Zoto Photo Sharing – my preliminary verdict

Posted by @ 2:49 pm on Thursday 2nd August, 2007.
Categories: Photo hosting
I'm halfway through the 2-week free trial and I have to say that I'm really impressed with Zoto Photo Sharing. It does just about everything that I want it to do, and a lot more besides. I've had accounts with Flickr, Zooomr, Photobox and some others, but they don't match Zoto when it comes to flexibility. Features that I'm particularly impressed with are:
  • Options for setting the order of pics (by date/time taken, date/time uploaded, title, an exif parameter etc.);
  • Options for setting the number and size of thumbnails for each album;
  • The facility to group pics into multiple albums, and to group albums into multiple sets;
  • Options for setting display colours and template colours (background, text, link, link hover, border etc.), these can be set independently for each album;
  • The bulk uploader;
  • The options for setting permissions;
  • Bulk editing for things like dates, tags, text, privacy, moving pics between albums etc.;
  • The overall ease of use.
 

  Bits that I don't like? Well, there's not much, really:
  • Page loads/refreshes seem a bit slow to me, but that may be due to the steam-powered processor that rattles about in my laptop pretending to crunch those 1s and 0s;
  • The user homepage is still a bit buggy, but it's just minor stuff, nothing to worry about.
But by far the best bit (IMO) is the Support. There's a Zoto forum, where there is a visible proactive approach to dealing with issues and bugs, where you can see that bug tickets have been raised, where you can see that the Zoto staff and community are willing to engage in a dialogue to get things sorted. So, to sum up, it's the best photo hosting/sharing package that I've used so far. So good that I've just paid a paltry $29.95 for a two-year subscription which doesn't kick in until the 2-week trial period has elapsed. Have a look and consider trying it out for a fortnight for free - what have you got to lose?

2 Responses to “Zoto Photo Sharing – my preliminary verdict”

  1. Thanks for the review dude! We've got a few cool things up our sleeve for the next quarter, including flash powered galleries (exportable), advanced search/limiting of tag clouds, limits for downloads (protect those originals), more blog support (WP included), and a rework of the framework to speed things up (poor IE6 doesn't like our site much).

    We've been a bit slow to respond to some of the feature requests due to a deal we are doing with the NBA, but we try to keep all requests in mind when we do our planning. All features that we are developing for our enterprise product will eventually make it to Zoto.com, so the users get features we might not otherwise be able to deploy.

    If you have a particular feature in mind don't hesitate to email me - I'll see that it makes the wiki for implementation.

    Cheers!

  2. BG! says:

    Hi Kord

    LOL - it's been a long, long time since I've been called a dude! Or maybe it was a typo - did you mean "dud"?

    I might email you with some feature ideas, but I'm mindful of the fact that my last email to you is still unanswered :-0

    Stef

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