For the last year or so I've operated a photo gallery on the webserver here in my kitchen for the purpose of sharing my particularly low-quality photos with friends and family. However, that setup isn't ideal, since my internet connection is quite slow. Because of this, I've been looking at two web-based photo sharing sites.
I signed up with Zooomr and Picasaweb. I decided against opening a Flickr account as it seems to be quite similar to Zooomr but with fewer features.
It didn't take me long to realise that Zooomr and Picasaweb, whilst both nominally "photo sharing" websites, are actually very different in their approach and audience.
Zooomr is very "Web 2.0", for the want of a better way of putting it. The emphasis is on sharing your photos with the public and with tagging your photos with keywords and "geotags" in order to categorise them.
The geotagging function works in conjunction with Google Maps and allows you to pinpoint the location in which the photos were taken. You can then look for other photos that were taken nearby, which is very impressive.
Zooomr does not allow the creation of static albums but instead uses "smart sets", which work rather like a smart playlist in iTunes. You tell it to create a set based on e.g. the photo owner, date taken, keywords, etc. Whilst this is obviously very powerful, it also means that you need to be very careful to ensure that any photos you want to appear in a pseudo-album must have a common denominator, usually the date taken or a keyword.
Whilst this is all very promising, provided you have photos you actively want to share with the world, there are some serious problems with Zooomr - the interface ergonomics and documentation (or the lack thereof).
The lack of help and documentation for Zooomr is bordering on comical. I'd like to think that I am reasonably proficient at using the World Wide Web and there are still parts of the Zooomr site that don't make sense. For example, when you start to "geotag" your photos there are red, green and blue coloured dots in the top right hand corner of the Google Map. Nowhere on the site is the function of these dots explained. I discovered, from a blog entry by the site developer from last year, that turning these dots on and off filters the photos you can see, with green dotted photos being your own, blue being those in your "social circle" and red being for other users. The presence of the dots is irrelevant when creating your own geotags.
Of course, a lot of this cluelessness would not exist in the first place if the site was in any way intuitive. Finding your way around the website to the pages and features you want is very hard work. The site will need to be made much more intuitive in layout and menu structure if the general public is to ever accept it.
Oh and it's dead slow at times - possibly a victim of its own success?
In summary, Zooomr has some innovative features and is very good at getting your photos seen by a wide audience - but it is currently being crippled by poor site layout and non-existant help. If these can be improved with time, Zooomr could become a huge success.
You can see my Zooomr photos here. I intend to keep my account to use in the unlikely event that I produce any photos in the future that are of artistic merit 
Picasaweb is a totally different animal. This Google offering is much more focussed towards providing an easy-to-use experience. The site is integrated into the Picasa photo organisation application and makes the uploading of photos from your computer to the web very easy indeed.
Picasaweb operates on a traditional album basis. It has a very simple user interface, from which you can view photos in individual albums and download the originals at full size. If you have Picasa installed you can download a whole album to your computer with a single click, which is very useful.
Unlike Zooomr, your Picasaweb public gallery is very much "fenced off" and as such any photos published there are extremely unlikely to be seen by the general public unless you specifically publicise the address or send people email invites, as you can do easily.
The site is fast and a free account gives you 250Mb of free storage, with paid upgrades available.
As an alternative to a self-hosted Coppermine photo gallery or similar, Picasaweb is an extremely worthy web-based contender and I intend to use it as such in the future. The integration with the Picasa desktop application makes photo sharing with family and friends so simple.
You can see my Picasaweb public photo gallery here.
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