With so many options for hosting your photographs on the web, how do you choose? There are free services like flickr and picasa. At the other extreme, you can pay mucho $$$ for custom design and monthly support, vital if you are a high end professional. I’ve chosen the middle ground with zenfolio. Let me tell you why, and point out a few similar, alternative services in the same price range.
Cape Spear Light
Why choose zenfolio? In my opinion, it gives the best combination of price, presentation and ease of use. Why spend any money at all for photo hosting, when I can get it elsewhere for free? The short answer – I want a classier presentation than (for example) the flickr style, and don’t want my photos surrounded by advertisements. What does it cost? The basic zenfolio membership is $25 per year. That gives you 1 GB of storage, plus another 1 GB for each year of membership. “Only a gigabyte?”, I hear you say. If you size you photos for the web, and use reasonable compression, a gigabyte can hold a couple of thousand pictures. You get all the other basic features you’d expect from a dedicated photo site, including a nicely thought out slideshow.
Moving up the food chain, for $40 per year you get some extra features including unlimited storage and the ability to use your own domain name (i.e. domain masking, not just redirection). The top tier membership is $100 per year, giving you the ability to price and sell photos and digital downloads online. You can fill these orders yourself or have them printed and shipped by Mpix (one of the best online print labs around). At this level, all zenfolio branding is removed from your site. Their premium grade of service is all many professional photographers will ever need.
Zenfolio gives you a moderate number of options for customizing your site. While there isn’t as much choice as with SmugMug or Exposure Manager, the pay-off is that it’s extremely easy to configure. No web design knowledge required – just point and click. They have a well thought out shopping cart manager, and lots of options for sales including metallic prints, frames, canvas and the usual miscellany such as magnets and coasters.
With all of these features, why would you not use zenfolio? There are two significant flaws with the service. The first is the limited number of design options for your home page. They are planning to upgrade this with features such as a home page slideshow. I have a home page elsewhere and use it as a gateway to my zenfolio site. This isn’t perfect, but serves as a work around for now.
The other big problem only applies if you live outside of the USA. Mpix is a great lab but for small orders, their charge for shipments to Canada is pretty outrageous ($16.45 to ship one 5″x7″ print!). If you live outside of the US and Canada, they won’t ship to you at all. To me, this is a real problem. The small orders (like a single 5″x7″ print) are precisely what I want an online store to handle. Zenfolio is working on a European printing and shipping option and, who knows, maybe it’ll be cheaper to ship across the Atlantic than across the Canada-US border. 🙁
Update July 6, 2009: Zenfolio has negotiated lower shipping rates to Canada from Mpix. Prints of size 5″x7″ or less, in quantities less than 50, can be shipped to Canadian addresses for $5.50. Still not ideal, but a big improvement from before. They’ve also teamed up with photobox to provide online ordering of prints and other items outside of Canada and the USA.
Pointe à la Renommée Light
Despite this, I’m still with zen. They have steadily improved over the 2 1/2 years I’ve been with them, and I expect them to keep getting better. They have a great user forum and are responsive to customer enquiries (I once emailed about a problem on New Year’s Eve – I know, get a life – and got a response within a few hours).
I’ve mentioned the two main competitors, SmugMug and Exposure Manager. SmugMug gives you more design options but at the expense of complexity that I really don’t want; and they are significantly more expensive. Exposure Manager is at a price point similar to Zenfolio but is also more complex to set up.
All of these services give you a free trial period, and it’s well worth using. It takes some effort to set up your site, no matter how simple the interface, and you don’t want to do it all over again when you decide your first choice for a host isn’t really cutting it.
I’d love to hear your comments, especially regarding other photo hosting options I haven’t considered.
Disclosure: I use zenfolio and it’s clearly in my best interest for others to use it, too. If you do end up signing on with zen, use my referral code QZ7-423-MH8 (you can do this automatically by navigating to zenfolio via any of the links on this page). You’ll get a $5 discount and I’ll get a $5 kickback! 😉
Hi,
I just want to thank you for the very helpfull article.
Thanks to you I am a happy Zenfolio user now (Daydream.Zenfolio.com).
Jan.
Glad you found it useful.
I had a chance to check out your site briefly – beautiful photographs! I’ll be back to take a longer look when I have some more time.
Arthur
I got here via a post on DPreview. Thanks for a thoughtful review. I would like your view of some fuzzy thoughts –
I’ve been using istockphoto for years as a customer. Got spoiled by their advanced search engine, didn’t realize that is not typical of photo sites! Finally getting around to thinking about putting some of my better shots up for sale. I was going to do this on istockphoto (assuming my junk could ever pass their jury), but got discouraged by posts on DPreview saying that you need a portfolio of 100+ shots on istock to realize even the most token income there. And I don’t take a lot of shots. So I started looking at the “regular” hosts that provide Pro accounts as a low scale alternative to istock. That quickly shook out to Shutterfly, Smugmug, or Zenfolio. The search tools at Shutterfly and Smugmug are so basic that I cannot take those sites seriously. Which leaves Zenfolio. But, when I browse/search Zenfolio they do not seem to separate the Pro accounts from the private ones? When I do stumble onto a Pro account I see prices for prints, but I’ve never found a price for a high rez digital download????
Help!
Kelly Cook
Arizona
Thanks for visiting!
First, the easy part: Zenfolio does allow you to sell digital downloads at whatever resolution you choose and with whatever licensing terms you choose.
Next: You’re right – to anyone searching zenfolio there is no real difference between the pro and non-pro accounts. The zenfolio search engine is dependent on how well the images are keyworded by the photographer. You can search based on keyword relevance, popularity, or date of upload. I guess the bottom line is that zenfolio is not a stock photo service. I would not expect many (if any) cold sales from people searching the zenfolio system for images. People doing that go to istockphoto or one of the other well known services, just like you do.
I would think of zenfolio as a web presence where you can send people who have heard of you some other way (coffee shop, gallery, magazine article, sporting event, etc.). They can browse your work and purchase prints, downloads, or other misc. items. For this purpose, I think it is still the best deal going.
I read an interview with the founder of iStockphoto awhile back (I think it was in Digital Photo Pro magazine) and he confirmed that to make a living with stock, you need to know what the market wants and you have to be very prolific. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it (especially if you have another source of income). What have you got to lose? The jury process alone could be very helpful.
Thanks for taking time with my query. I love searching photo sites for particular subject matter. Guess I am an odd bird in that respect. I’ve got zero prospects of people hearing of me from means other than searching images. So it now sounds like I have very dim prospects with either avenue. With istock, brave the juries and get a trickle income on the few images that pass. Or with a Pro account on a regular site pay up on the fee and pray that I snag the rare searcher. Which brings me to wonder, do the normal Bing/Google image searches reach into Zenfolio? Cannot recall that my searches with those have ever hit on istock.
yer Pest
Google does find images in zenfolio. That is a big issue for zenfolio right now – improving their search engine optimization. I can’t comment on iStock photo – they probably want to control the searching themselves.
I would still say you have nothing to lose with iStock.
You also don’t need a pro account with other photo services unless you want automated sales. It’s fairly easy to set up a paypal account for yourself and then ship your own orders.
Thanks for all your help!
Kelly
Does ZenFolio allow multiple home pages to be a gateway to different
galleries / collections for that unique home page.
And that gallery /collection is only visible for the specific home page.
For example:
Joe-Wedding-homepage.com > Joe-account-Wedding-gallery
Joe-Portrait-homepage.com > Joe-account-Portrait-gallery
This way I can have only one zenfolio account for multiple urls.
And the viewers do not see the other gallery.
I think that you could technically do this (using redirects and private galleries) but I’m not sure whether it would work very smoothly.
Having said that, they’re rolling out a major upgrade January 5. The details are still under wraps.
You might want to email the zenfolio support people.
Thanks for the Zenfolio review. I am currently (August 2013) trying to choose the best provider for a small market Canadian photographer. Any updates to service in 4 years? Has Zen made any improvements to shipping and duty issues across the border? It appears you are still with Zen. Do you know of any providers out there based in Canada or who are printing product in Canada?
Sorry but I haven’t done a serious comparison of the options recently. I’m not selling prints on my site so I’m still with zenfolio. The interface is very easy to use and my unlimited account is relatively inexpensive (but I’m grandfathered in at $40/year).
Zen’s prices have crept up and are now essentially the same as smugmug’s. Maybe smugmug has simplified their interface by now (I hope so!).
If you are selling expensive prints or high volumes, zenfolio’s 16.25US$ shipping might not be an issue. For a single 8×10 it can be a deal breaker. Zenfolio refuses to even acknowledge this as a problem and I’m left with the impression that they don’t really care about their Canadian customers (we’re too small a demographic).
If you are going to set up a commercial site from Canada, I would not recommend zenfolio. If you don’t need the shopping cart, zenfolio is easy to use (but no longer less expensive than smugmug).
I occasionally look for Canadian alternatives but haven’t found one yet that ticks all the boxes.
Thanks for the deets! Zen was one I was looking at. Being new to the market and no idea WTF I am doing ~ it seems Canada still gets the short end of the stick. Think I’ll just hold on to my domain name for awhile. Maybe get into the real-estate online. Buy ‘n’ sell domains. Let those fotos continue collecting digital dust.
Still, thanks for the in depth info. Zen does seem to be the best option.