Zenfolio Online Photo Sharing Review

Zen­fo­lio is an online photo shar­ing ser­vice sim­i­lar to Flickr, Smug­mug, Fotki, Expo­sure Man­ager, and many others. What dis­tin­guishes it is the ele­gance of its inter­face, easy of use, and superb cus­tomer ser­vice. I’ve been using it for almost a year and thought it would be useful to share my expe­ri­ence with others. This is not intended to be an exhaus­tive review, nor a com­par­i­son with other ser­vices. It’s rather a col­lec­tion of obser­va­tions from one user point of view.

Photo hosts pro­vide a ser­vice that falls in the gen­eral cat­e­gory of “photo shar­ing,” the pub­lish­ing or trans­fer of dig­i­tal photos (and/or videos) online for dis­play, down­load­ing, print­ing, etc.

In addi­tion to the social aspects of making photos avail­able online, many people use those ser­vices for con­ve­nient and pro­fes­sional print­ing and ship­ping to their con­tacts, as a sec­ondary backup to their image files, as an online pres­ence in the form of a photo blog, and even as a pro­fes­sional online store front pro­vid­ing ser­vices for cus­tomers all over the world.

They all have in common some basic usage steps: upload the files, set up the access priv­i­leges, and cus­tomize the public inter­face. What makes them dif­fer­ent is how well they imple­ment those steps.

First, let’s talk about the account plans avail­able and what you get for your money in each one. As of this writ­ing, Zen­fo­lio comes in three fla­vors: Basic, Unlim­ited, and Pre­mium. All the plans allow upload­ing files in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF for­mats. The Basic gives 1 GB of stor­age space for the first year of sub­scrip­tion and this max­i­mum is increased by 1 GB for each addi­tional year the cus­tomer stays with he ser­vice. The Unlim­ited and Pre­mium plans don’t have any limits in stor­age. The max­i­mum size for each file upload is 12 MB for Basic and Unlim­ited plans, and 24 MB for the Pre­mium plan (a normal user should not need more than 12 MB).

All the accounts allow the down­load of the orig­i­nal files by the user, making it an alter­na­tive backup at least for pho­tog­ra­phers who don’t shoot RAW The orig­i­nals can also be down­loaded by vis­i­tors unless the owner turns that option off, which is a good idea for extra pro­tec­tion (the print­ing ser­vices always use the orig­i­nal for max­i­mum quality).

As an aside, I couldn’t find any photo hosts allow­ing the stor­age of RAW and I wouldn’t rec­om­mend using any host as a pri­mary backup, even for JPEG shoot­ers. No host is a replace­ment for a good backup plan. A fre­quently asked ques­tion in pho­tog­ra­phy forums is “What hap­pens if they go out of busi­ness?”. The answer is “noth­ing,” as long as you have copies of your files as you should. You upload them some­where else and life goes on. That being said, all the major ser­vices pro­vide safety that typ­i­cally sur­passes what an aver­age person has. For peace of mind, it’s a good idea to email cus­tomer sup­port and ask them what exactly they do to pro­tect your files. A quote from Zenfolio:

Sev­eral copies of your uploaded files are kept at our redun­dant industrial-​grade stor­age facility.

I would ask for more details, if that wor­ries you.

Upload­ing files to the ser­vice is easy. While logged to your site, you choose “Upload Photos” from the con­trol panel. It will ask if you want to create a new gallery or to add photos to an exist­ing one. After making a choice, you are offered an option between a Java applet allow­ing for batch uploads with icon pre­views and real-​time progress updates, or a single-​file HTML uploader. Those options are fully inte­grated in the Zen­fo­lio site and work easier that could be described. They are not the only ways to upload images how­ever. The ser­vice also offers a set of free tools that inte­grate with soft­ware you might already have. There are plu­g­ins for iPhoto, Apple’s Aper­ture, Adobe Light­room, etc. I nor­mally use the Aper­ture plugin, keep­ing me from open­ing the web browser and making the upload of files just a matter of select­ing a menu inside Aperture.

The retrieval of the uploaded images is equally simple. From the “Free Tools” page, down­load a Zen­fo­lio down­loader appli­ca­tion and with it you can move your entire col­lec­tion back to your disk. The appli­ca­tion is avail­able for both Win­dows and Mac OS. In this same “Free Tools” sec­tion on their site you can find other useful items, e.g., a Word­Press plug-​in to dis­play your photo gal­leries on your blog (sim­i­lar to the ubiq­ui­tous Flickr patches that plague the web). You can see the Zen­fo­lio plug-​in at work in the home page of this blog. Another util­ity allows for migra­tion from other host ser­vices. I haven’t used it myself, but accord­ing to the description:

If you are switch­ing to Zen­fo­lio from another ser­vice, take a look at this handy tool which can help you save time. Migratr is a photo migra­tion util­ity which allows you to move your photos, along with all their asso­ci­ated meta­data (tags, titles, descrip­tions, and albums), between pop­u­lar photo shar­ing services.

More tools keep being added as more authors vol­un­teer to write them, so check the “Free Tools” page occasionally.

Back to the con­trol panel, this is where you per­form all the oper­a­tions on files and get infor­ma­tion on your account. It’s so Web 2.0 and sexy, one almost wants to kiss it. It’s divided in 3 columns, the left one is the orga­nizer, the middle one shows your gal­leries, the right one pro­vides infor­ma­tion on the account and galleries.

Zen­fo­lio orga­nizes pic­tures in gal­leries, col­lec­tions, and groups. A gallery is where uploaded pic­tures go. A col­lec­tion is a con­tainer for pic­tures by you or other users. A group can hold any com­bi­na­tion of gal­leries, col­lec­tions, and even other groups. The orga­nizer pane is where you con­trol all these options, allow­ing for the cre­ation, dele­tion, renam­ing of gal­leries, col­lec­tions, and groups, as well as moving them any­where you want.

The middle pane offers con­trols for upload­ing photos, edit­ing your public pro­file, send emails invit­ing friends to visit your gal­leries (the emails are cus­tomized to match your site appear­ance!), and fine-​grained con­trol over the way your images are grouped.

The right pane shows an even finer detail on your account and the par­tic­u­lar gallery you are work­ing on. Here you can see the account status, how much space is used, total number of pic­tures, how many vis­i­tors you had, your most pop­u­lar photos, and too much more list.

I’ll just com­ment on one par­tic­u­lar fea­ture that makes Zen­fo­lio spe­cial. The user has full con­trol on who can see the pic­tures, not just the gal­leries, but each indi­vid­ual pic­ture. The access can be granted by pass­word, by account, made com­pletely pri­vate, or public. Of course, the per­mis­sions can be set for full gal­leries too, and the pic­tures inside will inherit them if you choose so. There’s also a full tag­ging system that makes search­ing for pic­tures and gal­leries by you and others easy (if other users allow their pic­tures to be on public searches). Other fea­tures include title, cap­tions, copy­rights, full EXIF data, links, and much more.

Zen­fo­lio cur­rently offers a choice of two labs for print­ing, EZ Prints and Mpix. The first one ships world­wide. With a Pre­mium account the user can set his/her own prices and make a profit over what the lab charges, create pro­mo­tional coupons, have dif­fer­ent profit mar­gins for each image or gallery, and more. This is useful for pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers using Zen­fo­lio as an online store. Pre­mium users can also have images auto­mat­i­cally water­marked for extra pro­tec­tion, and can remove the Zen­fo­lio logo from their public pages (a small, dis­crete link to Zen­fo­lio will still remain in the lower right of the pages).

Update - May 17, 2008: Start­ing May 16, Zen­fo­lio no longer offers EZ Prints order­ing. That leaves most inter­na­tional cus­tomers with­out an option for direct print­ing and ship­ping. They are look­ing for a Euro­pean lab capa­ble of han­dling over­seas orders as a replace­ment to EZ Prints. (It would have made more sense to have an alter­na­tive in place before dis­con­tin­u­ing the only order­ing option for cus­tomers not in the US.)

That leaves the public dis­play, the eas­i­est way to see how it works is simply by point­ing your browser to a site hosted in Zen­fo­lio. If you are a cus­tomer and logged on to your account, in addi­tion to what the public sees, you will get a menu allow­ing for site cus­tomiza­tion, changes in the public pro­file, and return to account man­age­ment. The cus­tomiza­tion option offers a choice of three lay­outs and 15 themes, for a total of 45 basic options. This can be fine-​tuned with a plethora of con­trols lim­it­ing what you want on your pages. The themes are amaz­ingly taste­ful. No other ser­vice has been able to match the looks and sim­plic­ity of Zen­fo­lio. One could argue that other sites allow for greater flex­i­bil­ity using HTML tem­plates, but it would take con­sid­er­able effort to get any­thing that looks like Zen­fo­lio and you wouldn’t be able to change it with a menu choice in a matter of seconds.

This gives a cur­sory idea about what Zen­fo­lio offers. It would take too long to dis­cuss the other fea­tures in detail, so I’ll just point out a few things that might be of interest:

- Zen­fo­lio offers a 14-day free trial, this is the best way to see if you like it.

- The basic account costs US$25, the advanced US$ 40, the pre­mium US$100 per year, there’s also a free account I haven’t men­tioned. The free one allows the cre­at­ing of col­lec­tion of pic­tures but no uploads, it can be handy if you have friends who want to access pri­vate pic­tures with­out a pass­word and don’t have a sub­scrip­tion. They can open a free account and you just add their screen names to the list of allowed viewers.

- Zen­fo­lio doesn’t yet allow com­ments in pic­tures, this might be seen as a bless­ing or a curse. I per­son­ally don’t care for com­ments as I was not look­ing for a “social” site, but for people who care for them, here is a quote from Zenfolio:

Vis­i­tors will be able to leave com­ments for gal­leries, col­lec­tions, and pho­tographs. Pho­tog­ra­phers will have full con­trol over allow­ing or not allow­ing comments.

I must point out that they have been saying that for a while, so it’s prob­a­bly wise to email them and ask when, if that fea­ture is impor­tant to you.

- They offer a refer­ral pro­gram. Again, this can be good or bad. I hate seeing forums with people offer­ing their dis­count codes. It works by giving a US$ 5 dis­count to a new sub­scriber if he has a “coupon code.” Any user of the ser­vice can issue coupon codes and he/she gets a US$ 5 credit when anyone signs up using the code. The credit cannot be redeemed for cash and it’s used for future sub­scrip­tions or ser­vices. If anyone wants to get the $5.00 dis­count here is my Refer­ral Code: 4AM-Z13-VNX (or just search the web for one, makes little dif­fer­ence to me).

- Although the pre­mium sub­scrip­tion can be used to sell prints, that doesn’t include sell­ing down­loads (check out Expo­sure Man­ager for instance, if that’s a require­ment). I must point out that although they don’t have it imple­mented in the system, noth­ing pre­vents a pro­fes­sional to sell any­thing, even dig­i­tal down­loads. Zen­fo­lio has a nice built-​in self-​fulfillment in place and one can sell any­thing as long as it’s per­son­ally han­dled. You could sell photo-​tattooed live ele­phants for all they care as long as you take care of ship­ping. So, for dig­i­tal down­loads, one could use Zen­fo­lio for order place­ment and set up an FTP site for the clients to access the downloads.

- If you use Zen­fo­lio as a pro­fes­sional store to sell your work, they charge 12% over your profit for han­dling the sales. That’s usu­ally below other sim­i­lar ser­vices last time I checked. They charge 6% for self-​fulfilled orders. They don’t charge any­thing extra if you or your friends are just order­ing reg­u­lar prints from the lab, just the normal lab prices.

- The pre­mium ser­vice will permit review­ing and approv­ing orders before accept­ing them. This is labeled as “coming soon,” what­ever that means. (Reminds me of the anec­do­tal con­ver­sa­tion between a Spaniard and an Irish­man with the Spaniard explain­ing that in Spain every­thing is due “ma?ana,” for­ever post­pon­ing it until tomor­row. He asks the Irish­man if they do the same in his coun­try and gets the reply “in Ire­land we don’t have that degree of urgency.”)

Update - Feb 19, 2008 (click to expand/collapse)

They worked fast on this one! Just received this email from Zenfolio: Many Zen­fo­lio Pre­mium sub­scribers have been asking about this impor­tant fea­ture: you now have an option to approve orders placed for your photos before they are sent for ful­fill­ment to a Zen­fo­lio part­ner lab. That means that you can review and make changes to orders before they are printed. Here is how it works: When a new order is received, it is placed on hold, and you imme­di­ately receive an e-mail noti­fi­ca­tion. You can then login to your account and review the order. While you are review­ing the order, you can make changes to Crop­ping. You can review the orig­i­nal customer-​selected crop­ping and make changes to it, if needed. You can also replace the orig­i­nal photo files used in the order. This is par­tic­u­larly useful if you want to apply addi­tional image pro­cess­ing but you only want to do that to the photos that are ordered, to save time. Or you may choose to ini­tially upload low res­o­lu­tion files, and once an order is placed, upload high res­o­lu­tion files cropped for spe­cific print sizes. When you are fin­ished making changes, click Approve, and the order will be sub­mit­ted for ful­fill­ment. To select the option to have your orders approved first, open a price list from the SELL­ING > Price List page, and make the choice at the top. Don’t forget to Save. This is also where you can edit the mes­sage dis­played to your cus­tomers about the poten­tial ful­fill­ment delay.

- Zen­fo­lio doesn’t allow for upload­ing of video clips, if you need that Smug­mug and Apple’s dotMac are your best options, then again YouTube is your friend and free.

- For the unlim­ited and pre­mium sub­scrip­tions, Zen­fo­lio post this notice:

Coming soon is the abil­ity to create your own visual Theme designs. We feel strongly that pho­tog­ra­phers do not need to become pro­gram­mers to achieve custom look for their pages, and we are work­ing on devel­op­ing simple visual tools where no CSS or HTML coding knowl­edge will be needed.

It sounds inter­est­ing, if your degree of urgency agrees with theirs (the ital­ics are mine).

- For pre­mium cus­tomers using them as a store, they offer a sales report. The ref­er­ences to that I’ve seen in the forums seem to be very positive.

- There’s now avail­able a gift sub­scrip­tion. When you buy it for some­one, you get a US$ 10 credit to your account, it’s like some­one else using your coupon but you get their share and yours.

Here is an exam­ple of how link­ing from their server works (click to expand/collapse)

A link to a gallery page A link to a photo page “A small thumb­nail, linked to a small image.” “A medium thumb­nail, linked to an image.” “A larger thumb­nail, linked to an larger image.”

Before I started using Zen­fo­lio, I had used Fotki for a year. They had a pro­mo­tion for their pre­mium accounts for just US$ 30 per year and an array of fea­tures hard to match. Well, the pro­mo­tion is still there: “Fotki’s CUR­RENT SPE­CIAL OFFER for Pre­mium mem­ber­ship makes it pos­si­ble to buy it for US $30 a YEAR”. (Hurry up! It might expire before the cen­tury is over!) To their credit they had the most flex­i­ble uploads that any ser­vice offered, includ­ing FTP. They also offer inex­pen­sive prints. The rest is quite poor. The sites look awful, the custom brand­ing is vir­tu­ally unsup­ported and when one gets it to work, there’s always an ugly frame that can’t be removed. Cus­tomer sup­port is prac­ti­cally non-​existent. They are trying to com­pete with Flickr making their ser­vice a “social site” and cre­at­ing irrel­e­vant photo com­pe­ti­tions instead of improv­ing the photo side of their offering.

I also have an account with Flickr (who doesn’t). Flickr is not bad in what it does, but their empha­sis is not photos, but on using photos to create a com­mu­nity. It’s just not in the same class as ded­i­cated photo hosts and it shows in the appear­ance of their site (and the users who pop­u­late it).

The one ser­vice that pos­si­bly approaches Zen­fo­lio in fea­tures is Smug­mug. They too have a spec­tac­u­lar cus­tomer ser­vice and have a few fea­tures Zen­fo­lio doesn’t yet, depend­ing on the account you have. I just feel Zen­fo­lio offers all the impor­tant fea­tures I want, looks better, is faster load­ing, and has no match in the beauty of its inter­face (both on the cus­tomer side and on the guest side). One thing Smug­mug has that Zen­fo­lio doesn’t is a user forum. You don’t need to have an account with Smug­mug to use their forums and that high­lights the qual­ity of their ser­vice. If not for Zen­fo­lio, I would be with them.

Update - Mar 12, 2008: Zen­fo­lio has just intro­duced a user forum and there’s also a new com­pany blog.

I believe that covers the basics. In the many months I’ve had an account with them I’ve never had a prob­lem, slow­downs, or down­time, or any other prob­lem in fact. The few instances I had to con­tact them to ask a ques­tion they replied within min­utes and were very help­ful. I’m not asso­ci­ated with them in any way, just a happy cus­tomer. They even con­tacted me after a few months when the Mac down­loader was avail­able for testing.

Here is the main page for Zen​fo​lio.com

And here’s a list of links to the other ser­vices men­tioned, in no par­tic­u­lar order. (click to expand/collapse)

Fotki.com Smug­mug Dig­i­tal Grin (Smug­mug forums) Expo­sure Manager Flickr.com Apple’s dotMac

A few things to try while test­ing it: resize your browser window and see the image and icon size adjust in real-​time, start the slide show and check it’s con­trols, double click on an image page and nav­i­gate the gallery using the arrow keys, use the “send link” fea­ture to embed links to an image some­where else, check the over­lays with the EXIF data. You can try those on my site, “Phase­Light Gal­leries” or just browse around and find some other gal­leries while there. (If you decide to sign up, just google for a coupon or use the coupon 4AM-Z13-VNX I pro­vided in the text above).

Let me know of any omis­sions or errors.

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