

   This object will be considered stale, because it doesn’t have any freshness information assigned. It doesn’t have a validator present.

   Compare that with the image from my previous post:

   *

   http://static.flickr.com/131/322052492_c728e66f9e_o.jpg

   Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:24:50 GMT
   Expires -
   Cache-Control -
   Last-Modified 2 min 28 sec ago (Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:22 GMT) validated
   ETag -
   Content-Length 127.2K (130220)
   Server Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

   This object doesn’t have any explicit freshness information set, so a cache may use Last-Modified to determine how fresh it is with an adaptive TTL (at this time, it could be, depending on the adaptive percent used, considered fresh for: 29 sec (20%), 1 min 14 sec (50%), 2 min 28 sec (100%)). It can be validated with Last-Modified. The clock on this Web server appears to be set incorrectly; this can cause problems when calculating freshness.

   Despite the problems reported above the image is cached by my browser and even with a force reload, it loads quicky.

I’m not sure how to fix the first problem except by adding a faster pipe to the servers hosting the data or upgrading the hosting hardware, but the second problem is very easy to fix using eTags and better headers. There are numerous tutorials and even code examples out there. Please, please, please look into it and make your images more cacheable! Your European neighbours will really appreciate it!

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