Review of Zenfolio for Photographers – An Online hosting, sharing, and ecommerce solution
11 Feb
Zenfolio is a fantastic online photo sharing and backup service. I first stumbled across Zenfolio while looking for an effective way to present my work online. Out of the services available I was most intrigued by the free 14 day trial offered by ZenFolio. Rather than plunk out some hard earned cash for one of the other services I have the opportunity to try Zenfolio out.
This service while similar to Smugmug, Flickr, Imagekind, and Redbubble takes the best from each service and provides it in one easy-to-use one stop shop for photographers. It also gives the ability to sell your photographic prints as well as selling your own stock images through digital downloads.
Having this ability to store and sell your prints is incredible for a photographer whether you are just starting to sell your fine art, or you are already an established commercial photographer.
There are three types of accounts available as of the time of this writing: Basic, Unlimited, and Premium. Each plan allows for the uploading of files in JPEG, TIFF, and PNG file formats. The Basic plan allows 1 Gigabyte of storage space and provides an additional 1 GB for each year you are a member.
The unlimited and premium versions have no limit to your uploads which is fantastic. Now you have the ability to backup your valuable photographs virtually (I do hope you are keeping physical backups as well!). When uploading, the maximum file size is 12mb for Basic and Unlimited, and 24mb for the Premium Plan.
Uploading files is a fairly painless task. Especially as I primarily edit my photos in Adobe Lightroom. Zenfolio has a fantastic plugin that allows all images processed in Lightroom to be exported, tagged, keyworded, and placed in the proper gallery directly from Lightroom. There are also plugins for iPhoto, Aperture, or the basic java applet uploader directly on their site.
If you need to retrieve a file hosted on Zenfolio, say for example while you’re out traveling and might not necessarily have access to your desktop, you can download a free tool from Zenfolio which can download single files or your entire collection of photographs onto your disk. Also in this free tool section is a wordpress plugin which can display your photo galleries on your blog, as well as a handy migration tool which can bring photographs from other services onto Zenfolio.
Onto the actual service itself, there is one thing that makes Zenfolio very interesting. The photographer has the ability to choose who gets to see each individual photograph in a gallery. This is particularly useful for showing images from a photo shoot to a specific client. All images and galleries can be tagged for Search engine optimization and zenfolio search purposes. Each image can be titled, captioned, copyright info set, the option to display EXIF data, interlinking, and more.
There are currently five lab choices for printing: Mpix, IYP, fotoflot, Photobox, and PictureItPostage. With a Premium account enabled, photographers are able to set their own prices and make a profit over what the labs charge, create coupons for promotion purposes and more. All images can be watermarked, have the option to remove the zenfolio logo from public pages and more.
Finally, Zenfolio provides an easy way for photographers to professionally display their photographs. There are 15 different themes to choose from with three layouts each offering 45 different options. While not as customizable as an xhtml+css template, photographers are able to tweak each page to their liking with minimal knowledge of web design.
I’m excited for this new opportunity to present my work.
Here’s my Zenfolio link: Alan Tippins Fine Art Photography
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