VentureBeat has a post about the photosharing site Zooomr, run by Kris Tate. They recently met with Kris, and talk about some more features on the way, including an in-site messaging system, Zmail:

Zmail, an internal messaging system for the site, will let users notify their friends or groups of the photos they have taken — letting users avoid having to jump to an email client like most photo sites require. Zmail may not be a remarkable invention by itself, but is the latest in a series of features that makes Zooomr stand out for the sheer amount it has been able to do over the past year, on the backs of one and a half people.

I very much agree with the line VentureBeat takes. Peter and I have both been using Zooomr since they gave free Pro accounts away to bloggers a little while ago. I have only recently started properly uploading photos, with the launch of the bulk uploader jUploadr, and really like it. On many fronts, Zooomr offers a significantly better feature set than Flickr, and it is continuing to innovate at a fast pace.

There are two downsides to Zooomr at the moment. The first is that it does not yet have the critical number of active users that Flickr has to create a truly active and rewarding community. However, as they continue to recieve positive press user numbers will only increase solving this problem. The second issue is one that I have raised before. It is the time that it takes to enter metadata. Many of Zooomr’s features, such as Geotagging, require one to enter extra information about a photo. When coming back from holiday, I want to enjoy the photos that I have taken, rather than spend hours meticulously placing them on a Google Map, no matter what the rewards of doing this are later. It could just be that I am the exception rather than the rule, and that many people are happy to spend time entering metadata, but that has yet to be seen.

I wish my luck to Zooomr - they deserve success and are certainly going about the right way of achieving it. All they have to do now is find a way to appeal to users outside the Techcrunch subscribers. If they can do that, they will be on to a winner.

[watch out for updates on the Zooomr Blog]