Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

[jfriend]

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com. (http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp)

With the usual suspects like pbase or flickr or imageshack, I know how to explain why many users would rather choose smugmug. I don't really know zenfolio and it seems to be gaining some attention and users. I was wondering if anyone else (in the dgrin community or at Smugmug) corporate has any pithy set of reasons why Smugmug is better than zenfolio? I'm not trying to challenge Smugmug, just looking for ammo on how to explain why Smugmug is better.

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

[bwg]

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com. (http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp)

With the usual suspects like pbase or flickr or imageshack, I know how to explain why many users would rather choose smugmug. I don't really know zenfolio and it seems to be gaining some attention and users. I was wondering if anyone else (in the dgrin community or at Smugmug) corporate has any pithy set of reasons why Smugmug is better than zenfolio? I'm not trying to challenge Smugmug, just looking for ammo on how to explain why Smugmug is better.

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.ever since your first post about zenfolio, i've checked it out quite frequently. they have a really nice interface...hard to really find things to pick at. I noticed it wont fit 800x600 resolutions and i dont see any feeds but that's about it off the top of my head. i didnt sign up so i cant speak for their customization and/or administrative controls. i looove their browse and search though.

[onethumb]

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

We used to do this, too, since it's worth the extra bandwidth for speed, but in real world use, it wasn't noticeably better.

I haven't had a chance to play with them yet, but just hazarding a guess, I'll bet they're fast because they're new (Jan 2006) and don't have half a billion JPGs and millions of browsers per day. :)

I've heard great things about them, so we'll definitely check it out and see if there's anything we can learn - but we're so busy just implementing customer requested features we don't have a lot of time to do competitive research.

Don

[jfriend]

We used to do this, too, since it's worth the extra bandwidth for speed, but in real world use, it wasn't noticeably better.

I haven't had a chance to play with them yet, but just hazarding a guess, I'll bet they're fast because they're new (Jan 2006) and don't have half a billion JPGs and millions of browsers per day. :)

I've heard great things about them, so we'll definitely check it out and see if there's anything we can learn - but we're so busy just implementing customer requested features we don't have a lot of time to do competitive research.

Don

This is the text of a posting in different online forum that caught my attention and I was trying to figure out if there was a pro-Smugmug response to:

Damnit, Alex - I had read enough that I was all set to go to smugmug until I saw your post and checked out Zenfolio! What a great layout they have. It was instantly a breeze to go through an album, hover for more detailed exif (as opposed to it coming up on another page in smugmug) and for a larger version of the photo, and, yes, a very nice slideshow! And from what I understand, Zenfolio is still young with plenty improvement in the works. Very difficult decision indeed!The only thing I see missing in my quick perusal...is there no comment system?

[onethumb]

This is the text of a posting in different online forum that caught my attention and I was trying to figure out if there was a pro-Smugmug response to:

Damnit, Alex - I had read enough that I was all set to go to smugmug until I saw your post and checked out Zenfolio! What a great layout they have. It was instantly a breeze to go through an album, hover for more detailed exif (as opposed to it coming up on another page in smugmug) and for a larger version of the photo, and, yes, a very nice slideshow! And from what I understand, Zenfolio is still young with plenty improvement in the works. Very difficult decision indeed!The only thing I see missing in my quick perusal...is there no comment system?

I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Don

[bwg]

I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Doni like their slideshow interface...how you can get thumbnails of the images at the bottom, see your position in the slideshow and change the speed.

Features-wise you have them covered, but interface wise they are a notch above IMHO. Someone recently told me that people's visual impression of a product is a very important factor in their overall willingness to use it.

i also like that i can go full screen:

http://bigwebguy.smugmug.com/photos/69931067-L.jpg

the photographer/image info sidebar on the right is also cool. updates when you highlight a different photo.

[MPerdomo]

Im not really that impressed by them.

I prefer Smugmug's simple layout to the Zenfolio approach.

Also, according to the features listing, they don't support printing photos or customization

And I doubt they will have the same customer support as Smugmug. They look interesting, but I am a loyal Smugmug customer, and probably will be for a while.

[peestandingup]

The speed of clicking from one photo to the next with them is definitely faster & I do dig the layout, its very clean looking. Parts of the slideshow are kinda cool, like the hover effects for photos on the bottom & changing of the background color by hovering. But, thats about it. I found the transitions kinda jerky & not buttery smooth like ours.

It does say that selling prints & downloads are coming soon. Hmmm, interesting. Smugmug still rocks though! :thumb

[Baldy]

Features-wise you have them covered, but interface wise they are a notch above IMHO. Someone recently told me that people's visual impression of a product is a very important factor in their overall willingness to use it.Competition brings out the best in everyone and I noticed that they have a more polished look, starting with the buttons. We've been thinking about Project Polish for awhile, and they just accelerated the process. :D

[DanielB]

they're slideshows pretty cool but what really grabs me about it is that mouse-over background color thing on the right... thats really cool:D

[jfriend]

Competition brings out the best in everyone and I noticed that they have a more polished look, starting with the buttons. We've been thinking about Project Polish for awhile, and they just accelerated the process. :D
OK, while we're on the subject here's some UI style feedback:

Gallery page numbers in Zen are buttons, not just text. This makes them both look better (more polished) and makes the clickable area larger so they aren't so hard to hit with the mouse on a high res screen. Here's what their's look like:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69967602-O.jpg

The ability to see EXIF data with a mouse hover over the upper right corner of the image and don't have to click, open a new window, then click to close like in Smugmug. Here's what theirs looks like:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69968734-O.jpg

Smugmug's version is looking pretty tired:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69968260-M.jpg

After I've hit next a couple of times, I absolutely love that they are doing pre-fetching. In the cases where I'm paging through a gallery at the large size, the pre-fetching makes a huge difference and really makes it feel snappy.

Their Send Link functionality seems cleaner.
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69969342-M.jpg

Smugmug's style picker has always look unfinished, unaligned with anything and generally wasteful of nearly a whole line of space in the UI. Basically, windows drop-down lists look ugly these days. This is what I'm talking about:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69967846-O.jpg

[rainforest1155]

Gallery page numbers in Zen are buttons, not just text. This makes them both look better (more polished) and makes the clickable area larger so they aren't so hard to hit with the mouse on a high res screen. Here's what their's look like:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69967602-O.jpg

[...]
Smugmug's style picker has always look unfinished, unaligned with anything and generally wasteful of nearly a whole line of space in the UI. Basically, windows drop-down lists look ugly these days. This is what I'm talking about:
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/69967846-O.jpg
The page numbers are text, too, but with an added background image that provides a very prominent hover effect. I would like to have something similar for smugmug, too.

Concerning the style picker: It has always bothered me that the thing wastes a whole line of the precious window height on customized sites. I've fixed them to the top right edge on my site by giving a specific pixel position, but I don't like it that way. Would be much better if we could have something like 'smugsearch' for the style picker, too! That way everybody could position it in the header or footer were he wants it.


Sebastian

[Matthew Saville]

Zenfolio just looks like a clone of SM to me.

SM has a booming business, they are really a niche in my opinion because they offer WAY more than any other host out there. Naturally, someone else will want in on the action. It's called capitalism.

Zenfolio has simply joined in on offering the exact same things that SM offers. They listened to a few complaints from SM users and made differences in those areas, they made a nice snazzy interface that is essentially the same as SM but a little more slick looking, and ta-da, everyone goes "wow!"... But to me, it's just "something new" more than it is "something better".

Personally: I'm already nearly 5,000 images deep with SM, I already have hundreds of people who know my site is on SM, and I've already had more than enough of trying to learn new interfaces and whatnot. So I ain't gonna jump ship by any means, no matter what Zenfolio would offer. If anyone were to say "you should go to Zenfolio, they're so much nicer", that would only tell me I need to put more time into pimping out my current site.

However, they have yet to announce who they are going to team up with for a printing service. And if it's WHCC or MPix, I would really demand an "upgrade" of SM's printing options. We STILL have no panoramas nor true B&W prints, not to mention metallic prints or finishing services...

But that's a subject for another topic and another day.
-Matt-

[jfriend]

Zenfolio just looks like a clone of SM to me.

SM has a booming business, they are really a niche in my opinion because they offer WAY more than any other host out there. Naturally, someone else will want in on the action. It's called capitalism.

Zenfolio has simply joined in on offering the exact same things that SM offers. They listened to a few complaints from SM users and made differences in those areas, they made a nice snazzy interface that is essentially the same as SM but a little more slick looking, and ta-da, everyone goes "wow!"... But to me, it's just "something new" more than it is "something better".

Personally: I'm already nearly 5,000 images deep with SM, I already have hundreds of people who know my site is on SM, and I've already had more than enough of trying to learn new interfaces and whatnot. So I ain't gonna jump ship by any means, no matter what Zenfolio would offer. If anyone were to say "you should go to Zenfolio, they're so much nicer", that would only tell me I need to put more time into pimping out my current site.

However, they have yet to announce who they are going to team up with for a printing service. And if it's WHCC or MPix, I would really demand an "upgrade" of SM's printing options. We STILL have no panoramas nor true B&W prints, not to mention metallic prints or finishing services...

But that's a subject for another topic and another day.
-Matt-

So Since I started this thread, I want to make sure nobody interprets my motives here. I am not suggesting that Zenfolio is better than Smugmug or that anyone should think about switching and nobody should need to feel defensive. I did see some online postings by users (currently members of neither service) who thought that maybe Zenfolio "looked" better than Smugmug (superficially), so I started the thread to see if there was any good competitive ammunition to explain to them where Zenfolio was weak.

In the meantime, Baldy mentioned that maybe it was time for Smugmug to get a few cosmetic improvements so I thought it worthwhile to point out a few places where I like the cosmetics of Zenfolio vs. Smugmug.

To summarize, the point of this thread is to both help point out where Zenfolio is weaker than Smugmug and (since Baldy opened the door), to contribute ideas for how to improve the look of Smugmug.

[Baldy]

OK, while we're on the subject here's some UI style feedback:Great post, John. Very specific and helpful.

We're on a polish mission at the moment with a lot of focus on buttons and pull-down menus (I hate how rough the current ones look), so this is useful.

[pronvit]

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen


so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

[jfriend]

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen


so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

I think you are misinformed a bit about Smugmug. In my opinion, Smugmug has the best image quality out there. They even recently upgraded their algorithm to remove JPEG artifacts from a few of the smaller thumb sizes on certain kinds of images. They did not regenerate all existing images so you might be looking at a few old images or reading some older complaints.

I'm not sure what you think Zenfolio does with dynamic resizing that Smugmug doesn't. In Smugmug's slideshows, images are automatically generated to fit your screen size. And, with a feature just released yesterday, it's even possible for a user to generate any size image they want.

[flyingdutchie]

Great post, John. Very specific and helpful.

We're on a polish mission at the moment with a lot of focus on buttons and pull-down menus (I hate how rough the current ones look), so this is useful.

For changing gallery styles, I customized my site (http://www.streetsofboston.com)to not use the drop-down box but to use the top menu-bar instead... If smugmug ever is going to change the current drop-down box, i hope the overall way it works (behind the scenes) does not change (i.e. onchange on dropdown, causing a HTTP POST with certain input-fields having specific values). If this would change, i need to change quite a bit of JavaScripting :D

[rainforest1155]

smugmug
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)
Check out this thread (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241) - SM is thinking of a XL (1024x768) photo síze. Also you already get dynamic images sizes with the fullscreen slideshow like jfriend said.
Is there still a problem foreign characters? Could you point me a gallery where that happens - maybe the SM team wasn't notified about it. I know that there's still trouble with foreign characters in smugMaps - I see it with my German umlauts.

zenfolio
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen
Really? My standard gallery view at their page contains a big picture and there's a bar on the right that let's me switch between photo info and thumbnails. :wink

If you decide to go with smugmug be sure to use a coupon - that'll save you 5$ in your first year and the referrer 10$ - here's (http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=KsUKGc8HmF46c) mine. :wink

Sebastian

[pronvit]

Check out this thread (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241) - SM is thinking of a XL (1024x768) photo síze. Also you already get dynamic images sizes with the fullscreen slideshow like jfriend said.
Is there still a problem foreign characters? Could you point me a gallery where that happens - maybe the SM team wasn't notified about it. I know that there's still trouble with foreign characters in smugMaps - I see it with my German umlauts.


Really? My standard gallery view at their page contains a big picture and there's a bar on the right that let's me switch between photo info and thumbnails. :wink

If you decide to go with smugmug be sure to use a coupon - that'll save you 5$ in your first year and the referrer 10$ - here's (http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=KsUKGc8HmF46c) mine. :wink

Sebastian

1. I saw that thread, XL size is very good idea.
2. russian in captions itself is ok. but the problem is deeper - SM doesn't use UTF8 encoding so it's not possible to use different languages on one page and russian chars are encoded using char codes, eg. "Театр". browser converts this to russian text almost everywhere, but for example if you hold mouse over image text will be shown as "Т...." in popup. I think UTF8 is must-have. russian keywords just don't work, when I add russian keyword it doesn't show anywhere

3. what bar?? on the right I can see only short image info and two thumbnails for prev/next image, no way to get thumbnails for all images in gallery like in 'smugmug' view mode

[onethumb]

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)


Does anyone have an account at Zenfolio yet who can post comparison photos? I'd like to verify that our image quality is "poor" (generally, we feel we're the best on the net. But Zenfolio is brand-new, so they may have us beat).

We're adding an XL size (1024x768), and we also support custom render targets, so you can link to images of whatever size you want (1920x1200? 2048x1536?). Just specify the resolution as part of your URL and we'll resize it for you dynamically.

We support UTF-8 in many places in SmugMug, but we're not 100% yet. We plan to be 100% shortly, but we're still testing that. Plenty of Russian, Asian, and other non-Latin users are using SmugMug, with non-Latin captions, so I think that should work.


zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen

so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

Hmm, I haven't seen any evidence of the images being dynamically resized. As far as I know, we're the only photo sharing site that *does* do this. Their "fullscreen slideshow", for example, is really just a huge browser window with lots of empty space and a small image. But I really haven't spent much time on their site, so maybe I'm missing something? Got a URL I can see?

Password protecting individual photos is interesting. We haven't really heard that request, but we can think about it.

Again, I'd be shocked if our image quality didn't stack up against theirs.

Don

[rainforest1155]

2. russian in captions itself is ok. but the problem is deeper - SM doesn't use UTF8 encoding so it's not possible to use different languages on one page and russian chars are encoded using char codes, eg. "Театр". browser converts this to russian text almost everywhere, but for example if you hold mouse over image text will be shown as "Т...." in popup. I think UTF8 is must-have. russian keywords just don't work, when I add russian keyword it doesn't show anywhere

3. what bar?? on the right I can see only short image info and two thumbnails for prev/next image, no way to get thumbnails for all images in gallery like in 'smugmug' view mode
2. Oh I see - there are already a couple of threads (here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21665&highlight=utf-8), here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=19992&highlight=utf-8) and here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=18290&highlight=utf-8)) and JT even said something about it being tested long ago - let's see if we can't get the stone rolling again.
Concerning the keywords: yeah that's a problem by design, because the keyword is part of the URL in the browser - like my 'dailyphoto (http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/keyword/dailyphoto)' keyword - therefore I don't know what can be done about this. :dunno

3. Use this link (http://alexp.zenfolio.com/) from the first post and click on the featured gallery "month 2 - face making". Do you see the thumbnail sidebar now? Looks like they also got different view styles, because the not featured galleries display in the other style without the thumbnails at the side.

Sebastian

[rainforest1155]

We support UTF-8 in many places in SmugMug, but we're not 100% yet. We plan to be 100% shortly, but we're still testing that. Plenty of Russian, Asian, and other non-Latin users are using SmugMug, with non-Latin captions, so I think that should work.

Hmm, I haven't seen any evidence of the images being dynamically resized.
As I've posted over here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=310050#post310050) the <meta>-tag still doesn't contain UTF-8. :dunno

As for the dynamic resize: click on any picture and they'll show a lightbox with one resized to your browser window (keeping a fixed black margin) - here (http://alexp.zenfolio.com/p72829198/) for example.

Sebastian

[bwg]

3. Use this link (http://alexp.zenfolio.com/) from the first post and click on the featured gallery "month 2 - face making". Do you see the thumbnail sidebar now? Looks like they also got different view styles, because the not featured galleries display in the other style without the thumbnails at the side.
Sebastian
they have different templates you can specify for your gallery. they only appear to be owner-selectable though, not user selectable.

http://bigwebguy.smugmug.com/photos/70065029-M-1.jpg

[rainforest1155]

they have different templates you can specify for your gallery. they only appear to be owner-selectable though, not user selectable.
Thanks BWG, that clears things up. So did you sign up for an account? :D

Sebastian

[bwg]

Thanks BWG, that clears things up. So did you sign up for an account? :D

Sebastiannono. free 14 day trial. just checking out the competition is all.

[pronvit]

I uploaded two files http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/sm.jpg and http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/zf.jpg with images from SM and zenfolio. can you see artifacts around flower or just when green color ends on top? these images are from my accounts pronvit.smugmug.com and pronvit.zenfolio.com maybe the difference isn't very big but it's disturbing sometimes and when we're talking about profesional photo hosting, image quality is most important thing I think

russian tags work in flickr.com for example, try http://www.flickr.com/photos/pronvit/tags/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0/ so problem isn't in URLs

thanx for tip about different zenfolio layouts.

password-protecting individual photos are quite useful - in many galleries I can have photos that I don't want to show everybody and I can protect them. on SM I need to create separate gallery and move them to it - this isn't good for photo organization

[rainforest1155]

nono. free 14 day trial. just checking out the competition is all.
So you didn't just grab a screeny from there help pages.
Cool, would probably do it too, but time doesn't permit it at the moment.

Sebastian

[onethumb]

As I've posted over here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=310050#post310050) the <meta>-tag still doesn't contain UTF-8. :dunno

As for the dynamic resize: click on any picture and they'll show a lightbox with one resized to your browser window (keeping a fixed black margin) - here (http://alexp.zenfolio.com/p72829198/) for example.

Sebastian

We can't <meta> UTF-8 until we're 100% converted, otherwise things break. :)

Don

[rainforest1155]

russian tags work in flickr.com for example, try http://www.flickr.com/photos/pronvit/tags/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0/ so problem isn't in URLs
Cool, didn't know that you could even use russian characters in urls.
I'll make a feature request about this right away as I can't use German umlauts in keywords either! Correction - I've filed a request over here (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=310095&posted=1#post310095).

Sebastian

[rainforest1155]

We can't <meta> UTF-8 until we're 100% converted, otherwise things break. :)
Oh, yeah I alwas forget about the 80,000,000 photos that need to be handled. It's like the timeline feature I still haven't received, too. :wink

Sebastian

[onethumb]

As for the dynamic resize: click on any picture and they'll show a lightbox with one resized to your browser window (keeping a fixed black margin) - here (http://alexp.zenfolio.com/p72829198/) for example.

Sebastian

Hmm, so I'm not seeing that. It's not resizing to my window at all (I'm running at 1920x1200), I'm just getting a larger version of the image and tons of black space.

?

Don

[pronvit]

Hmm, so I'm not seeing that. It's not resizing to my window at all (I'm running at 1920x1200), I'm just getting a larger version of the image and tons of black space.

?

Don

maybe it doesn't work with soo big resolution:) but on my laptop 1280x800 it resizes when I press F11 for normal/fullscreen mode, same for desktop with 1280x1024

[rainforest1155]

Hmm, so I'm not seeing that. It's not resizing to my window at all (I'm running at 1920x1200), I'm just getting a larger version of the image and tons of black space.
Okay, I also was on 1280x1024 and had the impression they serve up on the fly, but now I had my old 19" CRT booted up to 1920x1440 @ 60Hz :huh and it seems that their XL size is 1100x794px.

Also they've been painfully slow recently for me - I downloaded an original at 10kb/s and for browsing that made a huge impact.

Sebastian

[Baldy]

I uploaded two files http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/sm.jpg and http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/zf.jpg with images from SM and zenfolio. Hi pronvit,

I've been trying to post them side-by-side here but use the same size images, since a small version will always look worse than a big one, but I'm sure I'm being dumb and missing something simple. How do I embed an image from Zenfolio in a post? The link it gives me seems to be to a whole page and not just the image.

Instead of linking directly, you seem to have moved the images to your server.

With regard to full-screen size, it appears to be their extra large display size:

Very Large image (1,100 pixels along the longest side for horizontal photos, 850 pixels along the longest side for vertical photos)

There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to sense your screen size and make special sizes that fit it. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Baldy

[Baldy]

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service.And by the way, I forgot to say thanks for thinking of us and giving it a try! :D

Whatever you end up choosing, you've asked some great questions, which will keep us honest.

[rainforest1155]

How do I embed an image from Zenfolio in a post? The link it gives me seems to be to a whole page and not just the image.

Very Large image (1,100 pixels along the longest side for horizontal photos, 850 pixels along the longest side for vertical photos)

There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to sense your screen size and make special sizes that fit it. Am I missing something?
I believe they're trying to protect the URLs to their images with Javascript and I haven't found anything on the site. So I guess they don't want people to hotlink images. Maybe BWG finds something about this topic.

From their filenaming scheme (p[imageid]-[single digit indicating size] )it looks like they've got 6 sizes. So far I've seen the following [single digits] in my browser cache:
0 - thumbnail (80px longest side)
1 - square thumbs (60px)
2 - ?? didn't have any in my cache
3 - medium (515x450px, 580x387px for landscape or 450px long for portrait)
4 - large (800px wide for landscape or 630px long for portrait)
5 - XL (1100px wide for landscape or 850px long for portrait)

Sebastian

[onethumb]

I uploaded two files http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/sm.jpg and http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/zf.jpg with images from SM and zenfolio. can you see artifacts around flower or just when green color ends on top? these images are from my accounts pronvit.smugmug.com and pronvit.zenfolio.com maybe the difference isn't very big but it's disturbing sometimes and when we're talking about profesional photo hosting, image quality is most important thing I think


Interesting. Their photo is 35% larger (aka 35% slower to load), but I'm unable to detect a difference on my high-end LCD. I suspect that on a lower resolution display the differences may be more apparent, but they're not for me.



russian tags work in flickr.com for example, try http://www.flickr.com/photos/pronvit/tags/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0/ so problem isn't in URLs

Yep, this is coming for SmugMug too.

Don

[dem]

Interesting. Their photo is 35% larger (aka 35% slower to load), but I'm unable to detect a difference on my high-end LCD. I suspect that on a lower resolution display the differences may be more apparent, but they're not for me.

I think they win here (on a calibrated iMac). The "sm" image has more artifacts along the top of the hood. Also, the "zf" image appears slightly sharper to me.

[onethumb]

I think they win here (on a calibrated iMac). The "sm" image has more artifacts along the top of the hood. Also, the "zf" image appears slightly sharper to me.

They're *clearly* sharpening more than we do. But unless that's configurable at Zenfolio, there's going to be problems for people who have already sharpened their photos to their taste prior to uploading.

Then the display sizes will appear way too sharpened and it'll add additional artifacts.

(One of the lessons learned from 70,000,000 photos :))

Don

[Baldy]

The unsharp mask swamp is a treacherous one. :uhoh We've had to back down from the level of unsharp mask we apply over time in response to user feedback and still we receive more pressure to go soft than we do for sharp.

Here's some history (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2719).

The main issue is the preference for portraits is soft but for shots of action, cars, and some landscapes it's sharp.

The deciding factor is the emotion level for someone whose close-up made their wrinkles and pores show is high, so we hear about them more. I don't think you can judge sharpness on one shot, especially of a child with perfect skin.

[AJNadershahi]

If you have restrictions set on original or large images from your gallery, SM slideshow ends up presenting very poor quality images because their system relys on upsampling from large images. Otherwise they have to upsample from medium sized images and the resulting slideshow is very pixelated and low quality.

So either you allow large or original sized images in your galleries so the slide shows look okay, (and risk having your images pilfered as I have witnessed), or you limit image sizes and suffer the consequences of visitors being presented with low resolution slideshow, or disable the option for slideshows completely.

[Ken CCP]

It looks to me like they have a less geeky interface. I'm a geek, I don't mind, I like control. But making layout choices more visual is cool

Some Gallery2 templates do that floating EXIf Thing it is cool

If they had e-commerce working and custom watermarks, I would comparing trial accounts.

[bwg]

If you have restrictions set on original or large images from your gallery, SM slideshow ends up presenting very poor quality images because their system relys on upsampling from large images. Otherwise they have to upsample from medium sized images and the resulting slideshow is very pixelated and low quality.

So either you allow large or original sized images in your galleries so the slide shows look okay, (and risk having your images pilfered as I have witnessed), or you limit image sizes and suffer the consequences of visitors being presented with low resolution slideshow, or disable the option for slideshows completely.okay....this is a designed and documented behavior of smugmug. How does it relate to this thread?

[wellman]

okay....this is a designed and documented behavior of smugmug. How does it relate to this thread?
:agree

[AJNadershahi]

okay....this is a designed and documented behavior of smugmug. How does it relate to this thread?
The slideshow function in Zenfolio doesn't behave this way. The images may not fill the whole screen, but what you see looks cleaner.

[armani]

To be honest: i LOVE their style. Design and buttons are simple but very classy to me. I also like their Lightbox: nothing else to see but the picture, it is centered (i really like that!), on a black background. And it all runs so smooth.

With our lightbox it takes longer for the picture to upload. Sometimes it mentions "uploading" but it doesnt....

[bwg]

The slideshow function in Zenfolio doesn't behave this way. The images may not fill the whole screen, but what you see looks cleaner.does the slideshow gallery style not accomplish the same thing?

zenfolio has 1 slideshow. smugmug has 2. one for specific viewing sizes (s/m/l) and one for full screen. if you disable originals and larges then sure the fullscreen slideshow wont be the best choice, but the slideshow gallery style will still work fine.

I think zenfolio did a better job with the presentation of their full screen slideshow (if you can call it full screen), but functionality wise i dont think they have an advantage.

[onethumb]

The slideshow function in Zenfolio doesn't behave this way. The images may not fill the whole screen, but what you see looks cleaner.

So basically they're violating your protection settings? Your customers can get nice high-resolution images even if you've told them not to?

That sounds like a Bad Idea.

Don

[DavidTO]

Why would they take up the whole screen if they're not going to use it?

[flyingdutchie]

So basically they're violating your protection settings? Your customers can get nice high-resolution images even if you've told them not to?

That sounds like a Bad Idea.

Don

I don't think they do...

With the full-screen slideshow, use the largest size possible (based on protection settings) and scale down to fit the (entire) screen. If this means that the image won't fill the entire screen, then that's OK.

[AJNadershahi]

So basically they're violating your protection settings? Your customers can get nice high-resolution images even if you've told them not to?

That sounds like a Bad Idea.

Don

From what I can see they still don't access or display full size or "large" images if you don't allow it. They display the images in smaller size, but higher quality because it's not being pixelated to fill a whole screen.

[peestandingup]

I sent them an email asking about upcoming features & they said all of these features are coming within the year.

-Custom domain names using CNAME (www.yourname.com (http://www.yourname.com))

-Ability to set print prices

-Ability to set prices for digital downloads

-Customizing your pages your own way

They also said they will be announcing soon who will handle their printing & that it will make some services "jealous".

For them being such a new service with only 6 months online, I must say im pretty impressed. Im not jumping ship from Smugmug or anything, but these guys seem to mean business & getting stuff together super fast.

[graphicknight]

Zenfolio seems too "busy" for me. Seems to be less focus on photographer's photo. I'm not drawn into the photos like I am at Smugmug. Could be because I'm just not used to seeing Zenfolio yet. Also, there seems to be too much Java and like. You can't right click a lot of the content and open it up in another window or tab. As with the galleries. With Smugmug I can open a photographers front page. Keep it open and right click subsequent galleries with them opening in a new tab or window. This is important to me, as it allows be to browse galleries and categories quicker. I suspect all the Java Zenfolio uses will really slow their sight down if they start getting more browsers and users.

Just my two cents.

Also, I have to say I find it unusual to see a thread posted about Zenfolio here within Smugmug's forums. Seems almost like someone taking a comment box or sheet about Burger King and posting it at McDonald's. Interesting.

[graphicknight]

One more thing....

A huge pet peeve for me. You cannot resize the slideshow window that pops up in Zenfolio. I think it's a big "NO, NO" when you start taking control and funtionality away from a user. Don't be messing with my browser windows! Sometimes, I like to shrink down a slide show window while I work on something else, all the while keeping an eye on the slideshow.

I write these things not to bash Zenfolio, but in hopes Smugmug won't follow suit with the same type of format.

[wrollins]

well i saw this thread and tried to check out what zenfolio had to offer, but ran into major browser layout issues!!!! anyone else seeing this?


i tried to view the popular and featured galleries from zenfolio's main site but i could not even access anything larger than the thumbnails :scratch so i don't know what's going on...


neither firefox nor ie would display anything correctly in ANY of the galleries i tried to check out. so no thanks. i'll stick with smugmug :thumb

[I Simonius]

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

WOW man that IS fast

Now if only SM could get that speed I'd be a happy chappy!

One thinmg you could mention is that SM has larger upload file capacity (for Pros)

[I Simonius]

We used to do this, too, since it's worth the extra bandwidth for speed, but in real world use, it wasn't noticeably better.

I haven't had a chance to play with them yet, but just hazarding a guess, I'll bet they're fast because they're new (Jan 2006) and don't have half a billion JPGs and millions of browsers per day. :)

I've heard great things about them, so we'll definitely check it out and see if there's anything we can learn - but we're so busy just implementing customer requested features we don't have a lot of time to do competitive research.

Don

Well I rerally do wish you could implement my request for better speed!
May be you're right and they are fast cos they're small ( at the moment) but as a non tech user Im really sorry to say it just sounds like an excuse. I don't mean that nastily!

[I Simonius]

So basically they're violating your protection settings? Your customers can get nice high-resolution images even if you've told them not to?

That sounds like a Bad Idea.

Don

YUP! REALLY bad!

[jfriend]

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com. (http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp)

As feedback for Smugmug, I've recently seen more users on some other online forums choosing Zenfolio, even after trying Smugmug. In a recent exchange, I asked why they chose Zenfolio. Here's the response I got:

I do not believe there is a bandwidth limit on my account. But e-mail their support to confirm, they are usually pretty quick to reply.
To answer the question on what I liked about Zenfolio over others, here is a short list:
- Much easier to use interface for uploading/managing photos and galleries - Groups/folders hierarchy that's completely free of any imposed structure
- Gorgeous page designs are much cleaner and more professional-looking to my eye. Since I do not know HTML or CSS, customizing my own pages with Smugmug was not an option, and the layouts and themes Zenfolio has are very very good. - A much better Slideshow
- More refined access protection where I can lock individual photos

A lot of this stuff is look-and-feel though so at the end of the day you should try them both and decide for yourself what "feels" better to you and your visitors.
Hope this helps.

The original thread at dpreview is here (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1034&thread=18939168).

[Andy]

The original thread at dpreview is here (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1034&thread=18939168).

Thanks. We'll read it for sure. But you should be aware of this, too:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=36689

[jfriend]

Thanks. We'll read it for sure. But you should be aware of this, too:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=36689

Bizzarre. I posted in OneThumbs thread in the open talk forum at dpreview. I can't believe Phil is think of banning all external links to Smugmug. That's hardly going to be in his own best interests.

[peestandingup]

OK, I signed up for the Unlimited Account ($35 after referral code) over at Zenfolio almost a month ago after using the (no credit card) trial version for a few days. I started getting interested after really using it to browse other peoples galleries, so I wanted to give it a shot & do a real in depth review of the service, not just nose around the site for a bit & then write it off as a Smugmug copy cat (which it isnt). I wanted to really get my hands dirty & use it just as much as I do my Smugmug site, which means uploading all my content, doing captions, rearranging stuff, setting up different page layouts/styles, and other options. What did I find out?

Smugmug has more features but Zenfolio has better browsing. I love the way it automatically resizes the main photo to fit peoples browser window & how the thumbnails arent actual links. That means each time you click on a new thumbnail or page number, the browsers page position stays put & doesnt make you scroll each time, which I find SUPER annoying in SM. (Yes, I know people can use Lightbox, but it doesnt allow you the same freedom as this with choosing thumbnails & such).

Zen also allows users to make their breadcrumb as deep as they want, which I find to be very useful at times. Everything looks nice & neat on the page, I like the way you hover over things to get info such as exif/download links/photo & gallery links/etc instead of having all that info strewn all over the page, the slideshow rocks pretty hard, and my god is this site fast! Most of the time it goes just as fast as I can click, which has a lot to do with the way they prefetch the images. But, I cant tell you how good that feels when you are dealing with a bunch of photos in a gallery & it goes that fast & doesnt make you scroll each time you view a new photo or page in a gallery.

But, like I said, Smugmug (as of now) has more pro features, more users, this awesome forum, great customer service. Although, I will say that everytime I have contacted Zenfolio support, they have replied within the same hour & were always extremely helpful & very nice too. What about prints? Smugmug all the way, no question. But, of course Zenfolio doesnt have a print service yet & they assure everyone its coming soon & will be a very robust system that will satisfy everyone, so we'll have to wait on that one to compare. Smugmug lets you customize your page with your own html/css code, which can be a good thing or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Zenfolio has pre-made templates (not just themes), which again can be a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on what you want to do with your page & how savy you are with coding, but I think its safe to say most people arent good with html/css. But, overall, there is no denying Zen is a VERY "Web 2.0" kind of setup & was built that way from the beginning.

So, for now, im keeping both accounts because I like different things about each service. Although, my Zenfolio site may get the pleasure of having my custom domain name point to it as soon as they get their CNAME switch in place, which they say is coming in the next week or two. So, for $40 a year, that aint bad at all!

I hope my little "review" helps. Cheers...Kerry

[onethumb]

OK, I signed up for the Unlimited Account ($35 after referral code) over at Zenfolio almost a month ago after using the (no credit card) trial version for a few days. I started getting interested after really using it to browse other peoples galleries, so I wanted to give it a shot & do a real in depth review of the service, not just nose around the site for a bit & then write it off as a Smugmug copy cat (which it isnt). I wanted to really get my hands dirty & use it just as much as I do my Smugmug site, which means uploading all my content, doing captions, rearranging stuff, setting up different page layouts/styles, and other options. What did I find out?

Smugmug has more features but Zenfolio has better browsing. I love the way it automatically resizes the main photo to fit peoples browser window & how the thumbnails arent actual links. That means each time you click on a new thumbnail or page number, the browsers page position stays put & doesnt make you scroll each time, which I find SUPER annoying in SM. (Yes, I know people can use Lightbox, but it doesnt allow you the same freedom as this with choosing thumbnails & such).

Zen also allows users to make their breadcrumb as deep as they want, which I find to be very useful at times. Everything looks nice & neat on the page, I like the way you hover over things to get info such as exif/download links/photo & gallery links/etc, the slideshow rocks, and my god is this site fast! Most of the time it goes just as fast as I can click, which has a lot to do with the way they prefetch the images. But, I cant tell you how good that feels when you are dealing with a bunch of photos in a gallery & it goes that fast & doesnt make you scroll each time you view a new photo or page in a gallery.

But, like I said, Smugmug (as of now) has more pro features, more users, this awesome forum, great customer service. Although, I will say that everytime I have contacted Zenfolio support, they have replied within the same hour & were always extremely helpful & very nice too. What about prints? Smugmug all the way, no question. But, of course Zenfolio doesnt have a print service yet & they assure everyone its coming soon & will be a very robust system that will satisfy everyone, so we'll have to wait on that one to compare. Smugmug lets you customize your page, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Zenfolio has pre-made templates, which again can be a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on what you want to do with your page. But, overall, there is no denying Zen is a VERY "Web 2.0" kind of setup & was built that way from the beginning.

So, for now, im keeping both accounts because I like different things about each service. Although, my Zenfolio site may get the pleasure of having my custom domain name point to it as soon as they get their CNAME switch in place, which they say is coming in the next week or two. So, for $40 a year, that aint bad at all!

I hope my little "review" helps. Cheers...Kerry

As you know, we rarely talk about future features, but I let the cat out of the bag (http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/06/14/welcome-google/) a little bit already when talking about Google's entrant, so...

The fast browsing stuff is coming to SmugMug, too. We've tested it a few times and never put it out because it makes the URLs uglier if you still want people to have nice links (which we do)... but I think we've now crossed the bridge that the speed benefit is worth it.

I wouldn't hold your breath, but it should be coming. :)

Thanks for the write up!

Don

[NikonGirl]

I also signed up for the free trial period - and eventually paid $15 for the Basic plan (I had a $10 coupon). For now, I plan on keeping both sites active.

I agree with Kerry - the speed at Zenfolio is awesome! And their slideshow is great! But my main reason for really liking Zenfolio is the fact that I don't have to scroll when viewing my galleries. I expressed my concern about scrolling in this thread: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=35038
Although I got answers, I didn't get a solution that didn't require me having to do something on my part - like pressing F11, or having to get rid of my status bar. To quote Andy, he blamed it on my "...fat status bar, and bookmarks bar". That may be true - but I guess my friends and family must also have the same fat status bar and bookmarks bar because they also have to scroll at my Smugmug site.

Anyway - I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents. For now, I'm happy with Smugmug (as always), but it's nice to have my account at Zenfolio as well.

[peestandingup]

As you know, we rarely talk about future features, but I let the cat out of the bag (http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/06/14/welcome-google/) a little bit already when talking about Google's entrant, so...

The fast browsing stuff is coming to SmugMug, too. We've tested it a few times and never put it out because it makes the URLs uglier if you still want people to have nice links (which we do)... but I think we've now crossed the bridge that the speed benefit is worth it.

I wouldn't hold your breath, but it should be coming. :)

Thanks for the write up!

Don Thanks, Don! You're welcome.

Glad you guys are working on improving browsing on smugmug. I definitely think the JavaScript/Ajax way of browsing photos is the way to go. It just makes for a more pleasing experience overall. I dont think the links part is that big of a deal. Especially if you put the "this is not a link" wording in the address bar like Zenfolio does.

[dmc]

...I agree with Kerry - the speed at Zenfolio is awesome! And their slideshow is great! But my main reason for really liking Zenfolio is the fact that I don't have to scroll when viewing my galleries. ....


Their slide show seems good, but the fade between pics was annoying and jumpy, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Slide shows are nice, but 1 pic at a time is just not good enough.

I still like my Journal Large (hacked) view best... (see it here (http://dmcpics.smugmug.com/gallery/1528779)) With Journal Large I get 10 pictures on one page, and I just scroll up and down to check em out. Load time is fast. I wish I could adjust how many pics per page, I would just set it to 100 and be able to a view a whole gallery nice and easy. My request (already on the request thread) is to give everyone more options in the journal style (pics per page, size, etc), I'm convinced that it is the easiest way to view pics. :1drink

[peestandingup]

Their slide show seems good, but the fade between pics was annoying and jumpy, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Yeah, I saw that too. Its a known bug that only affects Firefox & Safari. If you check it out in IE on XP, its smooth as butta.

[Mike Lane]

Yeah, I saw that too. Its a known bug that only affects Firefox & Safari. If you check it out in IE on XP, its smooth as butta.
the IROOONNNNNYYYYY!!!!

[dmc]

Yeah, I saw that too. Its a known bug that only affects Firefox & Safari. If you check it out in IE on XP, its smooth as butta.

interesting... I use IE 6 something on windows 2000, and it isn't smooth...hmmmm

[peestandingup]

the IROOONNNNNYYYYY!!!! LOL, my thoughts exactly! I didnt wanna say it. :D

interesting... I use IE 6 something on windows 2000, and it isn't smooth...hmmmm Not sure why its not smooth for you. It may require XP's version of IE. My girlfriend (err, wife) has XP SP1 & whatever version of IE that came with it (she never updates & we just did another clean install for reasons I wont go into, lol).

[TalkieT]

Zenfolio just looks like a clone of SM to me. (snippage)

-Matt-

Honestly, if they have Digital Downloads before SM, after at least 18 months of the feature being asked for here, I'm gone.

I don't sell any prints (by virtue of my entire target demographic being here in New Zealand with me) but I know that I would sell a bunch of Digital Downloads.

Official Smugmug peoples, if you're listening, you might want to break your silence on planned features for this one, unbelievably often requested feature.

Please.

Cheers - Neil G
www.nzsnaps.com

[peestandingup]

Honestly, if they have Digital Downloads before SM, after at least 18 months of the feature being asked for here, I'm gone.

I don't sell any prints (by virtue of my entire target demographic being here in New Zealand with me) but I know that I would sell a bunch of Digital Downloads.

Official Smugmug peoples, if you're listening, you might want to break your silence on planned features for this one, unbelievably often requested feature.

Please.

Cheers - Neil G
www.nzsnaps.com (http://www.nzsnaps.com) I cant speak for Zenfolio, but I asked that specific question a while back & they said prints are coming in a couple months, paid digital downloads probably within this calendar year.

Im sure Smugmug is working on that too.

[kevin.coppalotti]

I read this thread with interest, because I am curious about Zenfolio as well. My main concern is Halos on pics I upload to DP Review. When a viewer uses the DP review magnification tool (magnify twice) Halos become evident with my smugmug pics that are not in the original picture that I prepared for upload. I'm not sure how to get rid of halos in the uploaded image.
Zenfolio seems to have less halos.
I posted a side by side test onto DP review, it may get deleted however, after recent events. Link below.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1018&message=18967522

[onethumb]

Thanks, Don! You're welcome.

Glad you guys are working on improving browsing on smugmug. I definitely think the JavaScript/Ajax way of browsing photos is the way to go. It just makes for a more pleasing experience overall. I dont think the links part is that big of a deal. Especially if you put the "this is not a link" wording in the address bar like Zenfolio does.

Actually, we think linking is 100% necessary. We wouldn't do it if the links weren't easily copy & pasteable - too many people use them to share via email, forums, and blogs.

Interesting that Zenfolio's doesn't work - that sounds like a big drag, to me. I thought for sure they would.

Don

[peestandingup]

Actually, we think linking is 100% necessary. We wouldn't do it if the links weren't easily copy & pasteable - too many people use them to share via email, forums, and blogs.

Interesting that Zenfolio's doesn't work - that sounds like a big drag, to me. I thought for sure they would.

Don Doesnt work?? I have direct photo linking turned off for visitors, but they can still link to the gallery itself or photo within the gallery. You have to click on the "Send Link" button in the upper-right & you get these links:

Gallery Link (http://kerry.zenfolio.com/p360886154/)
Photo Within Gallery Link (http://kerry.zenfolio.com/p360886154/?photo=497081937)

Only I may see the links to the photos themselves. I can choose between 7 different sizes. Here is "Medium (580 x 435)"

http://www.zenfolio.com/img/p497081937-3.jpg

[peestandingup]

And here are the other sizes they offer me for direct linking:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/peestandingup/zensizes.jpg

[onethumb]

Doesnt work?? I have direct photo linking turned off for visitors, but they can still link to the gallery itself or photo within the gallery. You have to click on the "Send Link" button in the upper-right & you get these links:

Gallery Link (http://kerry.zenfolio.com/p360886154/)
Photo Within Gallery Link (http://kerry.zenfolio.com/p360886154/?photo=497081937)

Only I may see the links to the photos themselves. I can choose between 7 different sizes. Here is "Medium (580 x 435)"

Yes, but most people don't do that. "Reading is hard" and teaching people new interfaces is hard.

99% of the people browsing SmugMug simply copy and paste the URL in their browser bar to share.

If that doesn't work, you're going to have pissed off people. :)

Don

[rainforest1155]

And here are the other sizes they offer me for direct linking:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/peestandingup/zensizes.jpg
Smugmug offers the same except for the square thumb and the very large (should be coming soon). Also smugmug has got another thumb size, which is 100px I think. Plus you can resize the image on the fly to any size you want to in direct linking (imageID-500x500 - to get a 500px wide or high image - aspect ratio is maintained in any case). :wink

Sebastian

[peestandingup]

Smugmug offers the same except for the square thumb and the very large (should be coming soon). Also smugmug has got another thumb size, which is 100px I think. Plus you can resize the image on the fly to any size you want to in direct linking (imageID-500x500 - to get a 500px wide or high image - aspect ratio is maintained in any case). :wink

Sebastian Well, in all honesty, they both offer different sized thumbnails (which isnt a big deal to most), but the kicker is Zen's "Very Large" size that puts it ahead for now. Thats just my opinion though. Yes, SM is probably getting a Very Large size too, but "getting" & "got" are two different things.

And Zenfolio also has resizing on the fly thats pretty similar. Right-click on the photo I provided above & choose to view it separately. In the address bar, at the end you will see "-3.jpg". Change that "3" to any number from 0-5 (0 is the smallest, 5 is the biggest) & that changes the size of the image. Take that number away (along with the dash) & that is the original size. I dont know about sizing it to any random size you want. Havent tried that.

[bwg]

Well, in all honesty, they both offer different sized thumbnails (which isnt a big deal to most), but the kicker is Zen's "Very Large" size that puts it ahead for now. Thats just my opinion though.

And Zenfolio also has resizing on the fly thats a little easier actually. Right-click on the photo I provided above & choose to view it separately. In the address bar, at the end you will see "-3.jpg". Change that "3" to any number from 0-5 (0 is the smallest, 5 is the biggest) & that changes the size of the image. Take that number away (along with the dash) & that is the original size.

Is that easy enough?that's not the same as SM on the fly resizing. SM already has that capability..it's just called Ti, Th, S, M, L, O instead of 0-5.

with the SM on the fly feature you can plug in any arbitrary size and have that photo generated on the fly.

for example if you want an extra large photo from sm you would request http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)

or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)
or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1300x1000.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)
or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1234x987.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)

[peestandingup]

that's not the same as SM on the fly resizing. SM already has that capability..it's just called Ti, Th, S, M, L, O instead of 0-5.

with the SM on the fly feature you can plug in any arbitrary size and have that photo generated on the fly.

for example if you want an extra large photo from sm you would request http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)

or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)
or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1300x1000.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg)
or http://name.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1234x987.jpg (http://nickname.smugmug.com/photos/12345678-1200x900.jpg) Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah, I realized what he was talking about & edited my post right before you posted this. You're too damn quick, BWG! :D See:

Well, in all honesty, they both offer different sized thumbnails (which isnt a big deal to most), but the kicker is Zen's "Very Large" size that puts it ahead for now. Thats just my opinion though. Yes, SM is probably getting a Very Large size too, but "getting" & "got" are two different things.

And Zenfolio also has resizing on the fly thats pretty similar. Right-click on the photo I provided above & choose to view it separately. In the address bar, at the end you will see "-3.jpg". Change that "3" to any number from 0-5 (0 is the smallest, 5 is the biggest) & that changes the size of the image. Take that number away (along with the dash) & that is the original size. I dont know about sizing it to any random size you want. Havent tried that.

[rainforest1155]

Yes, SM is probably getting a Very Large size too, but "getting" & "got" are two different things.

And Zenfolio also has resizing on the fly thats pretty similar. Right-click on the photo I provided above & choose to view it separately. In the address bar, at the end you will see "-3.jpg". Change that "3" to any number from 0-5 (0 is the smallest, 5 is the biggest) & that changes the size of the image. Take that number away (along with the dash) & that is the original size. I dont know about sizing it to any random size you want. Havent tried that.
You're right with that they got it already, but if you want the XL size for direct linking, you can have it on smugmug also now. Just add any size (like -1200x1200) instead of the -Th,-Ti,-S,-M,-L or -O. Don't forget to allow originals and larges in your gallery settings though or you will just get upsamples of the smaller images.

Sebastian

[alexisgm]

I'm quite new to this online photo sharing stuff. I've always wanted an easy way to show my friends and family my pictures from travel and stuff, and when I found smugmug, I was really happy. I finally found a site that had all the features that I was looking for. I signed up for the regular account and paid my annual fee. After using smugmug for a few weeks, I really enjoy smugmug.

The one thing that bothered me the most though was that sometimes the site can seem "slow". It's really not that slow--there is just a small lag between pressing the next button and seeing the image--but slow enough so that someone that trying to look at an album with a hundred pictures might get a little annoyed. At the time I thought that there was just nothing that could be done about this problem because of bandwith issues and whatnot, but then I came accross Zenfolio. I like the design and all, but the one thing that caught my eye was the increadible picture browsing speed. I mean, it was just as fast as browsing them locally on my desktop! Because of this alone, I signed up for unlimited account and now use Zenfolio as my main picture site. I kind of feel bad about it though because I really like the friendliness and helpfulness of the people at smugmug.

Anyway, I'll keep both my accounts for the year and see how things change. If smugmug can match Zenfolio's browsing speed that would be great!

Since were on this topic, anothing thing that could be improved at Smugmug is that it would be nice if there was a central place where we could organize and take care of all of our albums and category. As it stands now, I find this process way too complicated. For example, put an album into a new custom named category, I have to first go to "organize and cutomize" in the control panel and select "category" to create the said category. I can't even create categories and sub-categories on the same page! Then you have to go to the album you want to move and select "customize" and finally you'll be able to move your gallery into the new custom sub-category. Phew! Instead of all this, why not have a page where you can see and modify the whole structure of your site?

Well, I'll stop my writing this message now as it is allready way too long. Sorry about that. I'm just trying to give Smugmug some feedback so that they can improve their product even more. Thanks,

Alexis

[peestandingup]

Since were on this topic, anothing thing that could be improved at Smugmug is that it would be nice if there was a central place where we could organize and take care of all of our albums and category. As it stands now, I find this process way too complicated. For example, put an album into a new custom named category, I have to first go to "organize and cutomize" in the control panel and select "category" to create the said category. I can't even create categories and sub-categories on the same page! Then you have to go to the album you want to move and select "customize" and finally you'll be able to move your gallery into the new custom sub-category. Phew! Instead of all this, why not have a page where you can see and modify the whole structure of your site? YES! That is something I should have included in my little write up earlier.

In Zenfolio, literally ALL options, edits, captions, titles, keywords, gallery/group creation, access controls, deleting, descriptions, uploading, re-arranging, etc is done in ONE centralized location for your entire content. And I mean everything!

This sounds like a bad idea because you would think thats too much info on one page, but its not like that at all & is actually very simple. You have a list of all your galleries/groups on the left & you just click on which ever one you want to make edits to, upload to (or whatever), then all the content appears inside the main area in the center with the options on the right. You can go deeper in your breadcrumb from there & make changes to any part of it. Then, you can view it as a guest would to see if its to your liking.

Its very refreshing & empowering to have all your controls in one place.

[peestandingup]

BTW, im really not trying to be overly critical of SM. If it sounds like that, its only because I like SM soo much. I do that with any product or service I love because I want them to be better.

You should see me on some of the Apple forums. WooWee! :D

[jfriend]

YES! That is something I should have included in my little write up earlier.

In Zenfolio, literally ALL options, edits, captions, titles, keywords, gallery/group creation, access controls, deleting, descriptions, uploading, re-arranging, etc is done in ONE centralized location for your entire content. And I mean everything!

This sounds like a bad idea because you would think thats too much info on one page, but its not like that at all & is actually very simple. You have a list of all your galleries/groups on the left & you just click on which ever one you want to make edits to, upload to (or whatever), then all the content appears inside the main area in the center with the options on the right. You can go deeper in your breadcrumb from there & make changes to any part of it. Then, you can view it as a guest would to see if its to your liking.

Its very refreshing & empowering to have all your controls in one place.

I'd have to agree that Smugmug's settings are scattered all over the place, not easy to find and not easy to do a multi-step operation in one place. Here's something I tried to do yesterday. I wanted to create a new gallery, in a custom category and custom sub-category. I go to create my new gallery. I faintly remember that I can't create categories or sub-categories here. I have to find where you can create them. I find them in the control panel. I have to first create the category. Then I have to create the sub-category. Then, I have to go back to the create a gallery screen. Then, after creating the gallery, I have to go to the options screen to set the options the way I want it. All in all, I have to go four different places to do this.

IMHO, it should be that you go one place to create a gallery and, if you need to, you can also create categories, sub-categories for it and set custom options on the gallery all from that one place.

[rainforest1155]

Yes, but most people don't do that. "Reading is hard" and teaching people new interfaces is hard.

99% of the people browsing SmugMug simply copy and paste the URL in their browser bar to share.

If that doesn't work, you're going to have pissed off people. :)
Amen. Whatever you do with the new AJAX browsing stuff, please keep the old link system alive if possible. I just like the way I can easily link directly to photos with the image ID and to photos in galleries with the image ID and gallery ID.

There's one thing about linking which always bothered me, because I almost always use traditional view. The links (e.g. http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/1582255/1/77938696) you got when using smugmug style are not working for a user with traditional/all thumbs! They result in showing the thumbs instead of the one picture someone wants to show me. Therefore I'm never sure what links to give out to people/post in forums. Often I decided using the single view links (http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/1582255/1/77938696/Medium), but they hide the cool smugmug view for visitors not familiar with smugmug and also force a viewing size.
I just want a redirect to single view when the visitor has traditional/all thumbs set for added conveniance that the user is getting the picture I want him to get.

I think I already posted this in either the feature request/bug thread long ago.

Thanks,
Sebastian

[bwg]

Amen. Whatever you do with the new AJAX browsing stuff, please keep the old link system alive if possible. I just like the way I can easily link directly to photos with the image ID and to photos in galleries with the image ID and gallery ID.

There's one thing about linking which always bothered me, because I almost always use traditional view. The links (e.g. http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/1582255/1/77938696) you got when using smugmug style are not working for a user with traditional/all thumbs! They result in showing the thumbs instead of the one picture someone wants to show me. Therefore I'm never sure what links to give out to people/post in forums. Often I decided using the single view links (http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/1582255/1/77938696/Medium), but they hide the cool smugmug view for visitors not familiar with smugmug and also force a viewing size.
I just want a redirect to single view when the visitor has traditional/all thumbs set for added conveniance that the user is getting the picture I want him to get.

I think I already posted this in either the feature request/bug thread long ago.

Thanks,
Sebastiansebastian, i know this isn't a 100% solution, but you could use my lightbox hack (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32708) to give you that capability. if you use a url like: http://bigwebguy.smugmug.com/gallery/1570395/1/75931688?Large it will auto-open lightbox with the photo displayed.

edit: you have to paste that link, clicking wont trigger it. this is by design.

[bwg]

I'd have to agree that Smugmug's settings are scattered all over the place, not easy to find and not easy to do a multi-step operation in one place. Here's something I tried to do yesterday. I wanted to create a new gallery, in a custom category and custom sub-category. I go to create my new gallery. I faintly remember that I can't create categories or sub-categories here. I have to find where you can create them. I find them in the control panel. I have to first create the category. Then I have to create the sub-category. Then, I have to go back to the create a gallery screen. Then, after creating the gallery, I have to go to the options screen to set the options the way I want it. All in all, I have to go four different places to do this.

IMHO, it should be that you go one place to create a gallery and, if you need to, you can also create categories, sub-categories for it and set custom options on the gallery all from that one place.i agree too, this is one of the functional elements of zenfolio i really liked.

[I Simonius]

I'd have to agree that Smugmug's settings are scattered all over the place, not easy to find and not easy to do a multi-step operation in one place. Here's something I tried to do yesterday. I wanted to create a new gallery, in a custom category and custom sub-category. I go to create my new gallery. I faintly remember that I can't create categories or sub-categories here. I have to find where you can create them. I find them in the control panel. I have to first create the category. Then I have to create the sub-category. Then, I have to go back to the create a gallery screen. Then, after creating the gallery, I have to go to the options screen to set the options the way I want it. All in all, I have to go four different places to do this.

IMHO, it should be that you go one place to create a gallery and, if you need to, you can also create categories, sub-categories for it and set custom options on the gallery all from that one place.

I really agree with all these lasts posts on this topic, the control could do with a MAJOR overhaul:thumb

[rainforest1155]

sebastian, i know this isn't a 100% solution, but you could use my lightbox hack (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32708) to give you that capability. if you use a url like: http://bigwebguy.smugmug.com/gallery/1570395/1/75931688?Large it will auto-open lightbox with the photo displayed.

edit: you have to paste that link, clicking wont trigger it. this is by design.
Thanks for the idea, but this is not much of a difference to add ?Large instead of /Large. And I also don't like to add too much JS. Especially since I've seen how a visitor of my site tried to open the standard LB with Opera...'loading.....loading....', but nothing showed up.

Sebastian

PS: Why can't I click the link? And why is this so by design?

[bwg]

Thanks for the idea, but this is not much of a difference to add ?Large instead of /Large. And I also don't like to add too much JS. Especially since I've seen how a visitor of my site tried to open the standard LB with Opera...'loading.....loading....', but nothing showed up.

Sebastian

PS: Why can't I click the link? And why is this so by design?

yeah but with /Large you get singleImage view which you said you didnt want. there is also a switch you can set in the hack to make singleImage url's open up in lightbox, it's off by default.

the hack just piggybacks on the existing SM lightbox so i cant fix the opera issues.

the paste vs. click thing is just because i'm lazy. I couldnt figure out a way to not display the lightbox again if someone hit the back button, which IMHO is undesirable. The easiest approach was to make it paste only. I could probably figure out a workaround if i put more effort into it.

[beeplove]

I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Don

I never tried zenfolio..
But smugmug slideshow is not great !
Its can't be nice to stretch just to fill up the entire window, that degrade image quality and viewer get a negative impression about image, its better to show in smaller size and keep the image quality.

Thanks,

[peestandingup]

Does anyone have an account at Zenfolio yet who can post comparison photos? I'd like to verify that our image quality is "poor" (generally, we feel we're the best on the net. But Zenfolio is brand-new, so they may have us beat). Sure, here goes!

Smugmug:
http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com/photos/60874868-567x850.jpg

Zenfolio:
http://www.zenfolio.com/img/p45366402-5.jpg

Notice the polka dots on her dress towards her neck. There is more noise on the Smugmug one overall. Thats what I see anyways. Also, look into & around her eyes. Noise is more apparent there too.

The Zenfolio image just looks more pleasing to my eyes.

[kevin.coppalotti]

[I'm viewing these two pics on a 1280 x 1064 CRT and cannot see any difference between the two pics above. The examples I posted on DP Review really had to be pixel peeped using the DP review magnification tool to notice the effect of the extra compression of the Smugmug version.

[bwg]

Sure, here goes!

Notice the polka dots on her dress towards her neck. There is more noise on the Smugmug one overall. Thats what I see anyways. Also, look into & around her eyes. Noise is more apparent there too.

The Zenfolio image just looks more pleasing to my eyes.i cant comment on the quality until i get home...my lcd's here at work are crap so i cant be sure of what i'm seeing. However the zenfolio image is approx 58KB larger so that needs to be taken into consideration.

[peestandingup]

OK, here comes some cropped goodness.

Smugmug:
http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com/photos/78281135-1100x630.jpg

Zenfolio:
http://www.zenfolio.com/img/p493938681-5.jpg

Look towards the bottom of both images. There are clearly artifacts in the Smugmug image on my huge 30 inch LCD monitor. They are mostly around the white dots in her dress. I cant see any in the Zenfolio image.

[bwg]

OK, here comes some cropped goodness.

Look towards the bottom of both images. There are clearly artifacts in the Smugmug image on my huge 30 inch LCD monitor. They are mostly around the white dots in her dress. I cant see any in the Zenfolio image.is that a crop of the original image?

[peestandingup]

is that a crop of the original image?
Yup. Image was taken with a Canon 20D & was originally 2336 x 3504. Cropped it in iPhoto to 1800 x 1031, exported it, then uploaded that to Smugmug & Zenfolio.

[Cameron]

Sure, here goes!
The Zenfolio image just looks more pleasing to my eyes.


Ok, I could see a SLIGHT difference when you uploaded 100% crops, but looking at the two smaller images (as I would see them in an online gallery), I see no obvious differences on my 20" monitor. Also, it's worth noting that the Zenfolio image is more than 50% larger than the Smugmug one - they're obviously using less compression which would account for the difference. The issue of speed vs quality has frequently been addressed. I think Smugmug has found a good balance. If anyone wants to do extreme pixel peeping on my images, they're not going to be doing it on the medium or even large gallery versions - I'd save that for viewing of originals (which are not further compressed by either service).

[peestandingup]

Ok, I could see a SLIGHT difference when you uploaded 100% crops, but looking at the two smaller images (as I would see them in an online gallery), I see no obvious differences on my 20" monitor. Also, it's worth noting that the Zenfolio image is more than 50% larger than the Smugmug one - they're obviously using less compression which would account for the difference. The issue of speed vs quality has frequently been addressed. I think Smugmug has found a good balance. If anyone wants to do extreme pixel peeping on my images, they're not going to be doing it on the medium or even large gallery versions - I'd save that for viewing of originals (which are not further compressed by either service). I see your point. However, if you enable Larges in your galleries & a visitor/customer blows an image up to that size, thats plenty big enough to see the artifacts I pointed out. And the "Large" size is actually quite small compared to what an "Extra Large" size would be or when you link to an image thats in your gallery & use the resize "on the fly" method to input a random larger size. You can see where this could get into problems.

See the image in the gallery here (http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com/gallery/1294158/3/60874868/Large). I can still see the artifacts & thats really not that big at all in terms of size. But I do totally understand that Smugmug has to conserve space & in order for that to happen, there are gonna be compressed oddities like this.

[Andy]

Yup. Image was taken with a Canon 20D & was originally 2336 x 3504. Cropped it in iPhoto to 1800 x 1031, exported it, then uploaded that to Smugmug & Zenfolio.
And showed at -O (orig) size?

[Andy]

I never tried zenfolio..
But smugmug slideshow is not great !
Its can't be nice to stretch just to fill up the entire window, that degrade image quality and viewer get a negative impression about image, its better to show in smaller size and keep the image quality.

Thanks,
Hi Beep,

are you showing slideshow from Originals or from -L (Large size?)

[peestandingup]

And showed at -O (orig) size? No, both images are shown at 1100 x 630. The XL (-5) setting in Zenfolio was used which came out to that size & Smugmug was set to that same size "on the fly" since they dont have that same "XL" size. But, you can change them both to whatever size you want in the address bar when viewing them separately in your browser.

Showing at "Original" would look the same on both since those wouldnt be compressed files.

[Malte]

Password protecting individual photos is interesting. We haven't really heard that request, but we can think about it.

Don

:cry But... but I've asked for it. If you decide to implement this I say one-up them by letting me create login-names in addition to password, and have only photos appropriate for the specific user be visible.

Malte

[bwg]

:cry But... but I've asked for it. If you decide to implement this I say one-up them by letting me create login-names in addition to password, and have only photos appropriate for the specific user be visible.

Maltezenfolio already kinda has this where you can specify access to other registered users. I'm with you malte, this would be a GREAT feature for smugmug.

[dlobel]

Hey Don,

As for the slideshow, I don't know if "...rocks theirs..." is so appropriate. I've been dicussing with Andy about issues with the slideshow, particularly in full screen mode. And especially when you have large files. The slideshow will display a distored image once in a while and can improperly fade and move to the next image (Andy was experiencing some of the same the other day). It's to the point that I've turned off the slideshow because of too many complaints from clients.

The "smaller" slideshows are great for what they are intended to provide. Personally, I'll ditch the fullscreen and concentrate on a dedicated window size.

-Dave-


I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Don

[Malte]

zenfolio already kinda has this where you can specify access to other registered users. I'm with you malte, this would be a GREAT feature for smugmug.

Wow. I thought I was just about the only one who wanted this, and here I have the legendary BWG in my corner... :bow Thanks man, err or whatever. Maybe we can scare up some traction for this thing? :D

Malte

[bwg]

Wow. I thought I was just about the only one who wanted this, and here I have the legendary BWG in my corner... :bow Thanks man, err or whatever. Maybe we can scare up some traction for this thing? :D

Maltei've seen a few other requests for this as well...so we're not the only ones. Since Don replied to the post, i'll assume that it's on whatever list they have going over there...but standard disclaimer applies. I have no more access to feature status than you do so we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe send Andy a few racks of ribs to see if you can get him motivated.

[Andy]

Maybe send Andy a few racks of ribs

This could *never* hurt the cause :lol3

[Malte]

i've seen a few other requests for this as well...so we're not the only ones. Since Don replied to the post, i'll assume that it's on whatever list they have going over there...but standard disclaimer applies. I have no more access to feature status than you do so we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe send Andy a few racks of ribs to see if you can get him motivated.

Hmm, racks of ribs... I think they'd turn on the way from Sweden to NY, might have the opposite effect. :puke1

Malte

[Malte]

To not be a hijacker-of-threads, anyone else react to the pricing on ZF? $40 per year for unlimited storage and no ads. I'd like to see their business plan because I doubt that price is going to last.

Malte

[Malte]

This could *never* hurt the cause :lol3

What's your favourite deli that delivers?

Malte

[rainforest1155]

To not be a hijacker-of-threads, anyone else react to the pricing on ZF? $40 per year for unlimited storage and no ads. I'd like to see their business plan because I doubt that price is going to last.

Malte
Smugmug's standard account (also offering unlimited storage without ads) was at 30$ for many years and only recently got raised to 40$. :dunno
In my opinion *they* started the unlimited thingy for photo sharing sites. :wink

Sebastian

[peestandingup]

To not be a hijacker-of-threads, anyone else react to the pricing on ZF? $40 per year for unlimited storage and no ads. I'd like to see their business plan because I doubt that price is going to last. I have thought about this too. Because when they get their print service w/ custom pricing up in a couple months + their CNAME domain name switch in a couple weeks, not to mention all the other nice little features they already have now/coming soon (hello, paid digital downloads) & they keep the pricing the same $40, IMHO thats gonna be the deal of the century & it will be hard for SM to compete at the current pricing structure.

Because as it is now, I already think the $40 Zenfolio account is a better deal than Smugmug's Standard ($40) & Power ($60) accounts, especially when they get CNAME in place. Thats just my opinion.

Maybe Zen will make another "pro" level account type that costs more, but im not sure they will. I already know for sure that the CNAME switch is gonna be free for the Unlimited ($40) accounts.

[dlobel]

MPerdomo,

Though I agree with you that SM has very good and responsive support, and they do their best to make us all content, I'm curious how you "doubt" ZenFolio will have the same customer support as Smugmug. What's your basis for that stance?

Thanks.

-Dave-

Im not really that impressed by them.

I prefer Smugmug's simple layout to the Zenfolio approach.

Also, according to the features listing, they don't support printing photos or customization

And I doubt they will have the same customer support as Smugmug. They look interesting, but I am a loyal Smugmug customer, and probably will be for a while.

[Malte]

Signed up for the trial and my very superficial first impressions are: very slick, less geared towards pros and tuners, more user friendly. I'd describe it as Flickr and Smugmug meeting in the middle, if that makes any sense.

Malte

[kevin.coppalotti]

Signed up for the trial and my very superficial first impressions are: very slick, less geared towards pros and tuners, more user friendly. I'd describe it as Flickr and Smugmug meeting in the middle, if that makes any sense.

Malte


I also am running a test gallery, my impressions are its very fast, very clean looking interface, pictures look good, and a slide show to do die for. Me like!

[peestandingup]

MPerdomo,

Though I agree with you that SM has very good and responsive support, and they do their best to make us all content, I'm curious how you "doubt" ZenFolio will have the same customer support as Smugmug. What's your basis for that stance? Well, like I said in an earlier post. I have contacted Zenfolio's customer support several times & they always got back to me super quick, were extremely helpful & very nice to boot. I even exchanged about 10 emails of screenshots & stuff one day directly with their in-house programming guy to resolve a problem with certain older versions of IE not displaying thumbnails. It was fixed that same day.

Not saying either service is better than the other, but from my experience, Zenfolio's CS is pretty great & so is Smugmug's.

[peestandingup]

The people at Zenfolio just released a pretty major update (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/releaseNotes.aspx) today. Most notably, a new feature called Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) as well as true custom domain names using CNAME. Here (http://www.photosbykerry.com/) is mine! They also got their links in the address bar working now. So, that should help with user confusion, as Don pointed out earlier.

Hmmm, they are looking better & better. I think I might just have to switch permanently & let my Smugmug account go. Im not sure yet, though. I just really REALLY love the way you browse photos with them. Plus, one of the biggest reasons why I got a Pro Smugmug account was so I could use my own custom domain name & thats $150. Its only $40 with Zenfolio. And I dont sell many prints anyways right now. I might later, so they should have their custom print prices feature in place by then anyways.

[jfriend]

The people at Zenfolio just released a pretty major update (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/releaseNotes.aspx) today. Most notably, a new feature called Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) as well as true custom domain names using CNAME. Here (http://www.photosbykerry.com/) is mine! They also got their links in the address bar working now. So, that should help with user confusion, as Don pointed out earlier.

Hmmm, they are looking better & better. I think I might just have to switch permanently & let my Smugmug account go. Im not sure yet, though. I just really REALLY love the way you browse photos with them. Plus, one of the biggest reasons why I got a Pro Smugmug account was so I could use my own custom domain name & thats $150. Its only $40 with Zenfolio. And I dont sell many prints anyways right now. I might later, so they should have their custom print prices feature in place by then anyways.

Wow, Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) sounds like a great feature. It sounds very close to the frequently requested "virtual galleries" that we've discussed here before.

I frequently have a need to display several hundred photos organized several different ways. Organized by event. Organized by person. Organized by teacher. Organized by team. Today I have to tag them all appropriately in Bridge, then upload separate copies to make distinct sets of galleries for each way I need to offer the pictures. This costs me extra prep time, costs me extra upload time and costs Smugmug extra storage space. I'd rather upload them all once to a master gallery and then define virtual galleries that consist of some sort of keyword query based on the master galery. But, to the user I want them to look just like a regular gallery. And, I have to have all the galleries password protected because of child privacy concerns of the parents, school, team or league.

Zenfolio sure is moving fast.

[peestandingup]

Zenfolio sure is moving fast.
You got that right! It amazes me how fast these guys are working & turning out major updates. Still hard to believe they are only 7 months old.

Like I said in an earlier post, it sure seems like Zenfolio means serious business & are in it for the long haul.

[Andy]

The people at Zenfolio just released a pretty major update (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/releaseNotes.aspx) today. Most notably, a new feature called Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) as well as true custom domain names using CNAME. Here (http://www.photosbykerry.com/) is mine! They also got their links in the address bar working now. So, that should help with user confusion, as Don pointed out earlier.

Hmmm, they are looking better & better. I think I might just have to switch permanently & let my Smugmug account go. Im not sure yet, though. I just really REALLY love the way you browse photos with them. Plus, one of the biggest reasons why I got a Pro Smugmug account was so I could use my own custom domain name & thats $150. Its only $40 with Zenfolio. And I dont sell many prints anyways right now. I might later, so they should have their custom print prices feature in place by then anyways.
Sorry to see you go, peestandingup, I see on your other site that you've made your decision.

[Andy]

You got that right! It amazes me how fast these guys are working & turning out major updates. Still hard to believe they are only 7 months old.

Like I said in an earlier post, it sure seems like Zenfolio means serious business & are in it for the long haul.
OK, we get it, we get it. Thank you again for posting.

[rainforest1155]

You got that right! It amazes me how fast these guys are working & turning out major updates. Still hard to believe they are only 7 months old.

Like I said in an earlier post, it sure seems like Zenfolio means serious business & are in it for the long haul.
They have to move fast and I like their browsing speed, but I think eventually they'll reach a point where the enormous photo masses and new users slow the them down a bit. Then they might meet similar problems smugmug already experienced.
*And* smugmug probably also has something in the pipe. I mean they haven't had a release for 1.5 months. Sooner or later they'll put out another big release. :wink

Sebastian

[peestandingup]

Sorry to see you go, peestandingup, I see on your other site that you've made your decision. Well, its not set in stone. I havent deleted my SM account yet, but I more than likely will soon.

I really love Smugmug A LOT! It just seems like Zenfolio is more of what im looking for right now. Just seems a better fit for me. I love how progressive the site is & they are also promising some pretty exciting features to come. So, dont look too much into it. You guys still rock!

But, I really enjoy posting here on dgrin, so hopefully I will still be welcome even though im a damn dirty traitor, lol.

[mario]

Wow, Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) sounds like a great feature. It sounds very close to the frequently requested "virtual galleries" that we've discussed here before.
.
Me too, I think these "virtual galleries" (they call them Collections in zenfolio, Sets in flickr) are essential for several purposes.

[Andy]

Me too, I think these "virtual galleries" (they call them Collections in zenfolio, Sets in flickr) are essential for several purposes.
Would love to hear how you use them? :ear

Thanks!

[cjyphoto]

To be honest: i LOVE their style. Design and buttons are simple but very classy to me. I also like their Lightbox: nothing else to see but the picture, it is centered (i really like that!), on a black background. And it all runs so smooth.

With our lightbox it takes longer for the picture to upload. Sometimes it mentions "uploading" but it doesnt....

The thing I don't like about SM lightbox is the scroll wheel on my mouse does not move the image. Instead it moves the background page. With Zenfolio I can scroll the image with the wheel on my mouse. Much better. :thumb

[Andy]

The thing I don't like about SM lightbox is the scroll wheel on my mouse does not move the image. Instead it moves the background page. With Zenfolio I can scroll the image with the wheel on my mouse. Much better. :thumb
Hm. What system, and sort of mouse are you using? I can move the photo just fine, left right, up down.

:ear

[cjyphoto]

Hm. What system, and sort of mouse are you using? I can move the photo just fine, left right, up down.

:ear

#1 Windows XP Home SP2, Logitech MX500, Firefox Browser.
#2 Windows XP Home SP1, Scroll Touchpad, Firefox Browser
#3 Windows XP Home SP2, Logitech Wireless, Firefox Browser
#4 Windows ME, Generic Wheel Mouse. Firefox Browser

The only constant in all these systems is the Firefox Browser.

When I click on Lightbox and an image actually shows up that is bigger than the screen I instictivly scrol with the wheel. Instead of the image I'm trying to scroll moving, the back ground page goes up and down. This happens on all my systems. :dunno

[Andy]

#1 Windows XP Home SP2, Logitech MX500, Firefox Browser.
#2 Windows XP Home SP1, Scroll Touchpad, Firefox Browser
#3 Windows XP Home SP2, Logitech Wireless, Firefox Browser
#4 Windows ME, Generic Wheel Mouse. Firefox Browser

The only constant in all these systems is the Firefox Browser.

When I click on Lightbox and an image actually shows up that is bigger than the screen I instictivly scrol with the wheel. Instead of the image I'm trying to scroll moving, the back ground page goes up and down. This happens on all my systems. :dunno

http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/929020/1/42491224/Original
FF 1.5, and IE6 on this image, with my Apple Mightmouse or the trackpad, I can scroll up/down the image. Perhaps theres some setting on your setup we need to find for you.

[fashion]

Both smugmug and zenfolio (and countless others) offers the same essential features of storing your photos and letting those photos be displayed in attractive ways to your audience. What really separates the various sites is how well the present it to your audience.

I like smugmugs many views and also like zenfolios views.

Smugmug offers more customizations which is nice, but the user interface is a blend of old and new technologies mixed together which sometimes makes for an awkward experience. But they do offer a greater selection of tools.

Zenfolio seems totally web2.0 and everything AJAX since its very new so in general you get a more user friendly and faster experience in managing your photos, but not nearly as many features as smugmug yet.

The challenge is for smugmug to make more changes to make their site more web2.0 and for zenfolio to keep adding new features to match smugmug.

Also, a big feature missing from zenfolio is batch downloading your original photos in case of a crash, smugmug doesn't have it directly, but you can get it through the various scripts/tools that you can download.

One thing that surprises me is why neither has ventured in flash based portfolio presentions!!! For example, on www.solomodels.com (http://www.solomodels.com) (a photo site for fashion models/photographers) I see flash based portfolios that I wish were on smugmug or these other sites.

For the time being, I think I'll stick with smugmug but will be watching zenfolio closely and might sign up for them as well and use both sites.

[cjyphoto]

http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/929020/1/42491224/Original
FF 1.5, and IE6 on this image, with my Apple Mightmouse or the trackpad, I can scroll up/down the image. Perhaps theres some setting on your setup we need to find for you.

This is not a "help me" thread. I simply stated what is a fact for me. All my machines behave the same regardless of OS. Lightbox does not scroll properly for me. Zenfolio's version of lightbox does. :dunno

I'm going to try Zenfolio. It seems to have and promises to have many of the features I've been requesting during my year with SmugMug.

1. Easier gallery manipulation and sub-gallery depth.
2. Digital Downloads.
3. Easier viewer experience.

Whether or not these pan out... Well I'll see in the next fourteen days. :scratch

I do think that you Andy deserve some kind of medal though. You have been quick to respond to my and many other SmugMug users. Even while on vacation! A round of applause for Andy. :clap :clap :clap

I'm not leaving yet. Just checking my options.:beer

[peestandingup]

Here is my revised review with a more head-2-head comparison between each service.

I have both a "pro-level" ($150) Smugmug account & an "unlimited" ($40) Zenfolio account. I have been with Smugmug well over a year now. I also signed up for the "unlimited" Zenfolio account ($35 after referral code) almost 2 months ago after using the (no credit card) trial version for a few days. I started getting interested in it after really using it to browse other peoples galleries, so I wanted to give it a shot & do a real in depth review of the service, not just nose around the site for a bit & then write it off as a Smugmug copy cat (which it isn't) as some have. I wanted to really get my hands dirty & use it just as much as I do my Smugmug site, which means uploading all my content, writing captions, rearranging stuff, setting up different page layouts/styles, and all the other options. What did I find out?

Smugmug has more pro features but Zenfolio looks nicer & has better browsing. I love the way it automatically resizes the main photo to fit peoples browser window & how the thumbnails arent actual links. That means each time you click on a new thumbnail or page number in a gallery, your browsers page position stays put & doesnt make you scroll each time, which I find SUPER annoying in Smugmug. You can sorta do this using the Lightbox feature in Smugmug, but it doesnt allow you the same freedom as Zenfolio with choosing thumbnails, pages & such. Both services offer unlimited uploads & downloads of original files. Bandwidth is unlimited too.

Zenfolio also allows users to make their breadcrumb as deep as they want, which I find to be VERY useful at times. Smugmug restricts the breadcrumb from going any deeper than 4 times. Everything looks nice & neat on the page in Zenfolio, I like the way you hover your mouse over things to get info such as exif/download links/photo & gallery links/etc instead of having all that info strewn all over the page, the slideshow rocks pretty hard, and my god is this site fast! Most of the time it goes just as fast as I can click, which has a lot to do with the way they prefetch the images. But, I cant tell you how good that feels when you are browsing a bunch of photos in a gallery & it goes that fast & doesnt make you scroll each time you view a new photo or page in a gallery. Its almost like viewing photos with a piece of software on your computer's hard drive! Yes, its THAT fast!!

But, like I said, Smugmug (as of now) has more pro features, more users, an awesome forum (dgrin.com) & great customer service. Although, I will say that everytime I have contacted Zenfolio support, they have usually replied within the same hour & were always extremely helpful & very nice too. What about prints? Smugmug all the way, no question. The prints look awesome & the service is the best that comes with a guarantee. But, of course Zenfolio doesnt have a print service yet & they assure everyone its coming soon & will be a very robust system that will satisfy everyone, so we'll have to wait on that one to do a true comparison.

Smugmug lets you customize your page with your own html/css code, which can be a good thing or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Zenfolio has pre-made templates (not just themes), which again can be a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on what you want to do with your page & how savy you are with coding, but I think its safe to say most people arent good with html/css nor do they want to be. Smugmug also has pre-made themes, but I personally like Zenfolio's better, as they look a bit more elegant to me without being overly cheesy.

How about user options? Well, thats a tough one. If I were comparing a pro-level Smugmug account to an unlimited Zenolio account, Smugmug would win because they have TONS of options for pros such as setting your own print prices, ability to upload short videos, watermarking, guest passwords for uploading original files, using your own custom domain name (which Zenfolio now has too), etc. However, if I were comparing Smugmug's other two accounts, Standard ($40) and Power ($60), to Zenfolio's Unlimited account ($40), in my opinion the Zenfolio account takes the cake & is a way better deal for what all you get.

But, back to options. How easy is it to change options with each service? Smugmug's are a little more spread out & you may find yourself looking in 4 different places within your account to accomplish something simple, like just setting up a new gallery with a sub-category, then choosing the options for that gallery in another location & finally adding photos to it. Its not hard, but its not what I would call intuitive either. Thats not the case with Zenfolio. In Zenfolio, literally ALL options, edits, captions, titles, keywords, gallery/group creation, access controls, deleting, descriptions, uploading, re-arranging, etc is done in ONE centralized location for your entire content. And I do mean everything!

This sounds like a bad idea at first because you would think thats too much info on one page, but its not like that at all & is actually very simple. You have a list of all your galleries/groups on the left & you just click on which ever one you want to make edits to, upload to (or whatever), then all the content of that folder appears inside the main area in the center with all the options on the right. You can go deeper in your breadcrumb from there & make changes to any part of it, including the homepage. Then, you can view it as a guest would to see if its to your liking. They also allow descriptions to any part of your breadcrumb, not just galleries. I really like that a lot because sometimes I want to write little descriptions to a group that may contain a bunch of galleries within it that have their own separate descriptions & so on.

How good do the actual photos themselves look on each site after compression? You be the judge. Here (http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com/photos/60874868-567x850.jpg) is a photo hosted on Smugmug. And here (http://www.zenfolio.com/img/p45366402-5.jpg) is the same exact photo hosted on Zenfolio at the same size. I notice a lot more compression artifacts on the Smugmug photo, especially around the polka dots on her dress going up towards her neck. Also, look into & around her eyes. Artifacts are more apparent there too in the Smugmug pic. Still can't tell much of a difference?? Here (http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com/photos/78281135-1100x630.jpg) is a closeup of the Smugmug image & here (http://www.zenfolio.com/img/p493938681-5.jpg) is the same closeup on Zenfolio. The Zenfolio image just looks more pleasing to my eyes & those image artifacts arent as apparent as they are in the Smugmug photo. Originals are the same, of course since there is no compression used with each service on those. My vote goes to Zenfolio here, even if technically the file size of the image is bigger with Zenfolio, I personally think thats irrelevant & when you're dealing with photos, looks should prevail over file size.

So, ultimately, I think both Smugmug & Zenfolio are truly the best photo sharing services out right now & you cant go wrong with either. I think it mostly just comes down to personal preference & what you aim to do with your site. I myself have decided to give up my Smugmug pro account in favor of my Zenfolio unlimited account. It fits me better & just plain does more of the things that I personally want it to do, not to mention is more cost effective to people like me who dont need all those high end features just yet. But, for $40 a year, Zenfolio is an awesome deal for what you get & in my opinion, is a better deal than Smugmug's Standard ($40) & Power ($60) accounts. But, now if your aim is to sell your prints online, you simply must have every pro option imaginable & are good with html/css web design, then a $150 Smugmug pro account is exactly what you're looking for. The service is great & you will be very happy with them! Both services have pretty regular updates, although I will argue that Zenfolio seems to have more meaningful updates as of late with more useful (and requested) features being implemented at an extremely fast rate, but dont count Smugmug out in this department. Im sure they got some tricks up their sleeves ;-) But, there is no denying that Zenfolio is a VERY "Web 2.0" kind of setup & was built that way from the beginning. Whereas, Smugmug seems like over the years have implemented feature after feature without a clear plan of where they all tie in together, mixing old with new, so its a bit more cluttered but still functions quite well. Maybe Smugmug is due for a complete interface overhaul? Regardless, it will be curious to watch as both sites progress in the coming months & years.

I hope my little "review" helps. Cheers...Kerry

[mario]

Would love to hear how you use them? :ear
Thanks!
I love smugmug. It’s the best thing that has happened to me since I bought my first digital camera. I think their two main functions are: to have a backup of your images accessible from anywhere, and to be able to show some of those pictures to who you want. But to be able to use independently these two functions, you need to upload several times the same photography.

In my case, as an architect, I take many photographies each time I visit a building in progress, because they let me show the evolution of the work, to comment some subjects with my team, and to work on it (you can see an example on http://ganchegui.smugmug.com/gallery/1292009/) (http://ganchegui.smugmug.com/gallery/1292009/)). And I like to be able to do it from anywhere, even from my house. But I also like that the people interested in our work can follow the evolution. For that purpose I need only some selected photographies. And here is where zenfolio’s collections would be very useful.

Also in familiar events, for example a wedding, some people can become bored to see the photos of people from invited families who they don't know. It would be nice to make a selection for each family.

Those are only two examples, but there are many more. The fact is always the same: one thing is to meke a backup of pictures and the other is how you show them.


mario
ganchegui.smugmug.com (http://ganchegui.smugmug.com)

[DodgeV83]

The main negative with Zenfolio is that you can't edit the HTML of a gallery description like you can here. That means no empty "HTML only" pages, and no embedding video.

[DodgeV83]

As you know, we rarely talk about future features, but I let the cat out of the bag (http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/06/14/welcome-google/) a little bit already when talking about Google's entrant, so...

The fast browsing stuff is coming to SmugMug, too. We've tested it a few times and never put it out because it makes the URLs uglier if you still want people to have nice links (which we do)... but I think we've now crossed the bridge that the speed benefit is worth it.

I wouldn't hold your breath, but it should be coming. :)

Thanks for the write up!

Don

Please hurry this up! The original blog post was on June 14th, hopefully we'll be seeing it soon! My renewal date is coming up and browsing speed is a HUGE factor for me in deciding weither or not to stay with Smugmug. Some of my visitors have been complaining that my Smugmug site is slow :(

[wellman]

After reading through this thread, I decided to kick the tires on a Zenfolio trial account. All the talks about their UI had me pretty interested in what the fuss was about. Below, I'll share some comparative thoughts.

Before I get to that though, let me comment on Smugmug. Today is the first day after Smugmug implemented it's new pro features (http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2006/07/28/new-features-july-28-2006). Response to customer wishes plus a rock-solid backend (Amazon S3, etc.) are what make Smugmug the best photo sharing/hosting/selling service out there. You dwarf the competition in terms of features, and you allow your customers the flexibility to make their site into anything they desire. You trust your customers to make you look good, which I like.

That being said, there are some very positive things in Zenfolio's UI I'd love to see brought to SM. So, without further ado...

Image prefetching. Zenfolio (ZF) has it, SM doesn't. I know you guys are working on something, and I'm sure it will rock. Just saying...
Dynamic image resizing. I love how ZF does this. I often don't have my browser window maximized, and ZF just "fits," any time, all the time. I know SM has the custom image sizes available, but in terms of a photo filling the available screen area "out of the box" every time, ZF wins hands down.
Keyboard shortcuts. I've already become addicted to "arrowing through" a gallery in ZF. Combined with image prefetching, this makes for a very nice user experience.
Image switching. I'm not sure whether ZF uses AJAX to switch images for the user, but whatever they do, it's awesome. From the user's perspective, not having the browser jump around and force scrolling each time the image changes is wonderful.I suppose my summary comment is that while SM focuses on its customers, ZF seems to have focused intently on the experience of it's "customer's users." The result, while more restrictive than SM, is an extremely clean, polished, and seamless user interface. I'd love to see the same brought to SM.

So, there are my $0.02 after a week playing with ZF. Kudos again to SM for the new features! Have a good weekend - you all deserve it.

-Greg

[kevin.coppalotti]

After reading through this thread, I decided to kick the tires on a Zenfolio trial account. All the talks about their UI had me pretty interested in what the fuss was about. Below, I'll share some comparative thoughts.

Before I get to that though, let me comment on Smugmug. Today is the first day after Smugmug implemented it's new pro features (http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2006/07/28/new-features-july-28-2006). Response to customer wishes plus a rock-solid backend (Amazon S3, etc.) are what make Smugmug the best photo sharing/hosting/selling service out there. You dwarf the competition in terms of features, and you allow your customers the flexibility to make their site into anything they desire. You trust your customers to make you look good, which I like.

That being said, there are some very positive things in Zenfolio's UI I'd love to see brought to SM. So, without further ado...

Image prefetching. Zenfolio (ZF) has it, SM doesn't. I know you guys are working on something, and I'm sure it will rock. Just saying...
Dynamic image resizing. I love how ZF does this. I often don't have my browser window maximized, and ZF just "fits," any time, all the time. I know SM has the custom image sizes available, but in terms of a photo filling the available screen area "out of the box" every time, ZF wins hands down.
Keyboard shortcuts. I've already become addicted to "arrowing through" a gallery in ZF. Combined with image prefetching, this makes for a very nice user experience.
Image switching. I'm not sure whether ZF uses AJAX to switch images for the user, but whatever they do, it's awesome. From the user's perspective, not having the browser jump around and force scrolling each time the image changes is wonderful.I suppose my summary comment is that while SM focuses on its customers, ZF seems to have focused intently on the experience of it's "customer's users." The result, while more restrictive than SM, is an extremely clean, polished, and seamless user interface. I'd love to see the same brought to SM.

So, there are my $0.02 after a week playing with ZF. Kudos again to SM for the new features! Have a good weekend - you all deserve it.

-Greg

I agree Greg, like someone said ,Zenfolio is 'WEB2' Smugmug 'Web1'. I have been running both Smugmug and Zenfolio. With Zenfolio a higher proportion of my clients are actually viewing the image in medium or larger size, whereas with smugmug people are just looking at thumbnails. The difference I think is speed: Blinding fast speed of Zenfolio vs the snail pace of Smugmug, - people just can't be bothered waiting for the smugmug images to download, hence the high proportion of people who just 'thumbnail' thru the gallery.

[Andy]

Smugmug 'Web1'.

No doubt Zenfolio's got some cool stuff, but it's been a long time that SmugMug has had Web 2.0 stuff like Keywords Tags, AJAX, GeoMapping, User Customization to the max, themes, RSS Feeds, PhotoRank, our open-since-forever API and more :deal

[peestandingup]

No doubt Zenfolio's got some cool stuff, but it's been a long time that SmugMug has had Web 2.0 stuff like Keywords Tags, AJAX, GeoMapping, User Customization to the max, themes, RSS Feeds, PhotoRank, our open-since-forever API and more :deal
Andy, those are indeed some great web 2.0 features SM has, but I think people are mostly referring to Zenfolio's browsing, UI & overall look.

You gotta admit, after browsing Zenfolio for a while & then coming back to browse photos on Smugmug, its a much less fulfilling experience overall.

[jfriend]

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com. (http://www.zenfolio.com/alexp)

With the usual suspects like pbase or flickr or imageshack, I know how to explain why many users would rather choose smugmug. I don't really know zenfolio and it seems to be gaining some attention and users. I was wondering if anyone else (in the dgrin community or at Smugmug) corporate has any pithy set of reasons why Smugmug is better than zenfolio? I'm not trying to challenge Smugmug, just looking for ammo on how to explain why Smugmug is better.

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.
In the spirit of making sure the Smugmug folks see their competitive challenges, here's some info from a thread over in dgrin.

For pro users, Smugmug is still a slam dunk, especially with the latest round of new features for pros.

But, for basic users, it's definitely more challenging than it used to be to convince someone that Smugmug is the best choice. And power users seem to be getting squeezed as some other services are including much of that functionality in their basic package. Here are some snippets from some folks who chose Zenfolio. These snippets are from this dpreview thread (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1018&thread=19682356).

Joss Delage wrote:
> Well, I've created one account of each. I'll see which one I like
> best. For now, Smugmug is the clear winner in ease of upload and
> edit, but I need to experiment some more.
>
> http://jdelage.smugmug.com/gallery/1803880
> and
> http://jdelage.zenfolio.com/p60541475/

I've just let my smugmug account expire and opened a Zenfolio account instead. Why? Mainly because its soooooo much easier to organise galleries in Zenfolio. Everything is in one place. You can create a directory structure thats as deep as you want. You don't have to go to 2 different places to edit categories and then sub-categories and finally a 3rd place to set gallery options. Its all done from one place. Its much more intuitive than smugmugs split page approach.

I will miss the myriad of upload options smugmug had courtesy of an open API (especially the uploader than integratd into the windows shell) but the Zenfolio uploader isn't too bad.

Don't get me wrong. I've been with smugmug for a year and I didn't really have any specific problems with them (infact I liked the service enough that I recommedned it to everyone I could). Its just that until I saw and tried Zenfolio I didn't know what I was missing. In summary my reasons for switching to Zenfolio were:

1 - Much easier organistion of galleries
2 - Faster browsing
3 - More "attractive" interface
4 - More customisation options at the $40 level than Smugmug


And a second message:

When I read something like this I start thinking I'm a martian that has just landed and for humans it is normal to have tentacles and three eyes on the back of the head.

When I opened my Smugmug account I was literally spending minutes trying to find how to accomplish simplest tasks such as deleting a gallery. With Zenfolio all the controls are right in front of you and the upload process is so straightforward so I cannot understand how can Smugmug can be easier to use than Zenfolio.
-- photo newbie


And a third message:

I actually went with the $25 Zenfolio option which gives you an extra 1GB of space each year you subscribe. It didn't actually cost me $25 as while I was on my free 14 day trial period I received a 10$ discount coupon! Since paying up I have had 2 referrals worth $10 (no idea who from) so up to now it's really only cost me $5.

I find the service great; no downtime since I started and no probems to report.

As others have pointed out Smugmug does offer more features and if you want to spend time doing lots of customization then Smugmug is probably for you. Howeevr, what I wanted was a simple to use hosted gallery service and I can say I have not been disappointed with Zenfolio.
-- Phil L


And a fourth message:

What Zenfolio managed to address with their service is the core of what photographers care about: the best online presentation with fast high quality navigation and beautifully designed themes (ok, there are not 38 of them but the 7 themes they provide are top notch and very unique). They gave users a modern user interface so you can easily fly through the tasks instead of learning where things are and spend hours on forums figuring out how to do things.


I'd have to say that I agree with some of the comments. I'm not thinking of leaving Smugmug myself, but would like to see it improve/catch-up in some of these areas.

This one just happened to me yesterday (and I've been a customer for 2+ years with hundreds of galleries). I wanted to create a new gallery in a new sub-category in an existing category. I went to the category I wanted the new sub-category and gallery in. I clicked on the New Gallery button. I got to a screen that gave me absolutely no idea how to create a new sub-category. Eventually I remembered I had to start over and go to control panel and find the new sub-category page. After that, I had to then go back to where I was to create the gallery. Why wouldn't you be allowed to create a category and sub-category right from the New Gallery screen? Isn't that ALWAYS where you want to do it? This is just one trivial example, but it's an example where Smugmug is getting beat now.

[AnneMcBean]

This one just happened to me yesterday (and I've been a customer for 2+ years with hundreds of galleries). I wanted to create a new gallery in a new sub-category in an existing category. I went to the category I wanted the new sub-category and gallery in. I clicked on the New Gallery button. I got to a screen that gave me absolutely no idea how to create a new sub-category. Eventually I remembered I had to start over and go to control panel and find the new sub-category page. After that, I had to then go back to where I was to create the gallery. Why wouldn't you be allowed to create a category and sub-category right from the New Gallery screen? Isn't that ALWAYS where you want to do it? This is just one trivial example, but it's an example where Smugmug is getting beat now.
:scratch We do have the option to create a category and subcategory right on the create a new gallery page.. It's a feature we added pretty recently, so everyone might not be aware of it. In the category and subcategory list, you'll find a "Create new category/subcategory" choice. A box will come up right underneath where you can title your new creation. Is this what you were asking for?

-Anne

EDIT: Should add here that we are always looking to improve the site... but you just happened to give an example of something we recently added. Our release motto: "Release early, release often. Keep our customers on their toes."

[jfriend]

:scratch We do have the option to create a category and subcategory right on the create a new gallery page.. It's a feature we added pretty recently, so everyone might not be aware of it. In the category and subcategory list, you'll find a "Create new category/subcategory" choice. A box will come up right underneath where you can title your new creation. Is this what you were asking for?

-Anne

I see it there now.

But, to tell you the blunt truth, before I posted my previous message I went and looked in that screen to make absolutely sure that this feature wasn't there (so I wouldn't have egg on my face). I even glanced at the drop-down list and I did NOT see it. Using myself as a sample of one, the point is that users don't seem to know it's there, even people who are looking for it.

This feature would be a WHOLE lot more obvious and more discoverable if there was a "New Category" button next to the category listing drop-down and "New Sub-Category" button next to the sub-category drop-down instead of putting them in the drop-down.

As it is today, you don't see it in the screen and you don't think of looking in a list of categories for a new category action. There are no other actions in that drop-down and the category list is really, really long.

[AnneMcBean]

I see it there now.

But, to tell you the blunt truth, before I posted my previous message I went and looked in that screen to make absolutely sure that this feature wasn't there (so I wouldn't have egg on my face). I even glanced at the drop-down list and I did NOT see it. Using myself as a sample of one, the point is that users don't seem to know it's there, even people who are looking for it.

This feature would be a WHOLE lot more obvious and more discoverable if there was a "New Category" button next to the category listing drop-down and "New Sub-Category" button next to the sub-category drop-down instead of putting them in the drop-down.

As it is today, you don't see it in the screen and you don't think of looking in a list of categories for a new category action. There are no other actions in that drop-down and the category list is really, really long.

Thanks for the feedback! We are constantly searching for a happy medium between ease-of-use and options.

Personally, I find that extra buttons tend to clutter a page and separating the "new category" from the drop down where you choose a category is less-intuitive to me.

The way I see it is that new users tend to discover that they can create their own category when they open the dropdown (it's first on the list), and existing users have an easier way to create categories. They can still go to the control panel if they want, or if they don't notice the feature right away.

I do think we could be better about notifying customers about new features, especially subtle (but helpful!) changes like this one. We do an ok job of this through release notes, but understand the majority of our customers don't read them (and don't care about all the little things we are doing constantly). The help pages on creating a gallery and on creating categories and subcategories have been updated to reflect this new feature.

Again, we love the feedback and I'm glad this is a feature you'll use... now that you know where to find it! :D

-Anne

[Andy]

I see it there now.

No comment on the theme thumbnail previewer :D :dunno

[jfriend]

Thanks for the feedback! We are constantly searching for a happy medium between ease-of-use and options.

Personally, I find that extra buttons tend to clutter a page and separating the "new category" from the drop down where you choose a category is less-intuitive to me.

The way I see it is that new users tend to discover that they can create their own category when they open the dropdown (it's first on the list), and existing users have an easier way to create categories. They can still go to the control panel if they want, or if they don't notice the feature right away.

I do think we could be better about notifying customers about new features, especially subtle (but helpful!) changes like this one. We do an ok job of this through release notes, but understand the majority of our customers don't read them (and don't care about all the little things we are doing constantly). The help pages on creating a gallery and on creating categories and subcategories have been updated to reflect this new feature.

Again, we love the feedback and I'm glad this is a feature you'll use... now that you know where to find it! :D

-Anne

I'm glad you're trying to get this feature into this screen, but I think it could be more discoverable and could be presented in a more consistent and expected user interface.

The thing about this feature is you shouldn't have to tell people about it for them to discover it and one shouldn't have to read a help screen to know it's there and/or how to use it. A great user interface makes the important features discoverable so people using it will naturally find what's important to them and then know how to use it.

That's my beef with putting this feature in the drop-down list. When you look at the screen and realize that you need to create a new category, a logical mind will think that the drop-down list is a list of existing categories because that's how it's labelled and that's what it's always been before and will not think to look there for an action like creating a new category. Intuition won't tell them that the drop-down list has both nouns and commands in it and generally a user interface shouldn't mix those in the same list. So, they will scan the screen for some other clue as to how to create a category and they will see nothing. I specifically looked in this screen for this feature and did not see it and I'm a pretty advanced user with a lot of experience with user interfaces.

If there was a button to the right of the category list that said "New Category" or "Create New Category", nobody would have a chance to miss it. It would be a lot more discoverable. You wouldn't be mixing nouns with actions in the same drop-down list. And, there's tons of room in this screen so it's not like anything gets crowded.

When they are using this screen to assign an existing category, they might get lucky and see the new category feature and it might stick in their head for future reference, but even that's not for sure.

Now, I've probably spent more time on this issue than it warrants, but I thought I'd take a stab at explaining my logic.

[jfriend]

No comment on the theme thumbnail previewer

I noticed it and it looks like it's probably cool, but I don't use themes hardly at all so it didn't register much with me.

Overall, the create gallery page has improved a lot as you can now set up a lot more stuff at creation time. You used to have to create the gallery and then set almost everything afterwards. You now can set more things at create time which is good.

[Mike Lane]

I noticed it and it looks like it's probably cool, but I don't use themes hardly at all so it didn't register much with me.

Overall, the create gallery page has improved a lot as you can now set up a lot more stuff at creation time. You used to have to create the gallery and then set almost everything afterwards. You now can set more things at create time which is good.:agree Overall I'm definitely liking the subtle improvements to the UI that have been going on the past few weeks. There is definitely room for improvement but things are getting better.

[peestandingup]

Zenfolio got their online print ordering (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/pnpOverview.aspx) up today as well as some other updates (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/releaseNotes.aspx) to the site.

Users have a choice to either use EZ Prints or Mpix labs. You can also choose both & let the customer decide because I think Mpix has things that EZ Prints doesn't, like Metallic paper & True Digital B&W paper.

Add some photos to the shopping cart & check that out too.

[peestandingup]

Hmm, I just noticed it makes your guests register just to order prints. Thats not cool. :huh

[Andy]

Hmm, I just noticed it makes your guests register just to order prints. Thats not cool. :huh
I noticed that, too.

I just finished a pretty big order. Looking forward to getting my prints, to check it out!

[renstar]

I noticed that, too.

I just finished a pretty big order. Looking forward to getting my prints, to check it out!
I fiddled around with it too, though i didnt order prints. A few things i noticed..

1) I really like their fly over. It is so much less obtrusive and much much more intuitive than even the beta flyover.

2) I can read their exif info, as it is presented as jfriend (i think) suggested with horizontal lines and such.

3) Their prints (on ezprints at least) are significantly cheaper!

4) The layout on the shopping cart is much more user friendly (Small, Medium, Large, and Square Prints) vs (Standard, Nonstandard). And their cart just looks nicer (but BigWebGuy is working on that I've heard so i have high hopes).

But lastly, they have alot of work to do before I'd even consider switching, especially as you cant select the paper type in their initial cart menu and they give no indication on the difference in price between lustre and matte/glossy. Andy, do let us know how the mpix prints turn out, and if smugmug will be considering allowing using that service. I'm interested in the digital black and white prints if anyone has any comments on those.

Also, requiring an account for orders (a free one at least) isnt a big deal to me, it is required at just about any other place you order things (amazon, etc).

Anyway, smugmug always seems to be improving things, so from past experience, im sure this release will increase the team's desire to keep on the front of things.

-russ

[peestandingup]

I noticed that, too.

I just finished a pretty big order. Looking forward to getting my prints, to check it out! Its not a huge deal for people to register I guess, but the first registration page was WAY messed up & confusing. It looked like people were signing up for a paid account. See screencaps I made here (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p544688992.jpg) & here (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p1025054771.jpg). I emailed their CS & they were quick to jump on it, so it should be better very soon. :thumb

Yeah, im gonna order prints too. Im wanting to see how those Metallic prints turn out. I heard they look pretty good.

[Baldy]

Andy, do let us know how the mpix prints turn out, and if smugmug will be considering allowing using that service.Mpix is a respected printer and I've ordered many times from them over the years. Our comparisons give the edge to EZ Prints in quality for more prints than not (when you order 40 prints from two labs, you usually see one lab do better with some prints, equal quality on the majority, and the other lab do better on the rest).

Our concern is how to offer great support from multiple sources. Our support heroes would have to master different color points, relationships, systems, packaging, shipping points of origin -- and cope with split orders. It will be interesting to see if any company can offer white glove support and do that too. Most people would say Photoreflect's support took a dive when they tried that.

[renstar]

Mpix is a respected printer and I've ordered many times from them over the years. Our comparisons give the edge to EZ Prints in quality for more prints than not (when you order 40 prints from two labs, you usually see one lab do better with some prints, equal quality on the majority, and the other lab do better on the rest).

Our concern is how to offer great support from multiple sources. Our support heroes would have to master different color points, relationships, systems, packaging, shipping points of origin -- and cope with split orders. It will be interesting to see if any company can offer white glove support and do that too. Most people would say Photoreflect's support took a dive when they tried that.

Fair enough, I wouldnt want anything to cause smugmug's order support level to drop, it must be hard enough keeping it at the excellent level that it is. Instead, maybe smugmug can leverage ez prints to get some similar types of prints?

[wellman]

Instead, maybe smugmug can leverage ez prints to get some similar types of prints?

Indeed. Smugmug = :rambo

:D

[El Kiwi]

Does anyone know if Zenfolio supports embedded profiles? This is the one feature that totally turns me off Smugmug since having an embedded profile is the *only* way that my photos have any hope of looking any good on a Mac (and only then if the user is using Safari). I know the main concern was bandwidth, but I can't see the disadvantage to leaving the profile for large versions of images and stripping it from thumbnails. I should at least be given the option.

[Baldy]

Does anyone know if Zenfolio supports embedded profiles? This is the one feature that totally turns me off Smugmug since having an embedded profile is the *only* way that my photos have any hope of looking any good on a Mac (and only then if the user is using Safari). I know the main concern was bandwidth, but I can't see the disadvantage to leaving the profile for large versions of images and stripping it from thumbnails. I should at least be given the option.Hi El Kiwi,

It wouldn't be a hard change for us to enable sRGB profiles in display images. Probably the right way is to only do it for images that come to us with an sRGB profile already attached. That way, people who care/know about the issue don't have to get the profiles if they don't want them.

One problem I'd like to get comfortable with, however, is what to do about the color shift between thumbs and medium images. I suspect there will be lots of customers who, depending on how their Macs are configured, will wonder why their small images look washed compared to larger ones. It wouldn't be hard to construct some screen shots for people to see what they think.

The other issue is, are we clear how Safari 3.0 (Webkit) handles sRGB images without profiles? We looked at this briefly last month and what we thought we saw was:

1. That the color shift between an sRGB image with and without profile was minor in Webkit but major in current implementations of Safari.

2. Not every user liked the look of images rendered by Safari with the profile attached. They felt they were too saturated.

Apple has been under pressure for good reason to render unprofiled images as sRGB, because that's the Internet standard. They explained why (http://webkit.org/blog/?p=73) they haven't done it to date, but it doesn't feel like their argument is sticking.

I can mess with Webkit more tomorrow, but in the meantime if anyone already knows how it treats unprofiled jpgs, I'd love to know.

Thanks,
Baldy

[nickphoto123]

Looked at someone's Zenfolio site from above post.

1) Dead slow.

2) My customer would have to 'Login' or create a 'Free Account'

This is a big deal breaker and is ridiculous and very 'non-business-like' .
I am using energy to get the customer to deal with me and they have to login with someone else???

If Smugmug suddenly required this I would leave as soon as I found out about it.

For my money and my customer's satisfaction, Smugmug is the BEST.

From someone who knows, Nicholas

[Andy]

Looked at someone's Zenfolio site from above post.

1) Dead slow.

2) My customer would have to 'Login' or create a 'Free Account'

This is a big deal breaker and is ridiculous and very 'non-business-like' .
I am using energy to get the customer to deal with me and they have to login with someone else???

If Smugmug suddenly required this I would leave as soon as I found out about it.

For my money and my customer's satisfaction, Smugmug is the BEST.

From someone who knows, Nicholas:thumb thanks Nick, thanks! No Worries! We won't require login to purchase photos.

:wave

[JDub]

:thumb thanks Nick, thanks! No Worries! We won't require login to purchase photos.

:wave

GOOD!! Thats a huge drawback!! The reason I left many other photo sites. I mean really, why make someone login to buy photos? Hmmm. Thanks smugmug for keeping everyone happy! :clap

[El Kiwi]

It wouldn't be a hard change for us to enable sRGB profiles in display images. Probably the right way is to only do it for images that come to us with an sRGB profile already attached. That way, people who care/know about the issue don't have to get the profiles if they don't want them.

This sounds reasonable.

One problem I'd like to get comfortable with, however, is what to do about the color shift between thumbs and medium images. I suspect there will be lots of customers who, depending on how their Macs are configured, will wonder why their small images look washed compared to larger ones.

Well, I wouldn't think that the thumbnail issue is that great, I'd be surprised if many people noticed. The "correct" fix is to have profiles on the thumbnails as well, but it seems this may not be possible for bandwidth reasons. Although I don't really see how big a problem this can be, a profile is, what, 2.5k? I realise that this makes a difference for you guys with a site the size of SmugMug, but for an individual user we're talking an extra 50k on the first download on a page of 20 thumbnails. This seems like very little to me, it's not like it requires an extra request for the profile and it should be cached alongside the image.

The other issue is, are we clear how Safari 3.0 (Webkit) handles sRGB images without profiles?

Well, no, that's totally random, which is the point. Safari is the *only* browser that gives me any way at all to display images correctly (with a profile). Anything else will give totally unpredictable results on the Mac.

Obviously trying to show the same colours to all users is a losing battle, since Aunty Mavis doesn't calibrate her monitor. sRGB is by far the best option for the widest array of users. However, I have a small group of people who I'd like to see my images well, they calibrate their monitors etc etc, and a lot of them are on Macs. By removing my profile, you're essentially removing my one possibility of showing my images to them as they're meant to be seen, and that's not acceptable to me in a paying service.

That the color shift between an sRGB image with and without profile was minor in Webkit but major in current implementations of Safari.

The point is not so much whether the change is minor or major, just that it can't be controlled for at all except by using an embedded profile, since without it Safari will do some random thing, probably based on the monitor profile (the "roll the dice" profile).

Not every user liked the look of images rendered by Safari with the profile attached. They felt they were too saturated.

In my experience, Safari will render images with a profile *exactly* as they appear in Photoshop if served off Apache either on my local machine or on my Dreamhost space. Maybe the users are just used to seeing the colours washed out in other browsers? Or is SmugMug converting the pixel data to sRGB and still applying the profile (which might cause oversaturation)?

Apple has been under pressure for good reason to render unprofiled images as sRGB, because that's the Internet standard. They explained why (http://webkit.org/blog/?p=73) they haven't done it to date, but it doesn't feel like their argument is sticking.

That's because their argument is totally brain-damaged. Seriously, I'm not defending their decision, but there is no better option on the Mac currently.

I can mess with Webkit more tomorrow, but in the meantime if anyone already knows how it treats unprofiled jpgs, I'd love to know.

To be honest, the only option for me if I was going to spend money would be to know that SmugMug honours the profiles I send. Anything else comes down to: "In our experience it (kind of/sort of/doesn't) work for (most/some/none) of our users (most/some/none) of the time" :D. In a paying service, that's not good enough IMO. I'd rather host myself.

Cheers,
Colin

[xris]

To be fair, I only gave it a brief once-over. It is fast, but so is SmugMug! And there are some impressive promises and a few very interesting features. But it just doesn't strike me as a pro service provider. They seem to be trying to please everyone, without any real focus. Even the customer service appears to be thrown into the labs' laps. And all the most notable features appear to be direct rip-offs from SmugMug!

Competition is cool, but a fresh approach would be appreciated. Looks like my money's on SmugMug!

[Baldy]

This sounds reasonable.

Well, I wouldn't think that the thumbnail issue is that great, I'd be surprised if many people noticed. The "correct" fix is to have profiles on the thumbnails as well, but it seems this may not be possible for bandwidth reasons. Although I don't really see how big a problem this can be, a profile is, what, 2.5k? I realise that this makes a difference for you guys with a site the size of SmugMug, but for an individual user we're talking an extra 50k on the first download on a page of 20 thumbnails. This seems like very little to me...We're actually not at all concerned about the extra bandwidth used. We just upgraded all accounts to get unlimited bandwidth 'cus we have some very fat pipes now.

What we are conerned about is the perception of speed. For many users, 50k is a lot. They share their photos with people on AOL and various slow connections. Our perceived speed gets judged by every user every time they click, many millions of times/day.

But as you say we may not need the profiles on thumbs because no one may notice.

Does anyone understand what Safari is doing with sRGB images when a profile is attached versus not? The conventional wisdom that Apple tells us and most color experts repeat on the forums is that when no profile is present, Safari assumes the monitor profile. However, if you look at this test page I made,

http://www.dgrin.com/test

it doesn't matter what profile you set your Mac for, including sRGB, the image with profile attached looks more saturated than the one without. If the monitor profile is set to sRGB, they should look the same.

(You can mouse over the upper left image to get it to flip back and forth between profile attached and not.)

One dilemma is some people feel the one with profile attached is the broken one because it looks too saturated to them. Others feel the opposite, making this decision a pain—worse than "do you prefer the pull-out window or the links" issue that divides some of our customers.

Your thoughts.

[El Kiwi]

What we are conerned about is the perception of speed. For many users, 50k is a lot. They share their photos with people on AOL and various slow connections. Our perceived speed gets judged by every user every time they click, many millions of times/day.

Fair enough - I still have trouble reminding myself that people still use dialup :-)

But as you say we may not need the profiles on thumbs because no one may notice.

Right, and especially if you leave the profiles on the large images but convert the thumbs to sRGB (which will give them the treatment they currently have, i.e. right for 95% of the people).

Does anyone understand what Safari is doing with sRGB images when a profile is attached versus not?
<snip>
However, if you look at this test page I made,

http://www.dgrin.com/test

it doesn't matter what profile you set your Mac for, including sRGB, the image with profile attached looks more saturated than the one without. If the monitor profile is set to sRGB, they should look the same.

Nice test! I must confess I have absolutely no idea what Safari is doing to the image there... Update: I just got on the #webkit channel and chatted to a couple of the developers there, they confirmed that for images with no profile, the pixels are just drawn straight on the screen. This happens *after* any system profile takes place, it's basically sent straight to the video card. This is also what Firefox does. So this means that:

1. Firefox and Safari should show the image with no profile the same (this seems to be true, on my machine at least).

2. Safari should show all the images with profiles accurately (this is also true).

3. The unprofiled data should not change in appearance when you change the monitor profile. This is not true, which implies that the colour correction happens after the pixels are drawn. Even more weirdly, changing the monitor profile also changes the images with profiles, which it in theory should not. I don't understand exactly how OSX is using the monitor profile there.

One dilemma is some people feel the one with profile attached is the broken one because it looks too saturated to them. Others feel the opposite.

Well, for me the only real test is if the images with profiles look the same as they do in Photoshop, which on my system they do. That test image is extremely saturated to begin with, but assuming it looks like that in PS, that's how I want it to look on the web too.

Interesting stuff, but more than a little frustrating :D

[peestandingup]

Looked at someone's Zenfolio site from above post.

1) Dead slow. Really?? I have NEVER heard someone say that about Zenfolio. In fact, I have always found it lightning fast. If you check back in this thread, im not the only one. They prefetch the images, which helps a lot. Perhaps your internet connection was on the fritz or maybe the site was having some kind of hiccup. But, its definitely the fastest photo site I have seen hands down.



2) My customer would have to 'Login' or create a 'Free Account'

This is a big deal breaker and is ridiculous and very 'non-business-like' .
I am using energy to get the customer to deal with me and they have to login with someone else???

If Smugmug suddenly required this I would leave as soon as I found out about it. You're not looking at the big picture. Its basically a free account that allows you to do lots of things that paid users do besides upload your own photos. It gives you your own web address with them, allows you to make your own albums & add photos to them from other paid users (like your friends, family members, favorite photographers, anyone). The feature is called Collections (http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/?topic=collections/working-collections) (which I have disabled btw).

I think the free Visitor account is a pretty neat feature & allows people to experience much of the site without having to pay or be on a trial account (they have that too btw).

Yeah, its kind of a bummer for just normal people who may want to just order a couple photos & thats it. Hopefully, they will allow those people to do that too in the future. But, I seriously cant think of many sites that you can just order from without making an account first, so its not a huge deal to most people.

[smugbug]

I just tried using Zenfolio, and in less than a day, I think I've made the decision to switch from Smugmug (which I've been using for a year and a half). Smugmug is definitely still great, but for me, I prefer some of the aspects and features of Zenfolio. Here are some of my thoughts:

Advantages:

1) Overall image viewing and aesthetics are better; everything looks and feels more slick and polished, and there are some great looking themes. Smugmug pages tend to have a distracting lines (white against black), at least with the default theme (I understand there are other themes, but not many nice, elegant, black background ones)

2) Smoother/faster image browsing - Zenfolio prefetching and AJAX helps, and pages load up right away (while thumbnails load as they come in). The recent Smugmug update, while intended to make viewing faster, actually seems to make loading of the Smugmug-style page slower (you wait for half a second or so while nothing shows up - a bug I'm told which will get fixed). Also with Smugmug, when changing images or image sizes, you get brief delays in between where nothing is shown, producing a sort of "flicker" effect. To be fair, Smugmug server bandwidth probably can't be beaten.

3) Layout of galleries - galleries are laid out across the page, making good use of space. The layout is also changed dynamically based on the size of the browser. I guess I was never the biggest fan of Smugmug's "two column" arrangement, which seemed to waste horizontal space and results in a lot of scrolling down (although you can fit more gallery caption data).

4) Zenfolio's analog of the "Smugmug style" view gives a larger default view of the image. There's a nice tab for Photo Info (Exit data) you can pull up on the right. The thumbnails are smaller and square, which look nicer, but also make it a bit harder to find a specific photo. I'm not a fan of Smugmug's new "Photo Bar", where you have to wait for the animation before it appears. With Zenfolio you can do what you want right away.

There are also some other nice photo viewing styles, and I like that you can choose the one your viewer can see (I feel like a lot of casual Smugmug visitors never realize there are other view styles anyway). I never did understand Smugmug's clunky Filmstrip style, which moves in the opposite direction you expect...

5) Groups/collections - Zenfolio allows you greater flexibility in creating groups and nested groups. It's also easier to apply some batch settings to galleries, because you can just set them in the parent group. I also like the "Collection" feature - basically it's like a gallery, except with links to other pictures on your site (or other sites).

Disadvantages

1) Groups (Zenfolio's version of Smugmug categories) currently don't have cover photos - but I was told this feature would be added in an upcoming update

2) Lack of search - You don't seem to be able to search your own photos, only a public Zenfolio search.

3) Smugmug has more cool features (RSS feeds, Google maps, etc) - although I haven't really found myself using too many of them.

4) Not as easy to choose a specific image size (S,M,L) as with Smugmug. On the other hand, everything resizes based on the browser window size, and you also get a Very Large (1100 x 850) image size.

To sum it up, while Smugmug has a lot of features that Zenfolio doesn't, the most important thing is really the viewing experience, and Zenfolio just does a better job at that. Hopefully the Smugmug developers can learn a thing or two from the competition (and I'm sure they will).

[Andy]

Thanks for the great feedback, smugbug, we really appreciate the time and the post. We're sorry to see you go!

(I understand there are other themes, but not many nice, elegant, black background ones)
We just made another new one, released yesterday, Gradient Grey. And more elegant, black ones, to come.

3) Layout of galleries - galleries are laid out across the page, making good use of space. The layout is also changed dynamically based on the size of the browser. I guess I was never the biggest fan of Smugmug's "two column" arrangement, which seemed to waste horizontal space and results in a lot of scrolling down (although you can fit more gallery caption data).
We hope to have a wider / bigger style in the not too distant future, based on a lot of great customer feedback we've been getting here.

I never did understand Smugmug's clunky Filmstrip style, which moves in the opposite direction you expect... we have hard data that shows you are in the 50% who feel that way :wink

Thanks again!

[rfaith]

Have been hearing a lot about Zenfolio and wanted to compare and see if Zenfolio fit my needs. After a testing for a few days am happy that I made the right decision about sticking with Smugmug. Even got a friend to sign up after the testing :D

The one thing I was really looking forward at Zenfolio was Collections. But after trying it out it just does not work for me. I really wish when/if Smugmug implements virtual gallery they do a complete job and treat it like a gallery but with links.
An example of how I would like to use virtual gallery:
1) Add all photos of my family vacation to a new gallery - password protected.
2) Create a virtual gallery with some photos that I want to make public (no password)
3) Create another virtual gallery with some photos that I want to share with friends - password protected but different from the original gallery
This way I can create different gallery for different groups of people.
Right now to do this in Smugmug I have to create different gallery and upload the photos again :cry
Zenfolio does it better by making it easy to add the photos into collection but the user needs to enter the original gallery password after entering the collection password :scratch Adding password to individual photos only complicates thing some more. I have to enter three passwords.
Better of going the Smugmug way for now.
Yes I know about share groups and use them currently but I want to group gallerys with different passwords into one virtual gallery so my friends, family and other only need to remeber one password given to them.

Next I took a look at the slideshow. Love the Smugmug slideshow, it uses every bit of space within the browser window. Small control bar compared to Zenfolio. Zenfolio does not use up the entire space available, leaves thick border around the images and a has background color control that is really irritating. An really useful that Zenfolio have is the thumbnail that pops from the control bar that can be used to quickly preview and skip photos in slideshow mode. But for me using maximum screen space was important.

Smugmug has many features that Zenfolio lacks like download entire album thanks to open API and tools provided by many users on this forum, a great forum, community, etc. Am happy with all the changes that keep happening at Smugmug.

Am going to stick with Smugmug. I just wish someone treats virtual gallery like regular gallery but with links. :bow

Thanks a lot to everyone at Smugmug.

[Andy]

Am going to stick with Smugmug. I just wish someone treats virtual gallery like regular gallery but with links. :bow

Thanks a lot to everyone at Smugmug.
:wave WELCOME to Dgrin and thanks for posting. This is great input, we thank you very much. Our SmugSorcerers are thinking a lot about virtual galleries, smart galleries, and more. Stay tuned :D

[devbobo]

Right now to do this in Smugmug I have to create different gallery and upload the photos again :cry
Have u tried making a 2nd copy and moving it to a new gallery ?
That might be quicker bandwidth-wise then uploading again.

[cmason]

Have u tried making a 2nd copy and moving it to a new gallery ?
That might be quicker bandwidth-wise then uploading again.

You tried this devbobo? Make 2nd copy only works on a single photo..there is no bulk setting. So if you want to copy say 10 photos to another gallery, it is just painful to click on a photo, make 2nd copy, wait for it to update, do this 10 times. THEN you have to find those 10 photos again, which you can do with Move (expert), so at least there is something there.

Takes like 5 seconds to drag those 10 photos in the upload tool from Windows.

Hey its your storage and bandwidth, but seems odd to have several copies of each photo. Seems like only one Original would do...but what do I know?

[rfaith]

:wave WELCOME to Dgrin and thanks for posting. This is great input, we thank you very much. Our SmugSorcerers are thinking a lot about virtual galleries, smart galleries, and more. Stay tuned :D
Thanks Andy. Its good to hear that you guys are working on it. Have been lurking around the forum since I signed up a year ago and found no reason to say anything as I was extremely happy with the service. But I had to say something now as I have tried Zenfolio and felt like they had not done a great job at implementing collections. Just wanted to help Smugmug get it right by contributing my experience and expectations of virtual gallery.

devboo, I find it easier to upload again. It is quiet slow on at 256 kbps connection but still easier than making copies, finding the copies and moving it.

[Malte]

Have u tried making a 2nd copy and moving it to a new gallery ?
That might be quicker bandwidth-wise then uploading again.

I tried this once, but since the copy is indistinguishable from the original (atleast with filenames off) I moved and later deleted the original, which killed a link.

Malte

[PBolchover]

The one thing I was really looking forward at Zenfolio was Collections. But after trying it out it just does not work for me. I really wish when/if Smugmug implements virtual gallery they do a complete job and treat it like a gallery but with links.
An example of how I would like to use virtual gallery:
1) Add all photos of my family vacation to a new gallery - password protected.
2) Create a virtual gallery with some photos that I want to make public (no password)
3) Create another virtual gallery with some photos that I want to share with friends - password protected but different from the original gallery
This way I can create different gallery for different groups of people.
Right now to do this in Smugmug I have to create different gallery and upload the photos again :cry
Zenfolio does it better by making it easy to add the photos into collection but the user needs to enter the original gallery password after entering the collection password :scratch Adding password to individual photos only complicates thing some more. I have to enter three passwords.
Better of going the Smugmug way for now.
Yes I know about share groups and use them currently but I want to group gallerys with different passwords into one virtual gallery so my friends, family and other only need to remeber one password given to them.

You can do at least some "virtual gallery" manipulation in smugmug via keywords, and use a "gallery redirect" in order to make the keyword "virtual gallery" appear in the relevant Category. This doesn't solve the public vs password-protected issue, but will allow the same photo to appear in multiple "galleries". (Or equally, for the same gallery to appear in multiple Categories)

[cjyphoto]

You can do at least some "virtual gallery" manipulation in smugmug via keywords, and use a "gallery redirect" in order to make the keyword "virtual gallery" appear in the relevant Category. This doesn't solve the public vs password-protected issue, but will allow the same photo to appear in multiple "galleries". (Or equally, for the same gallery to appear in multiple Categories)

See what ya did there? You explain how to jump through hoops with SmugMug to try and do what Zenfolio simply allows everyone to do without manipulating anything.

I am currently using both services. I love the awesome help, community and customization that SmugMug allows. To be honest though, Zenfolio is still cleaner looking and easier to navigate. The recent SmugMug gallery updates are a great step in the right direction but still do not work as smoothly as Zenfolio. I'll be keeping both for a while longer though. Still can't quit Smug yet. :thumb

[rfaith]

This doesn't solve the public vs password-protected issue, but will allow the same photo to appear in multiple "galleries". (Or equally, for the same gallery to appear in multiple Categories)
I am mainly interested in getting a fix on the public vs password-protected issue. Zenfolio does not solve that for me. In all other aspects my preference is Smugmug.

See what ya did there? You explain how to jump through hoops with SmugMug to try and do what Zenfolio simply allows everyone to do without manipulating anything.
True. But, for now this is a kind of an alternate solution available, it is a bit complicated and not as easy as in Zenfolio. Anyway Andy has hinted that they are working on it. :D

[devbobo]

You tried this devbobo?

:lol3 :lol3 yeah i was thinking that very thing as I was replying :D

For a long time I have been thinking about writing some bulk tools similar to the BZT, but there have been some limitations. When I get a chance I will dig a bit deeper into the new ajax functionality and see if anything new is exposed which might make this a realistic option.

Cheers,

David

[TheDuck]

In general, for me, the basic "look and feel" of the new Smug is superior to Zen, primarily because Zen's hierarchy plants ugly icons for file folders on my home page rather than photo thumbnails. This will change soon at Zen, so the advantage is fleeting. Power and Pro users can also customize sites at Smug far more than at Zen, so far. The help available from the Digital Grin forum will likely mean that Smug will retain a significant customization advantage over Zen for sometime, unless Zen implements a more user friendly system than Smug (which requires learning, or at least becoming comfortable with, HTML, CSS, JAVA, etc.) Keyword and cloud tag searching at Smug is superior to Zen, though all functionality is lost on non-public galleries.

Zen has done a fantastic job with the permissions issue, though. No, it's not perfect, but it is very powerful and very flexible. Many of the initial omissions on Zen described earlier in this thread have already been addressed (printing, for example).

I have found a difference between Smug and Zen that relates to the actual images - rather than the GUI or security: Zen accepts TIFF format, and Smug does not. I've searched the forums, and found very little discussion on Digital Grin relating to TIFF file storage. I'm trying to decide whether this difference is significant enough to "tip the scale", and I would welcome Andy's or anyone's comments.

It would appear that making TIFFs available for download would eliminate many of the issues that arise with storing JPGS as "the original". (TIFFs are a lossless format, whereas JPGs recompress the image via the Discrete Cosine Transformation every time the JPG is saved. With lots of software, even a rotation or a name change will recompress the entire image). For people wanting to d/l an "original" to edit the photo themselves before printing, TIFF appears a superior choice over JPG. Further, as a backup/archive for my own photos, I would prefer access to original RAW files, but if RAW isn't available I would prefer a TIFF converted from RAW over a JPG. The final JPG uploaded reflects not just the camera, lens and composition at the time of the original capture, but also reflects the editing software and my editing skills, and editing decisions made that existed at the point in time of edit. (Imagine, for example, if you just now learned that you could convert your 15mm fisheye images into rectilinear images using software that you did not have, or that did not exist, when you first uploaded images to your online galleries! Where are your "original" images that you want to reprocess?)

What is the downside of TIFF? Well, they're bigger files. Converting a random 10D image from RAW to TIFF with no other processing produced a 4.5MB file a moment ago. Well within Smug's 8MB limit and Zen's 10MB limit, but a 5D or whatever is announced at PMA this year could create issues for Smug and Zen. In addition, most viewers know about JPG rather than TIFF, but I'm not sure that the underlying image format makes the same difference to a viewer or anyone ordering prints as it would to a downloader.

So, GUI=Smugmug, access controls=Zenfolio; is TIFF storage significant? I welcome any comments you may have!

Be seeing you,
The Duck

p.s. btw, I almost wrote Zen off when I read this post...but I investigated instead and learned more about the power of Zen's permission system. Thought I'd share:

The one thing I was really looking forward at Zenfolio was Collections. But after trying it out it just does not work for me. I really wish when/if Smugmug implements virtual gallery they do a complete job and treat it like a gallery but with links.
An example of how I would like to use virtual gallery:
1) Add all photos of my family vacation to a new gallery - password protected.
2) Create a virtual gallery with some photos that I want to make public (no password)
3) Create another virtual gallery with some photos that I want to share with friends - password protected but different from the original gallery
This way I can create different gallery for different groups of people.
Right now to do this in Smugmug I have to create different gallery and upload the photos again :cry
Zenfolio does it better by making it easy to add the photos into collection but the user needs to enter the original gallery password after entering the collection password :scratch Adding password to individual photos only complicates thing some more. I have to enter three passwords.

Zen's permission system allows you to handle this much more elegantly than you tried. Put your photos in a password-protected gallery for your family. BUT - explicitly make the photos themselves not-password protected. Now create a collection (Zen's virtual gallery term) for your friends, using a different password for the collection. Your friends only have to enter their password once to see all (but only) the photos you approved for them, and your family only has to enter their password once to see their set. No one else can access the photos. You can independantly specify permissions for search engines, and even whether your friends can add the photos you've allowed them to see into their own collections!

[Andy]

Zen accepts TIFF format, and Smug does not. I've searched the forums, and found very little discussion on Digital Grin relating to TIFF file storage. I'm trying to decide whether this difference is significant enough to "tip the scale", and I would welcome Andy's or anyone's comments.

I think in general, folks tend to over-think this. The digertati-measurebaiti crowd has said things like "lossy jpg!- bleh!" Well, those TIFFs have to be converted to JPGs for printing - if there's a print to be made, so what then?

I'd rather have total control over the process, and produce my own jpgs, ready for output on the web, and in print. Tiffs for archival purposes? My digital negatives are stored in RAW format, on Amazon's S3 service, using Jungle Disk.

[cjyphoto]

I just got a new monitor yesterday and I hate to say it but SmugMug looks pretty bad on a high resolution wide screen :huh Zenfolios dynamic resizing works wonders. Here are examples:

Zen http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/p1040326803/?photo=267517740

Smug http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/p1040326803/?photo=466439831

I realize that most visitors probably are not running their monitors at 1920 x 1200 now. The trend though is toward bigger wide screen monitors and hopefully Smug will be able to address the wasted space of the current design. Just an observation. I still love SmugMug for the great support and the ability to make our sites unique but a little work on the display of images is in order.

[Rando]

Pics are coming up 403 forbidden.

I just got a new monitor yesterday and I hate to say it but SmugMug looks pretty bad on a high resolution wide screen :huh Zenfolios dynamic resizing works wonders. Here are examples:

Zen http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/img/p267517740.jpg

Smug http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/img/p466439831.jpg

I realize that most visitors probably are not running their monitors at 1920 x 1200 now. The trend though is toward bigger wide screen monitors and hopefully Smug will be able to address the wasted space of the current design. Just an observation. I still love SmugMug for the great support and the ability to make our sites unique but a little work on the display of images is in order.

[wellman]

Pics are coming up 403 forbidden.

Yar. :nod

[Andy]

I just got a new monitor yesterday and I hate to say it but SmugMug looks pretty bad on a high resolution wide screen :huh Zenfolios dynamic resizing works wonders. Here are examples:

Zen http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/img/p267517740.jpg

Smug http://cjyphoto.zenfolio.com/img/p466439831.jpg

I realize that most visitors probably are not running their monitors at 1920 x 1200 now. The trend though is toward bigger wide screen monitors and hopefully Smug will be able to address the wasted space of the current design. Just an observation. I still love SmugMug for the great support and the ability to make our sites unique but a little work on the display of images is in order.We can't see your linked images.

Anyhow, we're working on SmugMug Gigantor- wide & big. You can add your voice here:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241

[cjyphoto]

We can't see your linked images.

Anyhow, we're working on SmugMug Gigantor- wide & big. You can add your voice here:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241

My bad they should work now. Glad to hear that Smug is working on the issue. :thumb

[Malte]

Zen accepts TIFF format, and Smug does not. I've searched the forums, and found very little discussion on Digital Grin relating to TIFF file storage. I'm trying to decide whether this difference is significant enough to "tip the scale", and I would welcome Andy's or anyone's comments...

So, GUI=Smugmug, access controls=Zenfolio; is TIFF storage significant? I welcome any comments you may have!..

I tried ou some tiff conversions and my verdict on the fact that Zen allows them is that it's irrelevant as long as their cap on image size is 10 MB.

Malte

[Baldy]

My bad they should work now. Glad to hear that Smug is working on the issue. :thumbI still can't get to them.

[Pindy]

Andy, thanks for the Jungle Disk plug—I'm trying them out now. It would have been a major coup if Aperture would support Network Vaults directly. AARGH!

On the Zen front, my tryout today turned up some VERY slow performance (click — 2 seconds — photo updates). on the positive front, they have a good feature set and nice looking pages. Lack of keywording would keep me away. I like a little Web 2.0 in my diet, just not my main course as I'm force-fed it by Flickr.

[peestandingup]

Lack of keywording would keep me away.
They have keywording for galleries & photos. See (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p165306509.jpg).

[Pindy]

Nice—didn't notice that probably because they didn't really count keywording as one of the elements of the tour, unless I missed it.

[beline]

big plus, they're price...

cons, didn't see any support for proofing or watermarks.

also, they don't have a user-board, like this, from what I could tell...

You get what you pay for. :-D

[lr1811]

I have read a few posts that say for "pro" options, Smugmug offers much more then zenfolio.

Can anyone comment on that?

Thanks,
Brian

[Andy]

I have read a few posts that say for "pro" options, Smugmug offers much more then zenfolio.

Can anyone comment on that?

Thanks,
Brian
I'm biased because I'm with SmugMug, but here are some:

* set pro pricing, charge your price and be paid a profit

* custom watermarking

* backprinting

* proof & delay

http://smugmug.jot.com/WikiHome/Pros

Our Service, consistent track record of white glove support for pros and their customers :thumb
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=456689#post456689

[mkress65]

I have read a few posts that say for "pro" options, Smugmug offers much more then zenfolio.

Can anyone comment on that?

Thanks,
Brian

ZF really isn't a pro solution yet -- you cannot display your images for sale and adjust the price to your liking. They do say that functionality is on their road map -- not sure when though but it sounds like "soon". They just added the ability to order prints (at standard prices) from MPix and EZprints, with some interesting options regarding papers and framing. They also don't provide the extent of website customization that SmugMug Power/Pro users get, but again, they say they are working on something that will allow customization w/o CSS or HTML knowledge. Their current set of themes are nice, if somewhat limited, and they seem to add new ones on occasion. I've found their customer support responsiveness (including friendliness and helpfulness) to be on par w/ SmugMug's, although they lack direct and community support via a forum like DGrin.

[Pindy]

also, they don't have a user-board, like this, from what I could tell...



Although you don't have to be a SM customer to use DGrin, I think DGrin in general illustrates the type of quality stock that make up Smugmug's core clientelle! :lust

[lr1811]

I'm biased because I'm with SmugMug, but here are some:

* set pro pricing, charge your price and be paid a profit

* custom watermarking

* backprinting

* proof & delay

http://smugmug.jot.com/WikiHome/Pros

Our Service, consistent track record of white glove support for pros and their customers :thumb
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=456689#post456689


Thank you Andy, Matt, and Pindy.

Those first two are critical if you want to sell photos which I would have to imagine is why most people even get a "pro" account here.

After realizing that, you really can't compare zenfolio's "unlimited" account to smugmug's "pro account" because zenfolio's is obviously (at this time) not geared for sells but rather a place only to store and show off your photos.

As for me, I have really enjoyed smugmug. I had a pro account for a while but was not using it so I canceled it earlier this month just before renewal. About 2-3 days later, I received a call with the opportunity of taking all the team, individual, and action photos for a little league type baseball league. Now I am scrambling to get this done and find myself back at smugmug!

I was grandfathered in at the old rate but after I canceled, I imagine I will have to cough up $30 more dollars if (more like when) I re join. :cry

Is it too late to great grandfather me in?!?!

Anyway, I wanted to explore my options and found zenfolio so then I searched dgrin and found this thread. I actually felt awkward reading it because this is the "home" of smugmug! What I found refreshing is the way the smugmug crew has handled this and responded to various posts. THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE TRUE PROFESSIONALS WE ARE DEALING WITH HERE.


Thanks again,
Brian

[mkress65]

Thank you Andy, Matt, and Pindy.
<snip>
After realizing that, you really can't compare zenfolio's "unlimited" account to smugmug's "pro account" because zenfolio's is obviously (at this time) not geared for sells but rather a place only to store and show off your photos.
<snip>
Anyway, I wanted to explore my options and found zenfolio so then I searched dgrin and found this thread. I actually felt awkward reading it because this is the "home" of smugmug! What I found refreshing is the way the smugmug crew has handled this and responded to various posts. THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE TRUE PROFESSIONALS WE ARE DEALING WITH HERE.
Thanks again,
Brian

2 comments:

1) Zenfolio's unlimited account seems similar to SmugMug's standard account, since it has unlimited storage (and is comparably priced) and doesn't really offer the flexibility of even the power account let alone the pro account (at least in terms of customization.)

2) As I understand it, DGrin is not affiliated w/ SmugMug (according to Baldy and One-Thumb) so I'm assuming these conversations are fair game. It is a bit awkward that this thread is in the SmugMug support forum, which would seem to blur the line regarding affiliation, but since Andy has been participating and hasn't moved the thread to another forum, I'm again assuming its OK.

[Andy]

2) As I understand it, DGrin is not affiliated w/ SmugMug (according to Baldy and One-Thumb) so I'm assuming these conversations are fair game. It is a bit awkward that this thread is in the SmugMug support forum, which would seem to blur the line regarding affiliation, but since Andy has been participating and hasn't moved the thread to another forum, I'm again assuming its OK.
? It's very okay no worries at all.

Dgrin is owned by SmugMug.

Thanks for posting!

[Andy]

Thank you Andy, Matt, and Pindy.

Those first two are critical if you want to sell photos which I would have to imagine is why most people even get a "pro" account here.

After realizing that, you really can't compare zenfolio's "unlimited" account to smugmug's "pro account" because zenfolio's is obviously (at this time) not geared for sells but rather a place only to store and show off your photos.

As for me, I have really enjoyed smugmug. I had a pro account for a while but was not using it so I canceled it earlier this month just before renewal. About 2-3 days later, I received a call with the opportunity of taking all the team, individual, and action photos for a little league type baseball league. Now I am scrambling to get this done and find myself back at smugmug!

I was grandfathered in at the old rate but after I canceled, I imagine I will have to cough up $30 more dollars if (more like when) I re join. :cry

Is it too late to great grandfather me in?!?!

Anyway, I wanted to explore my options and found zenfolio so then I searched dgrin and found this thread. I actually felt awkward reading it because this is the "home" of smugmug! What I found refreshing is the way the smugmug crew has handled this and responded to various posts. THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE TRUE PROFESSIONALS WE ARE DEALING WITH HERE.


Thanks again,
Brianre-upgrade back to pro, and then when you do, send a note to our help desk, ATTN: Andy and I'll take care of things :deal

[mkress65]

? It's very okay no worries at all.

Dgrin is owned by SmugMug.

Really? That's not what Chris and Don told me. :dunno Or at least not what I inferred from their note.

[Andy]

Really? That's not what Chris and Don told me. :dunno Or at least not what I inferred from their note.
Hi, thanks again for writing. SmugMug owns Dgrin, we've made no bones about that.

[peestandingup]

1) Zenfolio's unlimited account seems similar to SmugMug's standard account, since it has unlimited storage (and is comparably priced) and doesn't really offer the flexibility of even the power account let alone the pro account (at least in terms of customization.) Now, I dont agree with that at all (besides the price similarities). IMO the $40 unlimited Zenfolio package blows away the Smugmug basic plan at the same price. Seriously, its just not a contest there. I dont think any person who has used those 2 account types with each service could honestly say any differently. Im not gonna list all the features you get with them, but trust me, there are A LOT of high end features you get that a basic SM account just dont give you.

With me using both services at this point, I would say that the $40 unlimited Zenfolio plan is currently in between a SM Power & Pro acount in terms of features, quickly approaching rivaling the Smugmug Pro plan as soon as you can set print/download prices (which is soon) & customize your page with more than just themes (with no html/css coding required). Now remember, thats all at the same $40 price as a SM basic account is. Dont know how they're pulling it off at that price, but im not complaining. :D

Both services approach to the whole customizing thing is different. I think that part is more of a personal preference honestly. People view customizing with their own html/css coding a blessing & some see it as a curse. Same thing with customizing without html/css coding. Its just different.

[mkress65]

Well, I've got them both too. Have had standard, power and pro accounts at SmugMug and I've got the unlimited account at ZF. ZF is great and there is a lot of canned ability, but, since the conversation was about professional features, you simply cannot do as much with a ZF unlimited account in terms of raw customization and flexibility as you can w/ SmugMug Power account. For instance, there is no CSS/HTML therefore I cannot use StatCounter or any of that ilk to determine specifics regarding who is coming to my account. ZF does not let me setup nearly as customized an entry page as SmugMug does w/ CSS/HTML.

ZF does have different security features that I find I need, but, as far as I can tell, they don't relate to a professional account, which was the context of the post to which I was responding. Obviously I think the plan is superior for my needs b/c I'm migrating my photos there, but Brian didn't ask which was better for my needs, so I gave feedback related to his question, and I included the reference to SM power account as a point of reference -- unless you know of current functionality on ZF that provides more customization to the look/ feel than Themes and layout options -- which I would love to hear!

Also, in a previous post, I had already pointed out the upcoming items. Sounds like you might have more information than I do about timing, since all I was told was "its on the roadmap." Except for comments and a couple other things that I was told are "soon".

[lr1811]

re-upgrade back to pro, and then when you do, send a note to our help desk, ATTN: Andy and I'll take care of things :deal

Thanks Andy!!!!!!

:bow

[bauerman]

I had never heard of Zenfolio until stumbling upon this post here about a week ago. I have since spent some time with a trial account and I must agree that the user interface is superior to what Smugmug is providing. You can have completely customized, professional looking galleries created in little or no time, and probably this biggest plus is that the process was intuitive to me. It just seemed to flow. While Smugmug’s tool set is greater at this point than Zenfolio’s, a lot of the features seem to be “bolted on” and there is not the same flow. I find the control panel view at Zenfolio to be much more user friendly.

Probably the biggest factor to me though was the “bang for the buck” with Zenfolio. Their “basic” account at the $20 price point is extremely full-featured and is very similar to most other sites professional level accounts. I think that they fact that they add another GB of storage space for every year that you renew a basic account is a wonderful idea. I am also a fan of Mpix printing and was happy to see that significant relationship in place for print fulfillment. Plus, they offer EZ Prints as well for reduced price printing, which I think Smugmug’s own testing at one point crowned as one of the best out there.

Once Zenfolio gets their print price functionality in place and allow users to sell for profit (which according to them is very soon)– that is almost the last piece of the puzzle for many pros. For me, the features offered for a $20 price tag were too great and I went for the Zenfolio account.

I think that Smugmug and Zenfolio are unique in their offerings and stand apart from the crowd when it comes to professional photo hosting. I also think that Zenfolio may be one of the best things to ever happen to Smugmug – having a close competitor is any business market is generally a good thing. It keeps both companies on their toes and innovating. I wish both companies a lot of success in the future.

[Malte]

...the user interface is superior to what Smugmug is providing.

I hear you. Zen's user interface is like crack, you're hooked on the first fix.

You can have completely customized,...galleries created in little or no time,...

Well, not really. You can choose a theme much like you can with Smug. Themes, in my opinion, look better on Zen but an untouched standard page looks better on Smug. Customization is clearly supereor with Smug.

...a lot of the features seem to be “bolted on” and there is not the same flow.

I can agree with this as well. Maybe that's the flipside of listening so much to your customers and adding features as you go. I don't know if Zen listens like Smug does, I don't really feel I have a way to communicate with them. Sure, I can read their FAQ and email them but as someone else here said: "They don't have an Andy".

Malte

[NikonGirl]

I have a Smugmug and a Zenfolio account. I love the user interface of Zenfolio. I especially like the feature of switching to user view. I like selecting multiple photos and updating the heading and description without having to select from a drop-down list and opening a new screen. And, for me anyway, Zenfolio is just much faster. No matter how many times I read that things have "speeded up" here, I find Zenfolio much faster.

On the other hand, I still have a Smugmug account because one of these days I plan on customizing my site and I still want to have that option. I'm not a professional, so it's just never been a priority with me.

I really do wish that Zenfolio had a forum. But I do have to say that Zenfolio's customer support is awesome - on par with Smugmug. They reply almost immediately to any question you email them.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

[Andy]

Themes, in my opinion, look better on Zen
Really? I'm biased and all, and sure I make many themes on Smug- but can't say that I can even stretch to that statement.

I'd LOVE to know the details about why you feel this way - so that I can learn and maybe apply new things as we make new themes.

Thanks!

[bauerman]

I really do wish that Zenfolio had a forum. But I do have to say that Zenfolio's customer support is awesome - on par with Smugmug. They reply almost immediately to any question you email them.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.
They plan to have a moderated support forum in the near future - at least that is what they told me in an e-mail response. I don't know if this means that they will "have an Andy".....but who else really could?

I would agree with you on the speed of answer on e-mails to Zen support - most of my replies have been within the hour or just an hour or two at the most.

[Andy]

I don't know if this means that they will "have an Andy".....but who else really could? :lol3 one of me is enough, or so folks say :wink

:wave Bauerman :D

LTNS - how's every little thing? Nice to see you again!

[bauerman]

:wave Bauerman :D

LTNS - how's every little thing? Nice to see you again!
Yes - LTNS - things are well. And it looks like you have really settled in over here quite well. Good for you - Smugmug is a great service and you and your counterparts are obvisouly setting high standards for support of a service like this one.

Don't you ever just want to go back to "that other site with a black theme" and talk about chromatic abberation? Come on - you know you do!

Jared

[Andy]

Yes - LTNS - things are well. And it looks like you have really settled in over here quite well. Good for you - Smugmug is a great service and you and your counterparts are obvisouly setting high standards for support of a service like this one.

Don't you ever just want to go back to "that other site with a black theme" and talk about chromatic abberation? Come on - you know you do!

Jared:lol3 too much fun, wasn't it?

[devbobo]

after reading a few recent threads about zenfolio 'apparently' being quicker than SM, I decided to do a few tests using firebug.

The results showed that the SM gallery I choose loaded around 9-12 sec on average, while Zenfolio loaded between 18-22 secs.

caution...large images

SM screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697310-O-LB)
Zenfolio screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697305-O-LB)

:dunno

[bauerman]

after reading a few recent threads about zenfolio 'apparently' being quicker than SM, I decided to do a few tests using firebug.

The results showed that the SM gallery I choose loaded around 9-12 sec on average, while Zenfolio loaded between 18-22 secs.

caution...large images

SM screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697310-O-LB)
Zenfolio screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697305-O-LB)

:dunno

The speed differences between Zenfolio and Smugmug may be based more on perception than hard numbers - as maybe your test shows. I think that is definitely a possibility.

Your tests are not what I would call a baseline of either site however. The reason that I say that is you are using a Macintosh system and using the Flock browser......hardly standard equipment for people viewing galleries on either site.

I would be curious to see similar tests using Firefox and/or IE on a Windows based machine.

[Andy]

Thank you Andy, Matt, and Pindy.

Those first two are critical if you want to sell photos which I would have to imagine is why most people even get a "pro" account here.

After realizing that, you really can't compare zenfolio's "unlimited" account to smugmug's "pro account" because zenfolio's is obviously (at this time) not geared for sells but rather a place only to store and show off your photos.

As for me, I have really enjoyed smugmug. I had a pro account for a while but was not using it so I canceled it earlier this month just before renewal. About 2-3 days later, I received a call with the opportunity of taking all the team, individual, and action photos for a little league type baseball league. Now I am scrambling to get this done and find myself back at smugmug!

I was grandfathered in at the old rate but after I canceled, I imagine I will have to cough up $30 more dollars if (more like when) I re join. :cry

Is it too late to great grandfather me in?!?!

Anyway, I wanted to explore my options and found zenfolio so then I searched dgrin and found this thread. I actually felt awkward reading it because this is the "home" of smugmug! What I found refreshing is the way the smugmug crew has handled this and responded to various posts. THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE TRUE PROFESSIONALS WE ARE DEALING WITH HERE.


Thanks again,
BrianHi Brian, I fixed your account back and credited you the $50 so you are at $99.95 per year, the olde grandfathered rate.

Glad you are staying!

[peestandingup]

after reading a few recent threads about zenfolio 'apparently' being quicker than SM, I decided to do a few tests using firebug.

The results showed that the SM gallery I choose loaded around 9-12 sec on average, while Zenfolio loaded between 18-22 secs.

caution...large images

SM screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697310-O-LB)
Zenfolio screenshot (http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/2281029#132697305-O-LB)

:dunno Hmmm, well to be fair about it, I did my own tests with Flock on both my Zen & Smug sites using the same exact galleries. Zenfolio was always faster. Not by a staggering amount mind you, but still faster. Also, Zen had more of a work load because there are more thumbs per page & more requests to execute, bigger files, etc.

I tested about 5 galleries, but here are a couple (High-Res Warning):

Smug Test #1 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p253408878.jpg)
Zen Test #1 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p140772152.jpg)

Smug Test #2 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p313675055.jpg)
Zen Test #2 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p309457204.jpg)

And the impression of Zen does make it seem like it loads much faster & Smug makes itself look slower than it really is. Like, the Smug "loading" animated graphic in the top left of the page makes it seem slower because most people wait on that to go away before they start browsing the gallery, etc. Zen doesnt have anything like that.

[bauerman]

Hmmm, well to be fair about it, I did my own tests with Flock on both my Zen & Smug sites using the same exact galleries. Zenfolio was always faster. Not by a staggering amount mind you, but still faster. Also, Zen had more of a work load because there are more thumbs per page & more requests to execute, bigger files, etc.

I tested about 5 galleries, but here are a couple (High-Res Warning):

Smug Test #1 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p253408878.jpg)
Zen Test #1 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p140772152.jpg)

Smug Test #2 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p313675055.jpg)
Zen Test #2 (http://www.photosbykerry.com/img/p309457204.jpg)

And the impression of Zen does make it seem like it loads much faster & Smug makes itself look slower than it really is. Like, the Smug "loading" animated graphic in the top left of the page makes it seem slower because most people wait on that to go away before they start browsing the gallery, etc. Zen doesnt have anything like that.

Thanks for that testing Kerry - very interesting to look at. Based on those number you would assume it was about a wash from a speed perspective - but then as you mention the Zen page was loading more thumbs.

Am I the only one not using this Flock browser? :dunno

[Andy]

Am I the only one not using this Flock browser? :dunno
Love Flock. I use many browsers at once, and Flock is basically the same as FF.

Give it a try, won't hurt a bit :)

[bauerman]

Love Flock. I use many browsers at once, and Flock is basically the same as FF.

Give it a try, won't hurt a bit :)

I will give it a try Andy - thanks. I am a big FF fan and have used it almost exclusively for over a year.

Does Flock offer some advantages over FF or IE for the viewing of photos?

[Andy]

I will give it a try Andy - thanks. I am a big FF fan and have used it almost exclusively for over a year.

Does Flock offer some advantages over FF or IE for the viewing of photos?
not over FF - it's essentially a clone. So, it's a great 2nd browser (one logged in to Smug, one not, in this case).

[peestandingup]

Thanks for that testing Kerry - very interesting to look at. Based on those number you would assume it was about a wash from a speed perspective - but then as you mention the Zen page was loading more thumbs.

Am I the only one not using this Flock browser? :dunno
Thanks. Yeah, I dont use it much since its basically a clone of FF. Firefox is not really all that great for Mac since its a direct port-over from the PC version, so its not really "made for Mac". Therefore, it doesnt take advantage of a lot of Mac components, like the Keychain. But, the extensions are pretty rad.

Its Safari or Camino for me. :D

[devbobo]

I will give it a try Andy - thanks. I am a big FF fan and have used it almost exclusively for over a year.

Does Flock offer some advantages over FF or IE for the viewing of photos?

Flock is another mozilla based-browser being developed in parallel to Firefox.

Flock pitches itself as the social browser, it has support built-in for blogging and photo sharing out of the box (only flickr and photobucket by default).
Since I do a fair bit of extension development, I need to restart my browser quite often, so I use multiple browsers...and I have settled on Flock as my main web surfing browser.

I have been working on a SmugMug photo service for Flock, which I hope to release at some point.

Cheers,

David

[NikonGirl]

I just thought I'd share this information - Zenfolio API released
http://zenfolio.blogspot.com/2007/03/zenfolio-api-released.html

[bauerman]

I just thought I'd share this information - Zenfolio API released
http://zenfolio.blogspot.com/2007/03/zenfolio-api-released.html


Yes - good point Yolanda - that is big. Allowing users to create features that can integrate with Zenfolio functionality. I know that is a big selling point for Smugmug as well.

And there is already an outside application available that allows some integration of the Zenfolio platform with Apple's Aperture program. This is available from the main Zenfolio site right now.

[TSK Photo]

FYI, new features have been added to ZF:

1. Cover photos can be assigned to groups
2. Visitors can now do searches based on All of Zenfolio or just one photographer.

These are the only two new features I've noticed so far.

[peestandingup]

FYI, new features have been added to ZF:

1. Cover photos can be assigned to groups
2. Visitors can now do searches based on All of Zenfolio or just one photographer.

These are the only two new features I've noticed so far. Yeah, kinda weak update. Seems like more of a "small stuff we've been meaning to get around to" update. I was expecting custom priced prints, but cant complain too much. They have really been working hard & churning along nicely.

Although, I do like the new folder look, the search your own gallery instead of all of Zenfolio, and putting hyperlinks into text without using any html code. Wish RSS feeds were sitewide though instead of only galleries or Recently Added/Featured items.

[MacLoyal]

After hours of reading opinions on the various photo sharing site (much on this fine forum), I decided it was a close contest between Smug and Zen. I've posted albums on iWeb and find that easy, but I wanted to enter more of the public realm. I'm attracted to the backup aspect of outside storage too.

I decided that the best way to choose was to take advantage of the free trials at both sites and to post the same photos at each site. I downloaded the plugins for both sites to work right out of Aperture. I found both services to be surprisingly and equally slow to upload with broadband.

I'm a complete newbie at photo sharing sites, so these are raw impressions I have about each of the services. I uploaded to Zen first. I found the customization tools pretty easy to use, but it seems they have much less to offer than this site for making your pages look unique.

On the plus side for Zen, I like the dynamic placement of thumbnails based on the size of window you have for your browser. The first gallery allowed me to view my photos in a slideshow and it was sweet. I like the disappearing control panel at the bottom. We Mac folk are used to that with our docks, but that could confound people not used to controls going away.

I also think Zen's pages are much cleaner looking, even on the construction pages. I liked that the message to invite viewers was right there when I got my files uploaded. That's woefully absent on Smug's site. After much hunting and dead results by using the search function, even in tutorials, in frustration I clicked on "Share this photo" and sent it to myself. Problem is I cannot get into my gallery with that link, only to the photo. What am I doing wrong? Where is your invite email function? I put a password on the site so I need to notify my recipients how to get into my gallery. Zen's invite was already set up with the necessary information, not blank.

The big bust for Zen is that when I added photos for my second gallery, it completely disabled my whole site. I can no longer get into my photos over there. In fact, I couldn't get a contact us form to send from their site for over three hours. Once I got it sent off, they did respond within an hour. They said they can see my photos just fine and wanted to know what browser I'm using (Safari 2.0.4). It worked fine at first, but now it won't on my tower or my laptop.

That failure was about enough to tip the scale completely to Smug for me until I started having issues over here. Now I can't see my photos here either. I think I need to call it a night!

At first the gallery displayed for me, but I clicked on Slideshow and was never able to see it in that format. I left it loading for over half an hour. I just had the silly grin rolling around all that time. I would never expect anyone to hang out that long to see my photos.

I'm going to restart my computer and start from scratch getting on both sites again to see if that helps.

On the plus side for Smug, I'm so impressed with the tutorials and help that is available on this forum. I love the wacky structure of this company and the philosophy you all have for serving your customers. I see none of that human, personal touch on the Zen site.

I'm still on day one of my trial period on both sites. I wish it hadn't turned into this big of a TRIAL.

[Andy]

Now I can't see my photos here either. I think I need to call it a night!

We can help. You probably have something set in Safari that's blocking the Ajax parts of our site (and Zenfolio, too). Have you tried with Firefox, btw?

Holler to our helpdesk, we'll get you sorted, no problem: http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Thanks for trying us out, and welcome :wave

[MacLoyal]

Hi, Andy
I'm back after a restart and that seemed to clear up problems on both sites. I probably had my computer in meltdown mode. I'd been pushing pretty hard with multiple programs this weekend.

I just tried both sites on the slideshow and the Zen site is blazing fast compared to this site. Indeed, on the one or two second setting on Zen, I can't even read all of my comments. I do like the look of Smug's slideshow, now that it worked for me. It's displaying a larger photo and the comments are nicely boxed and easy to read. The problem is speed. Even on the lowest setting, it's taking about ten seconds to load a photo. On my Smug homepage, the photos in a smaller size whiz by fast.

I still can't see where I go to send out an invitation to my photos. Can you point that out to me and then I'm going to call it a night. I've still got 13 days to sort through the pros and cons of each service.

I must say that I appreciate the free exchange of ideas that I've read on this thread concerning your competitor. It shows Smug to be a class act and makes being here very appealing to me. :clap

[Andy]

Hi, Andy
I'm back after a restart and that seemed to clear up problems on both sites. I probably had my computer in meltdown mode. I'd been pushing pretty hard with multiple programs this weekend.

I just tried both sites on the slideshow and the Zen site is blazing fast compared to this site. Indeed, on the one or two second setting on Zen, I can't even read all of my comments. I do like the look of Smug's slideshow, now that it worked for me. It's displaying a larger photo and the comments are nicely boxed and easy to read. The problem is speed. Even on the lowest setting, it's taking about ten seconds to load a photo. On my Smug homepage, the photos in a smaller size whiz by fast.
We're redoing slideshow, it's actually something that's in the works now. You can expect more speed :)

I still can't see where I go to send out an invitation to my photos. Can you point that out to me and then I'm going to call it a night. I've still got 13 days to sort through the pros and cons of each service.

I must say that I appreciate the free exchange of ideas that I've read on this thread concerning your competitor. It shows Smug to be a class act and makes being here very appealing to me. :clapIn your gallery, there's a "share" button. Try it :thumb

Holler back for help, we'll be here. I'm in NY so I'm crashing now, but will be online in the morning :)

[MacLoyal]

Thanks again, Andy.

I used the Share button eventually. What put me off about it is that it says "Share Photo" not "Share Gallery" or "Invite Viewers".

I used the slideshow function again and discovered that if I use the arrow key on my keyboard, I can speed up the rendering quite significantly. I'll just pass that information onto my viewers.

I'm off to nighty night time now too! I wish I could stay home tomorrow and play on the computer, but that will have to wait until I'm done with work.

[DavidTO]

Zenfolio just sent me some spam with their latest features.


Blecch. I hate spam. Another reason why smugmug rocks! :D

[peestandingup]

Zenfolio just sent me some spam with their latest features.


Blecch. I hate spam. Another reason why smugmug rocks! :D Spam?? Please, David. I would HARDLY call a feature update email from a service you pay good money for "spam". And I can think of TONS of requests from SM users for exactly this sorta thing, instead of relying on a forum to get the word out. Not every SM member comes here you know. Am I wrong??

Besides, you can turn off email updates in the Zenfolio preferences. :rolleyes

[DavidTO]

Spam?? Please, David. I would HARDLY call a feature update email from a service you pay good money for "spam". And I can think of TONS of requests from SM users for exactly this sorta thing, instead of relying on a forum to get the word out. Not every SM member comes here you know. Am I wrong??

Besides, you can turn off email updates in the Zenfolio preferences. :rolleyes


SmugMug sends out announcement messages in your control panel. I wouldn't mind an opt-in email from zenfolio. But I never opted in, AFAIK.

[MacLoyal]

I've posted the same set of photos on SmugMug and Zenfolio for my free trial period. This is my first venture into photo sharing outside of iWeb or posting on a forum. I've sent out invitations to people I email regularly and also on another forum I belong to with a request that people look at both services and give me their impressions.

I know I want the outcome to be that people like Smug best because each opinion favoring Zen makes me cringe just a little bit and leaves me wanting to defend Smug. As the original poster on this thread asked, how do I counter the comments and show that Smug is the superior service?

Here are some of the comments that have come in thus far:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the error I got when trying Smugmug. The other service worked fine. "The macloyal.smugmug.com web site is down or has currently reached it's limit for concurrent connections."

All of us here still think that zen takes the cake after viewing both sites with all their respective options.

I first went in to the Zenfolio site and it was very easy to navigate the pictures enlarged very easily. I was able to access it without using the password and once in I browsed around and found it easy to use. I also tried the slide show and was able to advance the photos at will using the right and left arrows. SmugMug, however, was very slow to load and especially the slide show mode. Just based on those alone I liked the Zenfolio site better.

Zenfolio gets my vote!* Didn't ask for a password though.*I had to go there twice to see any photos but got the gallery and a nice slideshow. Smug wouldn't let me in without a password then after arguing with me it wouldn't give me a gallery at all.* The slideshow was OK but lacked the smooth transitions of Zen.* I wanted to look for my gun when I got the awfully depressing Smug Homepage: all black.* My PC didn't need to have brightness adjusted.

I have seen SmugMug and have considered it for their professional side for my photo business - so I am biased from the start. I do like the Zenfolio site for the custom background you were able to use. Does it allow for the same password protection? That alone might be enough to sway to use the SmugMug site. I like that feature.

SmugMug required me to have cookies on and I don't like that.

I like the Smug site because your photos were brighter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm hoping to get more feedback. I looked at both of my sites on my office partner's Mac and was pleased with the look and speed of both sites. Since I've been working with the sites, I've discovered the hidden menus and the extra controls that aren't obvious to first time users so I was able to zip through adjustments that other new users don't know exist.

My purpose in joining is to give easier access and more distribution of my digital images. If the I keep hearing from friends and colleagues that they prefer Zenfolio, it makes it harder for me to land here. Please give me some encouragement and selling points.

[DavidTO]

MacLoyal,

I can't really debate all of those comments, but I have a question: did the Zenfolio site have a password as well? It sounds like you had a pw on smug only, and that it caused confusion.

[MacLoyal]

I'm glad you asked. I went back to check and sure enough, I hadn't made that gallery have a password. I've rectified that now. I don't know why Smug "argued" with my one friend. I sent him another email request to try it once more. I pointed out the drop down menu on the top right that will allow him to change the black background to white.

I've gone into my settings and put up a custom background now. I thought I'd done both of those things when I created the gallery. Thanks for making me look again. I thought it was a quirk of this site.

[Baldy]

Hi Macloyal,

That's a really interesting comparison. Many thanks for making it and posting here. We're fascinated, as you can imagine.

The problem with not getting through...is that person from Arizona by chance? This has popped up in the last few days and we're trying to narrow it down. There's no doubt it's an ISP with a routing problem somewhere. The last time it happened was to Comcast customers in South Florida some months ago for a few days. It happens to all sites but if we narrow it down to the ISP, we can report it and they'll fix it.

We hear about black backgrounds occasionally, but more often positive than negative. People say photos look better or brighter on black, but a few don't like it. It's in your control.

Don't hear about cookies much. That's for the password.

The big thing is slideshow and we're working hard on some big improvements there. Zenfolio's is nicer to a lot of eyes than ours at the moment, although it doesn't go full-screen and the transitions are pretty jumpy when the photo gets large. Hopefully you'll see a great slideshow from us in the future.

Thanks again and keep the info coming!
Baldy

[MacLoyal]

This is a small feature, but it makes a big difference to me. I was uploading my third or forth gallery on each site before this one caught my attention.

I'm exporting from Aperture, so the options may be different depending upon how you upload your photos. When I select Smug I'm able to start a new gallery and give it a title then and there. In Zen, I must go into their site first and set up a new gallery so it appears in the drop down menu where I can select it. Needless to say, I've canceled out of the export a couple of times because I forgot to do this first.

Smug also allows me to make it a private gallery and set the password at the time I create and name the gallery from my export function. In Zen I have to go into each gallery after I make it to set the password (unless I want to do a default for all my galleries). I like Smug reminding me to take care of it on the spot.

***** Edit - After posting this and not getting into my "private gallery" easily, I realized I don't want a PRIVATE gallery right now. It took me a while to rediscover where to correct that classification. I only want a Password Protected gallery. It would be nice to be able to select that option and assign the password in this same prompter at the time I create the galleries. *****

***** Post Edit - Practice makes perfect and I'm a long way from perfection, but I'm getting better. Now that I've uploaded another gallery I see that you can Password Protect a gallery and not make it a "private gallery." All you have to do is leave the Public box checked AND insert the Password in the box. I just got confused on the options. *****

This is a feature that gives Smug a boost that could overrule the popular opinion I'm hearing about Zen being better to view. The easier it is for me to get my photos posted, the better.

Zen automatically picks up my keywords as well as my comments. It seems Smug should do this too. Each of my photos has its own set of keywords. I do not want to be retyping all of them.

Both services are taking hours to upload my photos (usually in batches of more than 100). I'm just wondering if this is normal and if there's anyway to speed it up. I had a Smug member tell me he uses drag and drop and it only takes minutes. Is it because I'm exporting from Aperture with the drop down menu there?

[MacLoyal]

That's a really interesting comparison. Many thanks for making it and posting here. We're fascinated, as you can imagine.

The problem with not getting through...is that person from Arizona by chance?

Thanks again and keep the info coming!
Baldy

I'm glad to provide my impressions. It's helping think through all the pros and cons and try to keep it all straight. Zen's biggest deficit is not having a great forum like this! I appreciate your welcome and openness to information about your own site and your competitor's.

My friend that was argued with (I wish he'd given a better description) lives in British Columbia.

My husband just told me that he went into both sites again at work today and Smug displayed my oversaturated photos much better. I just did my own comparison of a particularly dark photo (still learning how to tweak in Aperture :scratch ) and Smug is much better. It's close to what I saw when I made the adjustments. It leads me to believe that Smug does a better job of getting Apple colors right, tricky as that is.

[peestandingup]

This is a small feature, but it makes a big difference to me. I was uploading my third or forth gallery on each site before this one caught my attention.

I'm exporting from Aperture, so the options may be different depending upon how you upload your photos. When I select Smug I'm able to start a new gallery and give it a title then and there. In Zen, I must go into their site first and set up a new gallery so it appears in the drop down menu where I can select it. Needless to say, I've canceled out of the export a couple of times because I forgot to do this first.

This is a feature that gives Smug a boost that could overrule the popular opinion I'm hearing about Zen being better to view. The easier it is for me to get my photos posted, the better.

Zen automatically picks up my keywords as well as my comments. It seems Smug should do this too. Each of my photos has its own set of keywords. I do not want to be retyping all of them.

Both services are taking hours to upload my photos (usually in batches of more than 100). I'm just wondering if this is normal and if there's anyway to speed it up. I had a Smug member tell me he uses drag and drop and it only takes minutes. Is it because I'm exporting from Aperture with the drop down menu there?
Here (http://davidholmes.org/aperture-to-zenfolio) is the Aperture plugin for Zenfolio.

Also, uploading full-res photos usually takes a while nomatter what service you use, with maybe a bit of speed difference here & there per service/method used, but its not anything major.

It mostly depends on your internet provider's (upload) speed.

[MacLoyal]

I have the plugin already, thanks. I'm on broadband with Comcast, which is pretty fast. I'm surprised at how long it's taking. I can't work in Aperture during the upload time, so I'm mostly trying to get my photos ready and then set it to upload and head for bed.

[jfriend]

I have the plugin already, thanks. I'm on broadband with Comcast, which is pretty fast. I'm surprised at how long it's taking. I can't work in Aperture during the upload time, so I'm mostly trying to get my photos ready and then set it to upload and head for bed.

If it takes a really, really long time to upload them, then you might be picking too high a JPEG quality in Aperture (higher than is needed by any size print). I don't know how Aperture expressed JPEG quality, but in Photoshop you want to pick no higher than quality level 10 (on the 1-12 scale) or quality level 80 on the (0-100 scale) and many claim you can go lower than this and still see no difference in the prints. The difference in file size between a quality level like these and the highest quality level can be 3x with no print difference at all.

Also, if the Aperture plug-in won't let you work in Aperture during the upload, you may find it more convenient to export the desired files to a temporary directory and then use a separate uploader because this will free you to continue to use Aperture during the upload.

[MacLoyal]

I hadn't thought about moving the photos (or copies of them) to a separate location to free up Aperture. Could I just put them into a folder? Is "directory" non-Apple speak for folder? I could even dump them back into iPhoto. I'd like to keep the steps as few and simple as possible, of course, as well as not bloating my hard drive with copies everywhere.

This is a good suggestion to alleviate some of my frustration. Thanks.

[peestandingup]

If it takes a really, really long time to upload them, then you might be picking too high a JPEG quality in Aperture (higher than is needed by any size print). I don't know how Aperture expressed JPEG quality, but in Photoshop you want to pick no higher than quality level 10 (on the 1-12 scale) or quality level 80 on the (0-100 scale) and many claim you can go lower than this and still see no difference in the prints. The difference in file size between a quality level like these and the highest quality level can be 3x with no print difference at all. When exporting to jpeg, Aperture defaults to the "original size" preset. Its at quality 10, but can go all the way up to 12 if you edit the preset. But, it doesnt show you that info unless you go to the edit preset menu.

Im curious about this too. I wonder what the threshold is for maintaining quality. Maybe 8??

[jfriend]

I hadn't thought about moving the photos (or copies of them) to a separate location to free up Aperture. Could I just put them into a folder? Is "directory" non-Apple speak for folder? I could even dump them back into iPhoto. I'd like to keep the steps as few and simple as possible, of course, as well as not bloating my hard drive with copies everywhere.

This is a good suggestion to alleviate some of my frustration. Thanks.
Yes, "folder" = "directory". Sorry for using a PC term, not a Mac term. You probably can't just move the files within aperture. You have to "export" (or some similar term that Aperture uses) to a set of JPEG files outside of Aperture in a temporary folder. This assures that Aperture applies all of it's settings to the files so when Smugmug gets them, they lookslike you want them to.

Someone who knows Aperture could probably advise you on exactly which menu commands to use to accomplish this.

Once you've exported them outside of Aperture, you can use any of the other Smugmug uploaders and then continue to use Aperture while they are uploading.

[MacLoyal]

I have an Apple lesson on Tuesday and I'll present this to my teacher so he can show me where to set that export quality.

I live in an Apple world so the PC code is foreign to me. Sometimes I can fake it. :):

Where do I find other uploaders? I've only looked into Mac compatible stuff so far. This site did convince me to try out Firefox and I'm doing OK on it because it's pretty similar to Safari.

I appreciate the help as I muddle my way through a lot of unfamiliar territory. At least this forum format is familiar. I belong to a couple of vBulletin forums.