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Smugmug vs. Zenfolio vs. Someone else

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jfriend00 said:
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.
Click to expand...
I could wait a few months for some of these features but not a year or so – not that I know how long it would take Zenfolio to implement similar features.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
jfriend00 said:
alexpphoto said:
With John a hard-core proponent of smugmug, I will chime in as I am
a huge fan of Zenfolio.
Click to expand...
One thing we agree on. Try them both on their free trial programs
and see which one feels right to you and has the features you care
the most about.
Click to expand...
This I will do! Thanks for your help, everyone!
jfriend00 said:
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio
Click to expand...
--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
jfriend00 said:
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.
Click to expand...
Not many are over 8MB and even less are over 9MB but it happens from time to time – straight out of the EOS 5D. I could of course check for file size before uploading and resize all photos to be less than 8MB.
jfriend00 said:
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.
Click to expand...
That is how I do it too. Always keep the RAW since it contains more data than any RAW converter can get out of the file – so future converters will do a better job. It also takes too long time and too much space to convert to TIFF.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
So I tried both and was disappointed in both because they were so slow. The Zenfolia slideshow does look great, though. Overall I like the look of Smugmug better, though, and browsing through the images was also faster. But with Smugmug you have to manually correct the orientation of an image. Anyway, both were frustrating slow at times so I've decided to try to use Coppermine on a server in my own apartment. Will see how that works out.
Thanks again for your help.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
Looks like there might be a problem with your Internet connection speed if both services appear slow. Zenfolio is flying for me and I just have regular DSL.

Have you tried contacting Support? Both smugmug and Zenfolio have a reputation for quick and helpful customer support, I am sure they can help you out.

Good luck.

-APP
---
My photos are hosted on Zenfolio: http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp
 
alexpphoto said:
Looks like there might be a problem with your Internet connection
speed if both services appear slow. Zenfolio is flying for me and I
just have regular DSL.
Click to expand...
What does flying mean exactly? How many seconds do you usually wait for images to appear. For me, only the slideshow at Zenfolio worked at a decent pace.
alexpphoto said:
Have you tried contacting Support? Both smugmug and Zenfolio have a
reputation for quick and helpful customer support, I am sure they
can help you out.
Click to expand...
My internet connection works fine. What could Zenfolio do to make my account work faster? I have not contacted anybody yet but still working on the idea of going through the trouble of setting up my own server.

Thanks.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
Looks like there might be a problem with your Internet connection
speed if both services appear slow. Zenfolio is flying for me and I
just have regular DSL.
Click to expand...
What does flying mean exactly? How many seconds do you usually wait
for images to appear. For me, only the slideshow at Zenfolio worked
at a decent pace.
Click to expand...
I have never timed loading pages in the past, never needed to. But since you asked nicely, I did some very basic stopwatch measuriements.

I use a fairly high resolution monitor displaying lots of thumbnails and Large images. My connection is a home DSL with 1.2Mb down and 360kb up.

http://www.zenfolio.com 10 sec
gallery page with thumbnails 3 sec
photo page 2 sec

every subsequent photo loads instantly since Zenfolio does intelligent prefetching
new gallery page with thumbs 4 sec
new photo page 1.5 sec
photographer home page 3 sec

These are kind of average numbers of three mesasurements.

Hope you find this useful.

-APP
---
My photos are hosted on Zenfolio: http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp
 
John V. L.

Thanks for bringing up the topic - I learned much from all the comments. I've just started into digital, and have been thinking about a hosting site, and this thread has been very useful (thanks also to all others that participated).

Now - right off topic: I browsed your site a few minutes ago, and I must say your work is imaginative, creative and unique. I will bookmark this site for my own enjoyment and edification - it's a real eye opener - show's what an open and creative mind can do.
--
Glenn NK
Victoria, BC

The capacity of the mind is limited only by attitude.
 
Thanks, APP, for testing this for me. I always try to be nice and I appreciate you doing this. I don’t understand why Zenfolio is so slower on my computer – but I’ve tried it on multiple computers and have a fast internet connection and I’ve tried my own account as well as other accounts on all computers, so my findings are pretty solid. If I’m not satisfied with Coppermine or Gallery2 I’ll try out Zenfolio and Smugmug again and see if there is something I can do to speed up things but for now, unless I gain new information, I’ll be going through the hassle of setting up my own server.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
Dito. After spending a lot of time evaluating several free and for-fee hosting sites - including Phanfare, Smugmug, Zenfolio, Flickr - I finally decided to go with Phanfare ( http://www.phanfare.com/ ).

Unlimited storage, ease of use, slick and nice album design, speedy (background) upload, awesome video integration, and the note to soon have an open API that will enable third party applications/add-ons are the reasons for my decision. So far no regrets, very happy.

If you need promotion codes for Phanfare ($7.- off) or for Smugmug ($5.- off), send me an email and I'd be happy to email you a valid code.
 
John Valliant Lauritzen wrote:
If I’m not satisfied with Coppermine or Gallery2 I’ll try
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
out Zenfolio and Smugmug again and see if there is something I can
do to speed up things but for now, unless I gain new information,
I’ll be going through the hassle of setting up my own server.
Click to expand...
So I haven’t actually installed the software but just reading about Coppermine and Gallery2 at various places on the internet - about all the many problems regarding safety and malfunctions in software implementations – the list of problems was seemingly endless – I was convinced that these solutions are not safe enough and that they too often will need updating and taking care of. They will, in other words, be too much trouble. So I’m back to trying out an online solution out of house. Any other suggestions on who to try and what to do to make Zenfolio and Smugmug faster, please feel free to contribute. Thanks.

--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
John,

I've been using Zenfolio for a while now, with close to 2GB uploaded so far (=2500+ images). I did shop around quite a bit beforehand, too, and settled on Zenfolio, in the end for no other reason than getting the decision behind me and being comfortable in Zenfolio's work environment.

The strengths I see with Z is the way images can be grouped and organized. Tucking stuff away in folder-like collections makes a lot of sense to me. Uploading is also a breeze (with two options).

Another feature I absolutely love is that I have space to write introductions to each gallery. I actually wish I had more writing space to work with. Maybe Smugmg and others have this feature, too, but it's really well integrated in Zenfolio, although very few Zenfolio-users I found make use of it.

What makes Zenfolio slow is (usually) not the internet connection, but the execution of the full-fledged java runtime machine on your local PC. I use an old 600MHZ with 380MB RAM as my desktop, and it takes quite a while to jumpstart everything before I can go into production. On my core duo 2GHZ laptop with 2GB RAM, however, the program comes up and connects in an instant.

Regards,

Thomas
John Valliant Lauritzen said:
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).
Click to expand...
--
 
HuntingSand said:
John,

I've been using Zenfolio for a while now, with close to 2GB
uploaded so far (=2500+ images). I did shop around quite a bit
beforehand, too, and settled on Zenfolio, in the end for no other
reason than getting the decision behind me and being comfortable in
Zenfolio's work environment.
Click to expand...
That is about half of what I uploaded on on my trial run of Zenfolio.
HuntingSand said:
The strengths I see with Z is the way images can be grouped and
organized. Tucking stuff away in folder-like collections makes a
lot of sense to me. Uploading is also a breeze (with two options).
Click to expand...
Yes, uploading was very easy for me as well.
HuntingSand said:
Another feature I absolutely love is that I have space to write
introductions to each gallery. I actually wish I had more writing
space to work with. Maybe Smugmg and others have this feature, too,
but it's really well integrated in Zenfolio, although very few
Zenfolio-users I found make use of it.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a worthwhile feature.
HuntingSand said:
What makes Zenfolio slow is (usually) not the internet connection,
but the execution of the full-fledged java runtime machine on your
local PC. I use an old 600MHZ with 380MB RAM as my desktop, and it
takes quite a while to jumpstart everything before I can go into
production. On my core duo 2GHZ laptop with 2GB RAM, however, the
program comes up and connects in an instant.
Click to expand...
I've used Zenfolio mostly on two computers - an older computer with about 500 Mb of RAM and a new and very fast computer with 2GB of RAM - both were similar in speed. My internet connection is very, very fast.

I tried out your Zenfolio site. First photo click took me 13 seconds to get to - and from there it is sometimes around 5 seconds and sometimes more. No difference from what I've experienced earlier. My older computer was about 20 seconds loading your initial page but it was actually much faster when I was to look at your individual photos - in the order of 5 seconds or so for most.
HuntingSand said:
Click to expand...
--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
I tried your Zenfolio site on both my new and my old computer. On the new one with 2GB of RAM and a very fast CPU I often had load times around 8-10 seconds. This is unacceptable to me. On my old computer with 512MB of RAM I have load times around between 2, 4 and only rarely around 8 seconds – which is acceptable performance to me.

I have an extremely fast internet connection - a 10Mbit professional connection so this is not where I'm slowed down.

So the difference in performance can’t be explained by internet connection speed or by computer power. My guess is that my new and fast computer is not running the Zenfolio software in an efficient way because of software setup on my machine. I don’t have any clues to what is set up wrongly – in every other way the computer works fine.
Framer said:
Maybe your internet connection is slowed down for whatever reason
because I certainly don't have any troubles with speed accessing my
site (nor do my clients)...

http://neilvan.zenfolio.com

--
Have a look at my work: http://neilvan.zenfolio.com
Click to expand...
--
Regards, John Valliant Lauritzen
http://www.photo.net/photos/John_Valliant_Lauritzen
 
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