What is Reddit's opinion of
Zenfolio?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
21 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
If you do want the social/voting aspect, flickr has the huge userbase.
If you don't want the social/voting aspect, zenfolio is excellent and seems to do more in terms of customization. Both seem to give a good number of options for selling prints/rights/etc. KTM-3MK-26R (my ref. code) should get you 10% off.
I didn't get an email. I just disabled this 'feature'.
Russell Wilson winning the super bowl has caused this obnoxious ass Johnny Football love fest to kick into overdrive just because he's short and can throw. They're similar but the Texans and the Seahawks are not. You go in expecting the same results, you're gonna have a bad time.
Sorry, I didn't realize it was specific to my account. You have to change the username in the URL below, or go to "Selling", and then go to "Photo Albums"....
What about Zenfolio? Can have different galleries for clients protected by passwords, they have various plans, supports RAW, unlimited bandwidth. I am no pro, I only use Zenfolio to hold albums of things I share primarily with family, but they seem to just work for me. Can even export from Lightroom directly to them.
I'd like to point you to Zenfolio. I've been using them for about 3 years now, and they've been phenomenal. Most if not all of the things you're looking to do, you can do there. But before I get ahead of myself here, are you talking about printed proofs? That changes things a bit. Furthermore...
My partner and I shoot slightly under 3K images for a typical wedding. We deliver a minimum of 500 images, and typically more around 700-800. Exceptionally beautiful days can net us beyond 1k deliverable images. I understand this is not typical but its what we offer, meaning its a great deal easier than you think to go through the images.
We have what we call, first and second cull. Where She and I will go through the images in passes. One after the other. So the images are flagged, and a great deal is axed. Then the next person goes through the culled images and does the same. We end up with what we hope to be, only the good pictures. We then begin editing.
There are several sites dedicated to making a photo website easy. I use SmugMug and I really like it, but Zenfolio and PhotoShelter are also popular.
I can't speak for the other two, but SmugMug makes it really easy to set up a site to sell prints online. The entire gallery and purchasing system is built-in, so it's fairly hassle-free. My only complaint has been a few customization tweaks that I thought would be pretty basic aren't available in the code-free "Easy Customizer." Fortunately, there's a pretty active forum for customization with a lot of useful help and code. It only took me a few days to get everything together, and I didn't know anything about coding beforehand.
I know SmugMug is a US-based company, I don't know about the other two. I'm not sure how that would affect you; perhaps there is a similar company with a print lab a little closer to home.
Still, if you choose to go with SmugMug, send me a message and I'll give you a referral code that will save you $5 and save me $10 off my renewal! :)
Zenfolio. Not free, but it is decently priced. Fully customizable, so many products you can choose, you set your own prices, various payment options. Easy to set up and customize
That depends on your upload speed but just let it run at night. And, yes I upload the originals. As for Zenfolio vs. Smugmug...the pricing is the same but Zenfolio caps the max file size at 36mb and charges extra for RAW.
Here's the details: [Zenfolio Features](http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/all-features.aspx?loc=en-US&__utma=1.1875748666.1401975979.1401975979.1401975979.1&__utmb=1.1.10.1401975979&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1401975979.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)
Edit: Link and answer.
I am doing the same thing. I just got my website up a couple of months ago. I go though a company called zenfolio. I am in no way affiliated with them but I have had very good experiences with them so far and have been impressed. They have different tiers of services you can select from. I'm using the Premium tier and its around $100 U.S. a year. They will take care of the hosting, customer service, payments, and printing through a few different providers you can choose from. With what I'm paying for all of the zenfolio branding is removed from the site and sales so it looks like everything is coming from you. I'm still working on my page, getting a logo made and doing some custom coding for the page but you can take a look at what something from there looks like. rnaphotos.com
It wasn't until I finished typing it crossed my mind that you may be a troll, as some of the the suggestions you put forward were such overkill for the task you suggested (scrap-booking with Creative Memory Manager) . I apologize.
For your mom, as she wants portability, a laptop is probably better for her needs, so an upgrade to a current mid-range one will probably do. Add in an external drive for backups and she should be set. The woman who told her she needs 8GB of RAM knows probably close to nothing about computers and just regurgitating numbers she's heard (CMM3 has a requirement of 512MB). Saying that though, more RAM is never going to hurt if you can afford it.
As for your own needs there are several options for backup and storage, personally I like Drobo as I can easily swap drives as things fill up or to send for offsite storage. Multiple backups can be made at once just in case a drive or even 2 or 3 drives die. As far as I remember they do a networked version if that's the way you want to go.
S3 is an option for offsite storage, Zenfolio provides a portfolio site and unlimited storage for €50 per year. These, plus a few other vendors are good options for offsite backup that your can access from almost anywhere. I also keep a physical copy (a drive swapped out of the Drobo at regular intervals) at a fellow photographers home, while I store his at mine.
As others have said Lightroom is great for keeping images organised and is a RAW converter as well.
Since I don't see it mentioned yet, I use http://www.zenfolio.com/. It has worked really well for me and the price is right. I upload all my photos there and then set up galleries of specific photos for specific customers. I mostly license my photos for commercial or editorial use and it works great for that. The printing integration through Mpix works well too.
A few recommended services if you don't want to do the coding yourself (in no specific order.)
It's literally right on their front page.
My bad, you're right about RAW storage. But it is infinite as to how much you can upload. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to pay.
I use Zenfolio for sales (partner with Mpix for prints), but they also offer pretty good, customizable templates. Their free trial includes all Premium features for a couple weeks, I believe.
It might be worth looking at something like - http://www.zenfolio.com/
I use it for hosting my photos, I think the package I have is like $40/yr :)
Edit: Mine - http://photos.ab5w.com/ (I havnt uploaded any for a while though :/)
I made one using Zenfolio. It was easy to get it going, but I had to really strip it down to get it the way I wanted. It's a little expensive, too, if you want to use your own logo and custom URL.
I just subscribed to SmugMug's service, and it seems to be fairly decent. $150/year (+ a certain % of your print sales), with lots of simplified tools for setting up galleries, with the option of password-protecting specific client galleries, print purchasing and delivery, and some aesthetic site customization. They also allow url aliasing, so you can register a domain and not be stuck with somebody.smugmug.com.
There are also really simple uploading and organization tools for his images.
If he wants to go a bit deeper as he learns a bit of web/dev, they also have an interface which allows you to input CSS to style elements (mostly those already appearing in their HTML, to which you don't have access), and some HTML within certain divs - eg: "Put some HTML all up in this bio of yours! Did you know that you can use <bold>?!?".
The interface is not very awesomely implemented, and many users are limited to searching forums and FAQs for copy-and-paste bits of CSS to "get that thing to be hidden" or "have a cool slideshow on my homepage", but someone a bit more experience can happily inspect elements they wish to style (Firebug is good for this) and then drop the styles into the interface fields after learning the #id or .class of what they are seeking to change.
In any case, they offer a trial. To be honest, if I didn't have the tiny bit of comfort with CSS that I do, I would find their simplified customization tools far too limiting. You really need to play with styles to get a site that doesn't feel so painfully like a template.
That said, once it's up and running and looking how he likes, his maintenance should be nothing more than Flickr would require.
edit: I have also heard Zenfolio recommended.
edit II: "self-printed..." I may not have answered your question at all. : {
Here's a link to the Zen pricing plans. Here's a link to the features of each of the plans. To sell prints directly to people, you'd need the 100 dollar/year premium plan. They also take 12% of the profit for most print sales. Maybe it sounds like a bit much, but I'm thrilled with the quality of service from them.
Who is your audience? Friends, or clients? If clients, are they individuals or companies?
Do you want to sell photos from the site?
Do you need secure areas for clients to be able to view photos?
Do you need a search feature?
Zenfolio is good, but overkill for a "I want to share my photos with mom" site.