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

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

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 Zenfolio.com

And here’s a list of links to the other services mentioned, in no particular order.

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.