I’ve tried to be patient with Zooomr.  Promises of a return to excellent services with the 2008 launch seem to have been empty.

Since Kris and crew announced the migration and upgrade to be complete, I’ve continued having nothing but problems.

Photos come and go.

My entire account vanished for several days.

All photos disappeared, followed by a rolling blackout of images.

The site is intermittently available (even now it returns either “500 – internal server error” or “502 – bad gateway” messages, and all photos are offline).

I have about 1,700 pictures hosted by Zooomr, all of them linked and/or displayed from this blog or xenogere unseen.  Migrating all of them—including having to edit each and every post—is a daunting challenge at best, and a black hole that will suck up every bit of free time I have in order to get it done.

But what other choice do I have?

Zooomr is useless if it can’t provide the one service it claims to offer: image hosting.  Since the Mark III debacle last year, it has failed utterly and miserably, and the migration to Japan along with the 2008 upgrade seem to have further crippled the service, making it essentially one large empty promise that delivers nothing but frustration.

I can continue hoping Kris somehow gets Zooomr back on track.  Meanwhile, I’m left with a very ugly choice: Do I begin migrating photos or do I continue waiting in hopes they can get their act together (all the while letting an incapable service randomly disable thousands of images across thousands of posts)?

Moving to Flick would be arduous at best.  It can be done though.

Still, I’ve never liked Yahoo!, and I like Microsoft even less.  If they’re able to acquire the former, Flickr becomes yet another Micro$haft mess that feeds the monster.  As someone who has vowed never to purchase MS products again, a migration could force me to migrate yet again at a later date—and to what?

Ugh.  The entire situation seems dire and hopeless.

I just wish Kris Tate and his Japanese Zooomr crew would focus on making the service what it’s supposed to be, making it stable, making it work, and stop focusing on bombastic assurances that are as insubstantial as their service has been for quite some time.