ALERT, Zenfolio Archiving wiped out half my galleries today

This issue is fixed now. I'm down to 6 galleries left to unarchive, and they are all very small. The sum of the sizes of all these galleries is only about 10 MB. I'll have to check on some of the galleries where a number of the images were not accessible. Yep, still an issue, the most significant of which, is a gallery of images that is supposed to be downloadable by a jigsaw app I wrote for iPhone. I mentioned it specifically to support a few days ago. It does not appear on the archive page. Instead, I navigate to the gallery and select slideshow, which, according to support, initiates fetching the images. It's been doing this for a few days now.







--
Victor Engel

Most folks probably don't use the caption box for their titles. But, if you do, the archive restoration process originally screwed up the captions (adding in html tags on the front and at the end). I got word that the issue has been resolved. Zenfolio asked that I try restoring some of my galleries where I used the caption box (in my case every gallery created since September of 2016). I restored a couple of galleries and the captions now render correctly.

I was told the fix is yet top be announced, but that their engineers say it has passed QA testing on their end.

Furthermore, Zenfolio support corrected several hundred captions in galleries I had restored from archive prior to the fix.

Since Zenfolio started this policy, I've been trying to stay on top of unarchiving my galleries when they archive. The most annoying thing about it is when I have a sub-gallery archive that has a picture assigned to the cover for the main gallery.

Currently I have 6 galleries that have not unarchived after several weeks and 7 more that are indicating that they are in the archive process (since April). The ones in the archive process have limited functionality. You can view the images, but they cannot be downloaded.

I'm dealing with one of their customer support representatives via email now. Hopefully the issue can be resolved.

Kurt

tr4driver said:

Since Zenfolio started this policy, I've been trying to stay on top of unarchiving my galleries when they archive. The most annoying thing about it is when I have a sub-gallery archive that has a picture assigned to the cover for the main gallery.

Currently I have 6 galleries that have not unarchived after several weeks and 7 more that are indicating that they are in the archive process (since April). The ones in the archive process have limited functionality. You can view the images, but they cannot be downloaded.

I'm dealing with one of their customer support representatives via email now. Hopefully the issue can be resolved.

Kurt

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, part of a successful process is contacting support. The good thing is that they are responsive. I found another issue. If you ever used a direct image link, say, in this forum, if the gallery is archived and subsequently unarchived, those links will no longer work, because the unarchiving process assigns a new ID. I'm most likely going to sign up for their new tier, which doesn't have these issues. There's currently no migration process, so it would need to be done manually. I think a migration process is planned for the future but is not scheduled yet.

Victor Engel said:

I found another issue. If you ever used a direct image link, say, in this forum, if the gallery is archived and subsequently unarchived, those links will no longer work, because the unarchiving process assigns a new ID. I'm most likely going to sign up for their new tier, which doesn't have these issues. There's currently no migration process, so it would need to be done manually. I think a migration process is planned for the future but is not scheduled yet.

Click to expand...

I would be very cautious about signing up for the new tier. A friend of mine--whose site is also hosted by Zenfolio for the time being--specifically asked a customer support rep yesterday whether the archive policy was applicable to new accounts (i.e. using the non-classic plans that Zenfolio presently offers). He was told (and I quote):

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

KML8 said:

Victor Engel said:

I found another issue. If you ever used a direct image link, say, in this forum, if the gallery is archived and subsequently unarchived, those links will no longer work, because the unarchiving process assigns a new ID. I'm most likely going to sign up for their new tier, which doesn't have these issues. There's currently no migration process, so it would need to be done manually. I think a migration process is planned for the future but is not scheduled yet.

Click to expand...

I would be very cautious about signing up for the new tier. A friend of mine--whose site is also hosted by Zenfolio for the time being--specifically asked a customer support rep yesterday whether the archive policy was applicable to new accounts (i.e. using the non-classic plans that Zenfolio presently offers). He was told (and I quote):

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

Click to expand...

Hmm - that differs from what I've read previously.

KML8 said:

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

Click to expand...

... that seemingly compels otherwise sensible people to go down this route?

I have not followed this thread over the last 3 months but it sounds like a disaster. Surely there are better alternatives?

Victor Engel said:

KML8 said:

Victor Engel said:

I found another issue. If you ever used a direct image link, say, in this forum, if the gallery is archived and subsequently unarchived, those links will no longer work, because the unarchiving process assigns a new ID. I'm most likely going to sign up for their new tier, which doesn't have these issues. There's currently no migration process, so it would need to be done manually. I think a migration process is planned for the future but is not scheduled yet.

Click to expand...

I would be very cautious about signing up for the new tier. A friend of mine--whose site is also hosted by Zenfolio for the time being--specifically asked a customer support rep yesterday whether the archive policy was applicable to new accounts (i.e. using the non-classic plans that Zenfolio presently offers). He was told (and I quote):

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

Click to expand...

Hmm - that differs from what I've read previously.

Click to expand...

At the time I asked Zenfolio, the lack of specificity of their answer though substance indicated that Kerry is correct. It was more a matter of time, not off the table, was my definite impression.

I have been away from this thread for about a month as major surgery and hospital stays have consumed my attention. Zenfolio has been at the very lower end of my concerns. Kerry has been kind enough to keep me in the loupe and for that I thank him. Today I received an e-mail from Zenfolio that my subscription is coming up for renewal. This may prompt me to answer their last support e-mail update and ask about new updates, including this one. It's getting to be decision time for me. With my website's 52 gig image/gallery database completed, I am ready to drag and drop into a new site now at any time. But would still prefer not to. Though most of the time I feel exhausted, I will try my best to keep all of you informed.

Ed

David Lal said:

KML8 said:

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

Click to expand...

... that seemingly compels otherwise sensible people to go down this route?

I have not followed this thread over the last 3 months but it sounds like a disaster. Surely there are better alternatives?

Click to expand...

I think part of what's going on is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy. Everyone--and this definitely includes me--who has already expended a great deal of time and effort establishing a website on the Zenfolio platform dreads, to a greater or lesser extent, the thought of having to start over from scratch somewhere else, and that is undoubtedly impacting our thinking. And to some degree, that's both understandable and appropriate.

The key--and the tricky part--is not fooling oneself into believing that what we want to be true is true.

Ed, thanks for keeping the rest of us updated on what you've learned/are learning about all of this. Please do continue to keep your health at the top of your priority list.

To add some detail to what Ed alluded to in his reply above:

Since this whole debacle began to unfold in earnest back in March, I have had numerous communications (all of them by email) with a variety of people at Zenfolio, including the CEO himself. (A friend of mine--another Zenfolio customer--and I sent a joint letter to the CEO by email and snail mail.) At one point--back in late April--several people at or near the top of the company stated that they intended to offer a plan that would allow customers to opt out of the archiving process. (In fairness, this was not guaranteed, nor were any details presented to us.) We were told--by the CEO himself--that someone could be expected to follow up with us with further details in a matter of days. That was something like seven weeks ago. After hearing nothing--and after being on the road and dealing with a broad series of matters having nothing to do photography generally or Zenfolio specifically, we sent a follow-up email to the CEO last Monday (6/17). To the moment, there has been no reply.

None of this indicates anything truly conclusive; however, i certainly wouldn't categorize it as encouraging. Broadly speaking, what remains unfortunately unanswered to this point is whether Zenfolio has any genuine interest in retaining as customers those of us who have and want to retain websites that have the purpose of displaying a permanent, growing body of photographic work. The archiving approach that Zenfolioi has implemented as a means to deal with their data storage problem is antithetical to this type of website's proper functioning. The higher-ups at Zenfolio seemed to grasp this concept, albeit after they'd already poisoned the well by implementing the archive process in the first place, when we communicated with them months ago. They also seemed, at least at that time, to be willing to do something substantive that would address the problem. But the key word in the last few sentences is "seemed," as nothing suggestive, let alone substantive, has been forthcoming since that initial round of communications.

In summary, I don't really know where things stand, and that is extremely unfortunate as some of us, like Ed, are coming up on subscription renewal deadlines without being able to make an informed decision about how to proceed.

KML8 said:

In summary, I don't really know where things stand, and that is extremely unfortunate as some of us, like Ed, are coming up on subscription renewal deadlines without being able to make an informed decision about how to proceed.

Click to expand...

... and some, like me, have already run into that deadline. I decided to continue one more year, especially since they gave me a discount due to all this grief, and all my archived galleries are now unarchived. The unarchive took way longer than indicated. We are led to believe the average time to unarchive is a day or so, which may be true, but in order to download everything, which is one of the suggested options, it is necessary to unarchive all the galleries, so the relevant time is the LONGEST time it takes to unarchive, not the average. In my case, that was several weeks.

If archiving by gallery is a possible scenario in the new setup, I would upload a completely different way than I have been, preferring large galleries, so that fewer of them need to be updated. The scheme I had before could then be arranged by collections instead of galleries.

Victor Engel said:

KML8 said:

In summary, I don't really know where things stand, and that is extremely unfortunate as some of us, like Ed, are coming up on subscription renewal deadlines without being able to make an informed decision about how to proceed.

Click to expand...

... and some, like me, have already run into that deadline. I decided to continue one more year, especially since they gave me a discount due to all this grief, and all my archived galleries are now unarchived. The unarchive took way longer than indicated. We are led to believe the average time to unarchive is a day or so, which may be true, but in order to download everything, which is one of the suggested options, it is necessary to unarchive all the galleries, so the relevant time is the LONGEST time it takes to unarchive, not the average. In my case, that was several weeks.
If archiving by gallery is a possible scenario in the new setup, I would upload a completely different way than I have been, preferring large galleries, so that fewer of them need to be updated. The scheme I had before could then be arranged by collections instead of galleries.

Click to expand...

I thought about doing that myself--literally reorganizing my entire organizational process on the current platform so that there are a very small number of galleries and then using collections as a way of kind of end-running the archiving rules. No need to even sign up for the nextgen service.

It very quickly occurred to me that the archiving rules are fungible. If enough people did what I was considering doing, the supposed benefits of implementing the archiving process in the first place wouldn't be realized and the Zenfolio powers that be could always move the proverbial goalposts in some way, potentially making all of that work moot.

I don't think there's any reliable way to work around the archival policy over the long-term, short of a way to officially opt out of it. (And, to be complete, I suppose that's not even completely reliable.)

--Kerry

I'm not a Zenfolio user, but this has been an interesting story to follow. Was it ever explained exactly how and where the offline archived data is stored? Unplugged hard drives? Tape? Something else?

It's true that maintaining the world's vast and ever-growing quantity of online, instantly accessible data is becoming a challenge in terms of hardware and energy costs.

KML8 said:

David Lal said:

KML8 said:

"While Archiving is currently only implemented on our Classic platform, it will be coming to our nextgen platform by next year."

Caveat emptor, everyone.

Click to expand...

... that seemingly compels otherwise sensible people to go down this route?

I have not followed this thread over the last 3 months but it sounds like a disaster. Surely there are better alternatives?

Click to expand...

I think part of what's going on is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy. Everyone--and this definitely includes me--who has already expended a great deal of time and effort establishing a website on the Zenfolio platform dreads, to a greater or lesser extent, the thought of having to start over from scratch somewhere else, and that is undoubtedly impacting our thinking. And to some degree, that's both understandable and appropriate.

The key--and the tricky part--is not fooling oneself into believing that what we want to be true is true.

Click to expand...

I left Zenfolio a few years ago and it was a pain but really not that difficult to switch to a free site on Wix. I use Dropbox to distribute finished photos now. Zenfolio wasn't worth the money and I'm really glad I bailed when I did.

As promised, I have taken some time out of my medical recovery to contact Zenfolio for an update. Rather than summarize their reply, I will just paste it here to allow you to make your own decisions going forward:

> > >

"I'm so sorry Ed. The transition period was less than pleasant for us all and especially frustrating for our longtime photographers.
Unfortunately, there are no subscription plans on the current platform where you can opt-out or pay more for a plan that doesn't archive because we don't have one. Our new platform currently does not have archiving but it will in the coming months.
The reported slowness of the Classic Platform was one of the main reasons for the archive feature. Reducing the massive websites which many of our longer-term users have 2TB-100TB of images stored on their websites was impacting site performance.

"Another reason is that folks have been asking for years for us to create a way to migrate to the new platform. When we can push galleries into the archive we have a way to allow any user to move to our new platform without having to download all their galleries and upload them to the new platform.

"Too, as you know most online data storage companies are beginning to charge by the amount of data that is stored. Since we offer unlimited storage we wanted to come up with a way to still allow unlimited storage without charging more for monthly accounts. Take a look at what Google charges for monthly storage accounts.

"The archiving feature is intended to keep the subscription price as affordable as possible with ever-rising prices, allow for migration to our new platform, and increase the performance of the Classic Platform.

"We have had some customers who have requested the ability to pay more to keep all their galleries unarchived and we are currently looking for options in the future for certain websites to have that ability based on undecided criteria (amount of storage vs amount of sales) so we can accommodate folks with your particular business model.

"For this big push, we had a hard deadline to get several billion images in tens of millions of galleries into the cloud so it was clumsy at best. Sadly it was the result of us having a successful business for so long.

"I do believe we will be looking at potential changes and adjustments as time goes on after we have completed this Initial big push. Your feedback is valuable to us.

"I can tell you that your images are safe. With regard to your request to get around archiving, at this point, we don't have a way to exclude you.

'I hope this helps to clarify. If you have any further questions, please get back in touch. Have a wonderful day!"

< < <

My subscription is up for renewal this month. As stated previously, I did write a program to easily transfer a formatted gallery structure of my over 50 gigs of images to one of the new hosts I have chosen. After this last reply, I very well may have pulled the trigger. But life and its medical challenges have taken precedence with Zenfolio just becoming an afterthought. Making the move is just an annoyance I don't need right now. Staying with Zenfolio will just become the annoyance I'll have to live with for one more year. And maybe they will get their act together in that time, because they are STILL NOT THERE. And I will no longer recommend them as I have done for many years.

My best wishes to all of you as you make your own decisions,

Ed

trupix said:

Over the years, I've had 2 different online photo gallery websites fail.....only one informed me in advance so I could recover my photos. The other just "disappeared".

Probably I'm now overly cautious, but I regard many cloud services providers as risky, subject to changes in policies & fees, denial of service attacks, etc.

You don't expect it though with the well established sites.

Click to expand...

Sites fail, sites change policies and terms of service. It's a big problem especially with 'free' sites.

I hope your convalescence proceeds hastily to a complete recovery, Ed.

Regarding Zenfolio, coincidentally, I batted a few notes back and forth with support last week. My focus was on the sluggishness of images rendering that have not been archived, though I did raise the underlying archiving issue as well, Here's the message I received:

What I was told, in sum, is that even images that were never archived--at least on the Classic platform--go into a kind queue, and if they haven't been viewed for a while, it can awhile for them to render.

I can say that, based on my own random testing, about half of images take more than a couple of seconds to render, about half of these (or 1/4 of the total) take more than 10 seconds to render and a small percentage--about 2% I would estimate--can take seemingly forever (in my case, between one and two hours) to render. And, while this is not officially considered "normal" by Zenfolio, it's uncertain when, if ever, this will get any better. Remember, this issue is independent of whether these image are or ever were archived. This issue, then, is on top of the whole archiving policy.

With that known, I'm out the door; it's just a matter of exactly when. I have identified several likely replacement hosts and will be signing up for free 14-day test trials with them in the coming weeks to see if a deep dive into features and performance allows me to consider them truly viable. I have about seven months before my Zenfolio subscription is up so I have some time to make this decision and go through the unpleasant task of recreating myself elsewhere.

But at this point, given the endemic issues noted above, I don't see how Zenfolio can be viewed as a viable platform for anyone with a "body of work" style site or, in some respects, for anyone at all. The rendering issue alone--which is a built-in limitation with no apparent fix available (as per Zenfolio support itself)--should be a hard disqualifier for just about everyone.

I was looking through my photos on Zenfolio a couple of days ago and noticed that several of the photos had the incorrect shutter speed listed (below the photo on my Zenfolio website). The uploaded photos have the full and correct EXIF.

I contacted support and they claimed that it had something to do with the software I was using to edit the photos. I then check several of my Zenfolio galleries and see that most photos are missing significant parts of the EXIF. It appears that any photo that has been archived and restored is missing significant portions of the EXIF (shutter speed, aperture, focal length, etc.).

Even some of the never archived photo are showing the incorrect shutter speed. These appear to be when the actual shutter speed was 1/50 (reported as 2 seconds) and 1/100 (reported as 1 second).

Has anyone else noticed this problem?

Ed at Ridersite said:

I was looking through my photos on Zenfolio a couple of days ago and noticed that several of the photos had the incorrect shutter speed listed (below the photo on my Zenfolio website). The uploaded photos have the full and correct EXIF.

I contacted support and they claimed that it had something to do with the software I was using to edit the photos. I then check several of my Zenfolio galleries and see that most photos are missing significant parts of the EXIF. It appears that any photo that has been archived and restored is missing significant portions of the EXIF (shutter speed, aperture, focal length, etc.).

Even some of the never archived photo are showing the incorrect shutter speed. These appear to be when the actual shutter speed was 1/50 (reported as 2 seconds) and 1/100 (reported as 1 second).

Has anyone else noticed this problem?

Click to expand...

Are you talking about EXIF reported on the website? Or are you talking about EXIF embedded in the file. You can check the latter by downloading the "original" and inspecting the EXIF using something like exiftool. If those two don't match, I'd ping it back to support. That would be ample evidence that the issue is with their software.

I wonder if it's related to the issue I had where restored images had thumbnails from someone else's galleries. They got corrected eventually after navigating to each image with a problem and waiting.

Victor Engel said:

Ed at Ridersite said:

I was looking through my photos on Zenfolio a couple of days ago and noticed that several of the photos had the incorrect shutter speed listed (below the photo on my Zenfolio website). The uploaded photos have the full and correct EXIF.

I contacted support and they claimed that it had something to do with the software I was using to edit the photos. I then check several of my Zenfolio galleries and see that most photos are missing significant parts of the EXIF. It appears that any photo that has been archived and restored is missing significant portions of the EXIF (shutter speed, aperture, focal length, etc.).

Even some of the never archived photo are showing the incorrect shutter speed. These appear to be when the actual shutter speed was 1/50 (reported as 2 seconds) and 1/100 (reported as 1 second).

Has anyone else noticed this problem?

Click to expand...

Are you talking about EXIF reported on the website? Or are you talking about EXIF embedded in the file. You can check the latter by downloading the "original" and inspecting the EXIF using something like exiftool. If those two don't match, I'd ping it back to support. That would be ample evidence that the issue is with their software.
I wonder if it's related to the issue I had where restored images had thumbnails from someone else's galleries. They got corrected eventually after navigating to each image with a problem and waiting.

Click to expand...

The EXIF in the uploaded file is correct. The information reported on my Zenfolio website is incorrect.