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.

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.

Originally Posted by 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. 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.

Originally Posted by jfriend 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

Originally Posted by onethumb 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?

Originally Posted by jfriend 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

Originally Posted by onethumb 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 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:



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

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.

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!

Originally Posted by bigwebguy 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.

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

Originally Posted by Baldy 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.

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:


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:


Smugmug's version is looking pretty tired:


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.


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:

Originally Posted by jfriend 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: [...] 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:

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

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-

Originally Posted by 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-

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.

Originally Posted by jfriend 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.

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

Originally Posted by 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

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.

Originally Posted by Baldy 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 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

Originally Posted by pronvit 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 - 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.

Originally Posted by pronvit 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.

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 mine.

Sebastian

Originally Posted by rainforest1155 Check out this thread - 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. 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 mine. 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