[Xcom]

I am considering smugmug however I would like to know of more options that exist. Found out today for example that imagekind offers you 15% on any frames that you sell. Not all of my customers would be interested in frames. However enough will to make that 15% worth it. After all its our photographs that are selling the frames. None goes to smugmug or another site like it just to buy frames.

Here is a rough idea of what I am looking for.

A site that will allow templates and the ability to edit them. I am not the best HTML designer and know jack about programming . Flash templates would be a plus.

Allow hosting of the domain itself. I don't want to use some cheesy javascript redirect or myloginname.hostingsite.com.

Commission on any frames that are bought from my site.

A shopping cart that only includes the product and sizes that I am selling. Not every single product that the companies can print and all of the sizes they offer. Just covered in grey or red telling the customer its not available. It makes the checkout look sloppy.

Digital downloads with an ability to add a documents for licenceing. Photoshelter offers this. Do any others?

The ability to add a blog or at least be able to intergate a blogging service.

Email along with the hosting package would be great. However I can get a paid host for emails if I have to.

Feel free to add your referral code. If you have one. When I decide on a host. I will use it.

Thank you for the advice/help.

[MRRiley]

Zenfolio won't give you everything you listed but I like em and the price is very reasonable.

Zenfolio | hosting service for photo galleries | a place to learn and enjoy photography

Another that I considered was http://www.ifp3.com/ but the price was a little steep.

Mike

[Xcom]

MRRiley who do you use to host your email?

[cwood]

I don't use Smugmug as my main site - I just use it for distributing images and I have a Pro account. Unlimited storage, lots of products, lots of customization options (although i haven't really done any of it). I don't know if they offer everything you want but the offer everything I could ask for.

If you go with them feel free to use my referal number to save yourself $5 - gDzFo9eFXVlY2

[MRRiley]

MRRiley who do you use to host your email?

At present I use my ISP, Comcast, and have a dedicated "Carpe Luminous (at) comcast" email address... I eventually plan to move to a more formal "me (at) carpeluminous.com" email but for now the Comcast one works.

Also, my "www.carpeluminous.com" is registered with GoDaddy but is actually located on Comcast. The main front pages are all thats on Comcast though and all of the content is on zenfolio with redirects from Comcast. This has worked satisfactorily for me to this point.

Mike

[palmor]

Zenfolio won't give you everything you listed but I like em and the price is very reasonable.

Zenfolio | hosting service for photo galleries | a place to learn and enjoy photography

Another that I considered was ifp3 - Advanced Gallery Web Sites - Home but the price was a little steep.

Mike

I second Zenfolio... if you self fulfill your orders they only take something like 2% of the sale which I think is reasonable. I really like the workflow they have to (you progress the photos through a workflow so you always know what you have to do next for a particular order).


John

[maxwell1295]

My fairly simple solution was to go with a website template. The site is a blogsite with a flash header, galleries, text pages, etc. I linked the blogsite to a separate site for proofing/print ordering. I did not like the shopping cart/ordering system of the one that came with the template.

I got the blogsite from portfoliositez.com for $16/mo ((includes template and hosting) and use Zenfolio ($100/yr) for the client proofing/print orders. You don't have to be a computer whiz to use either service.

Zenfolio is great for print orders. You set your own pricing using custom price lists and only offer the products and sizes you want. I only offer standard print sizes (wallet, 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 16x20), standoffs, and gallery wraps. That's it. No t-shirts, coffee mugs, or mousepads for me.

[jbrowning]

I only offer standard print sizes (wallet, 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 16x20), standoffs, and gallery wraps.

Hi Alan, I have a question for you. When you say you offer only wallet, 4x6, 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20. Do you have to send a seperate file sized to meet those deminsions or is it just one file then Zenfolio sizes the print size down?

Thanks
Jim

[tcdk]

I'm using Zenfolio, mainly because they have a printer i europa now.

(yes you upload full res to zenfolio and they do the rest)

[maxwell1295]

Hi Alan, I have a question for you. When you say you offer only wallet, 4x6, 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20. Do you have to send a seperate file sized to meet those deminsions or is it just one file then Zenfolio sizes the print size down?

Thanks
Jim

Nope, I upload the full resolution file cropped to 4x6, but try to leave enough room for 5x7 and 8x10 crops. The customer will be instructed to crop the image if they're ordering sizes other than 4x6.

[George Lama]

I host my own website and use Menalto Gallery to manage it. All orders are sent to WHCC using ROES. The thought of the customer recropping images at will gives me the willies.

I used to offer 4x6 but now only offer them if a customer specifically asks for them - I found myself doing a lot more recroping when ordering if I stuck to the "default" 4x6 aspect ratio. This can be a nightmare when doing wedding orders and people are ordering all sizes under the sun.

So as of this year I've been cropping everything to 4x5/8x10 ratio. This way, I end up with a minimal number of recroppings when ordering. Wallets and 5x7 are the same ratio and 11x14 is pretty close, and 4x5, 8x10, 16x20 are the same ratio. With most of my orders being for 4x5 and 8x10s, it certainly saves time.

[K-9]

Does Zenfolio do web hosting or just photo hosting?

[palmor]

Does Zenfolio do web hosting or just photo hosting?

Just photo hosting but they let you tie in your zenfolio pages into your website if you want (haven't done it myself but their help pages say you can).


John

[sluggo913]

I use ifp3.com, they don't charge a percentage and give you plenty of tools to work with and keep upgrading. They will host your domain and your e-mail from the site will be directed to a e-mail account you specify. It seems a little pricey at first but you can deduct it from your taxes and is reasonable if you consider the cost of developing your own web site.

[WMBP]

I am considering smugmug however I would like to know of more options that exist.

I've had a pro account with SmugMug for years. It's worked okay but I'm just about to close it down and move to zenfolio.


SmugMug

When I first signed up with SmugMug, I wasn't looking at the higher end pro services that cost hundreds of dollars (or more) a year, and SmugMug was much better than most of the free or low-cost services. It certainly provides lots of options! The reason I'm abandoning SmugMug now is that I got tired of fighting with those options - and I was never terribly pleased with the way my galleries looked.

SmugMug claims that you can customize almost everything in your pro site, and I believe this is true, because I've seen some other pro sites that were really impressive. But to do most of that customization, you have to do a lot of difficult work with CSS, and you have to do it in a very unforgiving environment. I have worked with CSS for years. I'm not good at it and don't enjoy working with it, but when I'm designing a site in Dreamweaver, I can adjust a property in the style sheet and immediately view how it's affecting the site. I can also see the entire style sheet in one place and assess how the various definitions affect one another. But in SmugMug, it's harder to do this. There are are clearly hidden formatting parameters that I can't assess; I deduce this because I have tried to do things that should work (do work in Dreamweaver) but don't work in SmugMug and the reason they fail has to be that there are other parameters defined by SmugMug and inaccessible to me that are overriding my choices.

Sorry, the previous paragraph will probably mean nothing to you if you don't know anything about CSS (cascading style sheets), and perhaps doesn't mean much even if you do. Let me summarize then by saying that I have simply found it very difficult to take advantage of all the options in SmugMug - and I've spent a lot of time on it!

There is excellent help available, but I think it's a case of the help really being necessary. I finally got things kind of working for me by taking some code that somebody had written and simply pasting it into an options field, without understanding. I didn't like that.

Another problem I've had with SmugMug is that I sometimes lose my photos. This happened recently when I made a change to the organization of my galleries - and then found that I couldn't figure out how to get to the page that lists ALL of my galleries. I found it eventually, but it was a bit of luck; I was afraid I was going to have to call for help.

For a long time, SmugMug hosted my entire domain. In theory that meant that the "smugmug.com" domain name should not have appeared in the URL of pages, but for reasons I never understood, it kept appearing. But the real problem with having Smugmug host my domain completely was that I couldn't easily design and control the site the way I wanted. I think it would have been possible to do what I wanted if I'd been willing to do research, ask for help, go to the trouble. I found it easier to create my own html site pages and host them elsewhere, so I did that, and a year ago or so I started using SmugMug simply as a back end for proofing galleries and making it possible for clients to order prints.

My impression is that SmugMug was a brilliant idea about 4 years ago, but that they built it in a way that has not scaled well or worn well. They are obviously aware of the problems their users are having, because there are tons of tutorials about how to customize your site (even in basic ways), there's a lot of help available in their forums (which are very active), and because recently they introduced the "Easy Customizer" which is designed to help you change your site's look without having to use CSS. I've used the Easy Customizer lately quite a bit in an effort to revise my site and I have continued to run into problems.

A final problem for me is that SmugMug does not support virtual copies of photos in galleries. I would like to be able to upload client galleries and make 'em private, but mark the best photos in that gallery for automatic display in a public gallery showing my best photos. With SmugMug, what I have to do is make a copy of photos if I want them to appear in two places. Not a huge deal, but not as easy as simply being able to mark a photo for display in the "MY BEST PHOTOS" gallery.

To end on a positive note: SmugMug has a LOT of features that I haven't used. I don't post video, but SmugMug supports video now. It's a big service, meaning they're working hard on it. The forums are very active, and the SmugMug forums aren't just for SmugMug support - they're a full-fledged photography forum with people talking about all kinds of wonderful subjects. I think especially for photographers who aren't trying to make money from their photography and who would like some social interaction, SmugMug would be a great choice. (There's Flickr, too, which I used for a couple of years before I used SmugMug: I joined Flickr before anybody had heard of it. But Flickr's display of photos has never been very good.) Anyway, I know a lot of photographers who are quite happy with SmugMug.


Zenfolio

I've looked at zenfolio a couple of times in the last year or two but I finally signed up for a trial account a week ago - and I'm about to convert that to a paid premium account. In some basic count-of-features sense, zenfolio clearly has fewer features than SmugMug. But the features that zenfolio lacks are ones I don't need (hosting video clips, for example), the ones it has are the ones I need, and I like the way zenfolio works and looks better than SmugMug. I think zenfolio's best templates look more up-to-date than SmugMug's.

I mentioned above that I made some changes to the organization of my photos in SmugMug and then realized I could not find some of my galleries at first. In zenfolio, this problem could not occur, because there's a user control page where you can see everything at a glance. Organizing things in Zenfolio is MUCH easier than in SmugMug. For example, as I'm about to close my SmugMug account, I would like to delete about 50 galleries. As far as I can tell - and I could be wrong - in SmugMug, to delete a gallery, I have to go to the gallery's main page, and use a command there. In Zenfolio, I can delete all those 50 galleries very quickly from the same page.

Zenfolio doesn't just support galleries (like SmugMug). It also supports "collections," which are virtual folders. I'm creating collections that contain my best photos from many different shoots and occasions. The galleries for individual shoots will mostly be hidden; but the best photos will be available to any visitor. I can quickly add a photo to a collection any time. For me this is a big deal. I really like Zenfolio's organizational tools. While they are quite powerful, the user interface is very easy to understand. In a few hours I've been able to create an account, figure out Zenfolio's organizational options, upload photos, configure galleries, reorganize galleries fairly extensively, create groups and collections (virtual containers), manage access to photos, figure out how to watermark, set prices, and more. After one week, I think I know my way around Zenfolio about as well or better than I know my way around SmugMug after several years.

Zenfolio's galleries are not nearly as customizable as SmugMug's are if you're willing to do the work; but Zenfolio offers enough options for me and I very much like the look of them.

Zenfolio's support for pro printing seems pretty similar to SmugMug's. I can set my own prices. Actually, pricing looks somewhat easier in Zenfolio. Zenfolio offers a range of products similar to SmugMug's. One thing that I've liked about SmugMug is that Bay Photo, the higher-end lab of the two they make available, does a great job, and Zenfolio uses Mpix, which has a reputation for being a bit more consumer-oriented rather than pro-oriented. But I've done some research and I think Mpix may be better than its rep. And Zenfolio gives me an option to fulfill print orders myself in the future if I choose to, meaning I could actually still send photos to Bay Photo (or whoever) for printing. I don't think SmugMug offers self-fulfillment as an option.


Alternatives?

There are MANY alternatives, designed for pros with a wide variety of needs (and varying budgets). SmugMug and Zenfolio are both aimed, I think, at a combination of serious amateurs and low-budget pros (like me). For photographers with bigger budgets or more specialized needs, there are other services worth considering. I've looked at a lot of them, including Printroom and Instaproofs.

Found out today for example that imagekind offers you 15% on any frames that you sell. Not all of my customers would be interested in frames. However enough will to make that 15% worth it. After all its our photographs that are selling the frames. None goes to smugmug or another site like it just to buy frames.

You'd have to check this, but I see that zenfolio also sells frames and it looks like I will get a cut from this sale (if I ask for one in my pricing setup). I haven't sold any prints through zenfolio yet except to myself (test prints to see the results).

Here is a rough idea of what I am looking for.

A site that will allow templates and the ability to edit them. I am not the best HTML designer and know jack about programming . Flash templates would be a plus.

Zenfolio and SmugMug both have templates. SmugMug has more templates by simple count but most of SmugMug's templates are awfully cheesy. If you compare the dignified templates only, I think Zenfolio has about as many as SmugMug. SmugMug has more options for organizing an individual gallery. You can show an index page with nothing but thumbnails that, when clicked, show just 1 photo at a time; or you can show thumbnails + one selected photo at the same time; or you can show one photo + a large caption (suitable for critique or journals); and several others.

Allow hosting of the domain itself. I don't want to use some cheesy javascript redirect or myloginname.hostingsite.com.

Both SmugMug and Zenfolio will let you use your own domain name. Personally, I don't think there's anything too "cheesy" about this url:

"http://williamporter.zenfolio.com"

It's not my home page, it's simply the backend where I host and sell photos. Even so, I'm thinking of creating a cname record for my domain so that users can get to my zenfolio index page with this url:

"http://photos.william-porter.net"

A shopping cart that only includes the product and sizes that I am selling. Not every single product that the companies can print and all of the sizes they offer. Just covered in grey or red telling the customer its not available. It makes the checkout look sloppy.

I think both SmugMug and Zenfolio allow the degree of customization that you're after.

Digital downloads with an ability to add a documents for licenceing. Photoshelter offers this. Do any others?

SmugMug does and I think Zenfolio does, too.

The ability to add a blog or at least be able to intergate a blogging service.

Neither SmugMug NOR Zenfolio has a built-in blogging service, which is fine with me. I blog through Google's (free) Blogger service. My domain's home is hosted by GoDaddy.com. My domain home page has a link to my blog. Works for me.

Email along with the hosting package would be great. However I can get a paid host for emails if I have to.

I use Google's Gmail for my william-porter.net domain. Gmail for domains is free, like ordinary Gmail, and is the best email service available anywhere.


Good luck.

Will