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Smugmug vs. Zenfolio vs. Someone else

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John Valliant Lauritzen

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I’m looking for an internet site to store and share my photos. I have a lot of photos to share and was wondering which site is the best for my purposes. As it is now, I’m leaning towards Zenfolio since they have a larger size file – 10MB compared to Smugmug’s 8MB maximum file size (except if you pay 150USD/year). JPEGs out of my 5D are sometimes over 8MB. Do any of them have limits on how much you can upload a day/month once you reach a certain point?

Any other advantages/disadvantages to using either of them or a complete third (no interest in Flickr since I can’t use my domain name with them and since they have a 2GB upload/month).

BTW I shoot RAW with my EOS 5D and so need to convert a large number of files easily into jpeg – any suggestions on how to do this most efficiently? Software?

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
I really like SMugmug. I started with the basic membership but upgraded to pro within a month to allow friends and family members to order prints from my site.

I basically double the standard rate for prints, but its paid for itself and then some.

8MB files weren't an issue for me. EVen when shooting raw, and converting to jpg, I tried to keep the files under 4MB.

--
Jesse A.
-------Ultra-Amature Time Capture Snatcher--------
My stock photo portfolio
http://www.dreamstime.com/resp155987
and other photos http://jascher.smugmug.com/
 
Smugmug has never been slow for me. In fact just the opposite.

Why do I keep my images under 4mb? Because 95% of the images are going to be viewed on the web only, and so even a 4mb file is overkill in size, however, the 4mb will still produce a very nice 5x7 and even 8x10 (by most standards) if friends/family purchase an image.

--
Jesse A.
-------Ultra-Amature Time Capture Snatcher--------
My stock photo portfolio
http://www.dreamstime.com/resp155987
and other photos http://jascher.smugmug.com/
 
I'm a user of phanfare (www.phanfare.com).

I belive they offer a great service: for around US$50 for one year you get unlimited storage, image size up to 20meg, videos up to 1gb or 5 minutes.

I like it very much
 
thirdlife said:
Smugmug has never been slow for me. In fact just the opposite.
Click to expand...
My browsing times on your smugmug portfolio (I browsed random images I found interesting):
image:

5 seconds to laod smugmug.com

opening first photo: 8 seconds
opening photo: 4 seconds
go to new gallery: 4 seconds
go to new gallery: 4 seconds
enlarge photo: 2 seconds
loading main page 5 seconds
Opening photo: 4 seconds
Enlarging photo: 3 seconds
loading main page: 8 seconds
enlarge photo: 2 seconds

Open another portfolio: 8 seconds
opening photo: 9 seconds
opening photo: 10 seconds
opening photo: 9 seconds
opening photo: 8 seconds
openng new gallery page: 6 seconds
openng new gallery page: 8 seconds
opening photo: 9 seconds

To me that feels sluggish/slow. So I went ahead and tried Zenfolio.

11 seconds to load zenfolio.com

Opening first photo and laoding a gallery 33 seconds
opening photo in gallery 13 seconds
going to next gallery 20 seconds
opening photo: 12 seconds
openikng photo: less than 1 second
opening photo: 40 seconds
opening photo: 1 second
opening photo: 1 second
opening photo: 1 second
opening photo: 1 second
browse to next gallery: less than 1 second
browse to next gallery: less tahn 1 second
opening photo: 3 seconds
opening photo: 5 seconds
return to zenfolio.com: 11 seconds

opening photo in new gallery: 12 seconds
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: 10 seconds
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: 3 seconds
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
next photo: instant
opening new gallery: 8 seconds
opening new gallery: 8 seconds
opening first photo: 13 seconds

So Zenfolio isn't that fast either but once a gallery has loaded it is faster than Smugmug. The 40 seconds load is unacceptable, though. Also, Zenfolio doesn't have all the feature that Smugmug has, ye anyway.

Any other photo sharing/storing sites I should try out?
thirdlife said:
Why do I keep my images under 4mb? Because 95% of the images are
going to be viewed on the web only, and so even a 4mb file is
overkill in size, however, the 4mb will still produce a very nice
5x7 and even 8x10 (by most standards) if friends/family purchase an
image.
Click to expand...
I was thinking of also using the site to backup my photos and would therefore want the largest resolution possible.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
Here's a previous posting on different hosting sites in general: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1006&message=20473693

Here's one pointing out a bunch of features that Zenfolio is lacking when compared to Smugmug: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=19684793 . You can see if any of these features matter to you.

On the performance difference, you will have to decide how much to base your decision on one particular measurement. My experience has been that a growing hosting site goes in cycles. They all start out really fast when they don't have many users, then if they are successful they grow really fast, they start to slow down a bit, then if the operators are on the ball, they add a bunch of hardware and/or make improvements to how the site works under-the-covers and it speeds up a bunch, then it grows a bunch more, etc... This cycle repeats. Smugmug has been around for a long time and is profitable, Zenfolio is fairly new.

In the long run, you're looking for a site that is well run and is making money because that money will fund keeping the site performance and hardware current. At any given point, you'd love the performance to always be great, but it's also dangerous to assume that one particular snapshot in time is representative of their longer term record at all. Zenfolio performance times can be widely variable depending upon how you do things because their site uses a lot of JavaScript which has to initially get downloaded by your browser, but will then be cached by a good browser and they often pre-fetch images in the background so your image load time will depend greatly on whether they've already pre-cached it or not (this is like Google trying to pre-fetch the first search result). Sometimes the pre-fetching works great, sometimes it just bogs down your internet connection and isn't what you were going to view next.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
 
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
JPEGs out of my
5D are sometimes over 8MB. Do any of them have limits on how much
you can upload a day/month once you reach a certain point?
Click to expand...
Are you really finding that "out-of-the-camera" JPEGs from your 5D are more than 8MB? Or are you saving these as quality 12 in Photoshop and getting > 8MB that way? If that's the case, then you should know that quality 10 is more than enough for viewing or printing (any likely use from your web site) and will not get anywhere near 8MB.

In answer to your question, Smugmug is truly unlimited. They do not enforce any limits. Their site just says "unlimited storage" and "upload as many photos as you wish". I personally have more than 11,000 images and 28GB.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
 
Over the past several years I have tried so many services that it would take to long to list.

I finally settled on Zenfolio as the interface is clean and easy to use, it's reasonably fast and at $40 for unlimited space, it's great bang for the buck! Zenfolio has a an e-commerce module coming which is exciting, I look forward to selling some of my prints. I actually just got featured on the homepage for Zenfolio which is cool...

As far as the Jpeg thing goes try saving at Quality 10 instead of 12. I spoke with a local professional printer recently and he said that there is no discernable difference.

--
Have a look at my work: http://neilvan.zenfolio.com
 
jfriend00 said:
In answer to your question, Smugmug is truly unlimited. They do
not enforce any limits. Their site just says "unlimited storage"
and "upload as many photos as you wish". I personally have more
than 11,000 images and 28GB.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I think my posting was confusing. Smugmug doesn't enforce any limits on number of images you can upload.

They do have an 8MB per image limit for the standard and power users accounts and a 16MB per image limit for their pro account. They also have a 48 megapixel image limit. I suspect these to make the design and performance of their image manipulation software more predictable.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
 
jfriend00 said:
Here's a previous posting on different hosting sites in general:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1006&message=20473693

Here's one pointing out a bunch of features that Zenfolio is
lacking when compared to Smugmug:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=19684793 . You can see if any of these features matter to you.
Click to expand...
I read it all and it does seem to favor Zenfolio slightly in my opinion.
jfriend00 said:
On the performance difference, you will have to decide how much to
base your decision on one particular measurement. My experience
has been that a growing hosting site goes in cycles. They all
start out really fast when they don't have many users, then if they
are successful they grow really fast, they start to slow down a
bit, then if the operators are on the ball, they add a bunch of
hardware and/or make improvements to how the site works
under-the-covers and it speeds up a bunch, then it grows a bunch
more, etc... This cycle repeats. Smugmug has been around for a
long time and is profitable, Zenfolio is fairly new.
Click to expand...
This does make completely sense. Maybe both will be faster in the future, maybe both will slow down. Maybe one will be much faster than the other. No one knows. It is likely that both will be around, since both seem quite successful but Smugmug seems a best bet in this respect.
jfriend00 said:
In the long run, you're looking for a site that is well run and is
making money because that money will fund keeping the site
performance and hardware current. At any given point, you'd love
the performance to always be great, but it's also dangerous to
assume that one particular snapshot in time is representative of
their longer term record at all.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is in fact what I’m looking for. Another thing I would be looking for is a company that aims to serve professional who can pay to have things work properly. As far as I have understood, both companies aim at these groups, is that correct?

Zenfolio performance times can be
jfriend00 said:
widely variable depending upon how you do things because their site
uses a lot of JavaScript which has to initially get downloaded by
your browser, but will then be cached by a good browser and they
often pre-fetch images in the background so your image load time
will depend greatly on whether they've already pre-cached it or not
(this is like Google trying to pre-fetch the first search result).
Sometimes the pre-fetching works great, sometimes it just bogs down
your internet connection and isn't what you were going to view next.
Click to expand...
This does explain my findings when using Zenfolio!

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
jfriend00 said:
Are you really finding that "out-of-the-camera" JPEGs from your 5D
are more than 8MB?
Click to expand...
Yes, not many, though. Have even some that are above 9MB. And then again, a few are less than 3MB. Most are around 6MB I would guess ...

Or are you saving these as quality 12 in
jfriend00 said:
Photoshop and getting > 8MB that way? If that's the case, then you
should know that quality 10 is more than enough for viewing or
printing (any likely use from your web site) and will not get
anywhere near 8MB.
Click to expand...
Yes, but I would also want to use the files as backup and therefore I would convert my RAW files to JPEG 12 if possible.
jfriend00 said:
In answer to your question, Smugmug is truly unlimited. They do
not enforce any limits. Their site just says "unlimited storage"
and "upload as many photos as you wish". I personally have more
than 11,000 images and 28GB.
Click to expand...
I like to hear this! Does this mean there is no monthly limit on how much I can upload?
jfriend00 said:
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
Click to expand...
--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
Framer said:
Over the past several years I have tried so many services that it
would take to long to list.

I finally settled on Zenfolio as the interface is clean and easy to
use, it's reasonably fast and at $40 for unlimited space, it's
great bang for the buck! Zenfolio has a an e-commerce module coming
which is exciting, I look forward to selling some of my prints. I
actually just got featured on the homepage for Zenfolio which is
cool...
Click to expand...
So why did yo choose Zenfolio over Smugmug. Is Zenfolio really unlimited, as they say or are there limits to how much you can upload every month/day and how much you can upload total?
Member said:
As far as the Jpeg thing goes try saving at Quality 10 instead of
12. I spoke with a local professional printer recently and he said
that there is no discernable difference.
Click to expand...
That may be right is you are not planning on doing any post processing on the image. As soon as you want to do this, JPEG 12, TIFF and RAW are the way to go.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
In the long run, you're looking for a site that is well run and is
making money because that money will fund keeping the site
performance and hardware current. At any given point, you'd love
the performance to always be great, but it's also dangerous to
assume that one particular snapshot in time is representative of
their longer term record at all.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is in fact what I’m looking for. Another thing I would be
looking for is a company that aims to serve professional who can
pay to have things work properly. As far as I have understood, both
companies aim at these groups, is that correct?
Click to expand...
I don't think Zenfolio has a "pro" offering yet. To serve lots of pros, you need:

o Rich site customization so the pro can build their own brand look - this has to be lots more than pre-built themes
o Online print sales with pricing control
o Digital downloads so you can sell the image files
o Custom watermarks to protect your images

o Proof-delay shipping (so you can fine tune the post processing on the exact prints that were ordered before the order is fullfilled)
o Sales reporting
o Credit card processing
o Print satisfaction guarantee

o Uploaders for uploading 100's of photos across many galleries in one unattended session.

I don't think Zenfolio has any of these for pros. They may intend to build some of them in the future, but I don't think the world has seen them yet.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
 
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
jfriend00 said:
Are you really finding that "out-of-the-camera" JPEGs from your 5D
are more than 8MB?
Click to expand...
Yes, not many, though. Have even some that are above 9MB. And then
again, a few are less than 3MB. Most are around 6MB I would guess
...

Or are you saving these as quality 12 in
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
Photoshop and getting > 8MB that way? If that's the case, then you
should know that quality 10 is more than enough for viewing or
printing (any likely use from your web site) and will not get
anywhere near 8MB.
Click to expand...
Yes, but I would also want to use the files as backup and therefore
I would convert my RAW files to JPEG 12 if possible.
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
In answer to your question, Smugmug is truly unlimited. They do
not enforce any limits. Their site just says "unlimited storage"
and "upload as many photos as you wish". I personally have more
than 11,000 images and 28GB.
Click to expand...
I like to hear this! Does this mean there is no monthly limit on
how much I can upload?
Click to expand...
There is no monthly upload limit that I'm aware of on Smugmug and I've certainly uploaded multiple GB over a couple days.

If you want to upload JPEG 12's and you have a high mega pixel camera, you will need the pro account to get the 16MB image limit. Unless you have a very fast upload pipe from the place where you do your photo work, JPEG 12's are soooo much larger than 10's that I find it a lot more productive to upload JPEG 10's with no discernible printing or viewing sacrifices at all.

I know there's been some discussion in the forums around increasing the 8MB number, though I don't know if they decided to change anything or not. For now, you won't hit it if you save at quality level 10, you can hit it sometimes at quality 12. I'd be surprised if you ever hit it with a JPEG right out of the camera.

Smugmug is not my primary backup mechanism, though it is a nice emergency backup in case all else fails. I shoot RAW so I backup my RAWs separately as those are my real negatives.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
 
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
Framer said:
Over the past several years I have tried so many services that it
would take to long to list.

I finally settled on Zenfolio as the interface is clean and easy to
use, it's reasonably fast and at $40 for unlimited space, it's
great bang for the buck! Zenfolio has a an e-commerce module coming
which is exciting, I look forward to selling some of my prints. I
actually just got featured on the homepage for Zenfolio which is
cool...
Click to expand...
So why did yo choose Zenfolio over Smugmug. Is Zenfolio really
unlimited, as they say or are there limits to how much you can
upload every month/day and how much you can upload total?
Click to expand...
Ease of use, customer service. I have never come across any limits, I uploaded 200 5-7MB images one evening with no troubles. You might want to contact them to clarify...
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
As far as the Jpeg thing goes try saving at Quality 10 instead of
12. I spoke with a local professional printer recently and he said
that there is no discernable difference.
Click to expand...
That may be right is you are not planning on doing any post
processing on the image. As soon as you want to do this, JPEG 12,
TIFF and RAW are the way to go.
Click to expand...
Yes, I realize this and anything that stays resident in my system are RAW converted to 16-bit TIFFs. I have been doing this for years...

--
Have a look at my work: http://neilvan.zenfolio.com
 
With John a hard-core proponent of smugmug, I will chime in as I am a huge fan of Zenfolio.

For completion, here is a link to my previous post about why Zenfolio beats smugmug and everyone else at the moment IMO: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=19689039

And for the record, Zenfolio has been around for almost a year now and from what I gathered through my e-mail exchanges with their support, a lot longer in the making, not exactly a brand new face.

The Unlimited account I have seems to be truly unlimited. I have exchanged e-mails with another user who has close to 100GB on Zenfolio as he uses it purely for backup. And I have uploaded more than a GB the first night I used them with no problems.

Zenfolio certainly offers the best bang for the buck with the custom domain and unlimited storage for $40/year and they have some unique features that no one else has, like Collections, keyboard navigation, dynamic image sizes, and customizable e-mail invitations.

My advice, sign up for a free trial and be your own judge.

I do concur with the rest that JPEG 10 is of the same quality as JPEG 12 for all intents and purposes, including backup.

Hope this helps,

-APP
---
My photos are hosted on Zenfolio: http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp
 
It is really unlimited for $40. I must have uploaded like 7-8 GB worth of pictures for the last month alone. Form my China trip and firends' weddings :)
--
  • Johnny
http://tuxbailey.zenfolio.com
 
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