« [ OLYMPUS E-330 digital single lens reflex ] | Main | [ COLOUR ME RIGHT ] »
June 28, 2006
[ ZENFOLIO – an elegant photo sharing service ]
dpexpert LIVES BY THE BOWER BIRD PHILSOPHY -- if it’s bright and shiny we have to take it home to play with it. So when we stumbled across a web photo hosting service called Zenfolio and we saw some sample pages we had to have one.
Zenfolio is a newish service of this kind run from somewhere in California. It has a few stand-out features that make it irresistible, even though it costs real money to belong. The basic service is $25US a year and for that you get 1gb of storage space. Flickr, the Yahoo equivalent, is free, as is Zooomr which is promoting itself as the better Flickr. So Zenfolio has to offer something special to be worth the money. Other hosting-for-money services such as Smugmug and Pbase also have their devotees who can be pretty evangelical in defending their photo sharing service.
dpexpert has fallen in love with Zenfolio (but keep checking back, we are nothing if not fickle in our affections for this sort of thing). Although there is a 14 day free trial we had our credit card out within an hour of starting the tryout.
The first thing you notice is that Zenfolio looks elegant on the screen. There are a few different colour schemes and page layouts to choose from and they are all attractive. In fact they are the best layouts we have seen for this type of service.
The instant resizing of pictures from main display to the largest possible display is exceptionally good. And the slideshow is the best thought-out thing of its type.
When you create an account with Zenfolio you get a personalised URL for the home page of your Gallery. Ours is simply dpexpert.zenfolio.com. Send it to anyone you want to see your pictures and they have instant access to all your galleries and collections. If you’re the paranoid type who thinks that anyone seeing your picture on the Web is stealing your soul you can pay $40US and get a password locking system for your photos. That price also buys unlimited storage space.
Flickr, for which we still have affection, has one serious defect. If you use the Flickr “Invite your friends and family” link to send an email to a pal asking them to look at your photos they will be asked to sign up for Yahoo before they are admitted to Flickr. (This can be avoided by mailing the URL for your Flickr page directly, bypassing the Yahoo sign-up.)
If there’s one thing no one needs these days it is another user name and password. Who remembers these things? Even clicking the “remember me” box in the web browser won’t help when you are using a different computer and trying to remember whether this time you used your dog’s name or called yourself Ned Kelly or was that for Hotmail? Or perhaps Amazon? Who knows? Who can be bothered? At dpexpert we have ten user IDs stuck to the PC monitor and that is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
So three cheers for Zenfolio for not making casual visitors to the site jump through these annoying hoops.
Managing the Zenfolio site is a dream. Upload is straight forward. Editing is easy. So, is there a downside? Sadly there is. Zenfolio is not for the bandwidth-challenged. We tried looking at our gallery on a computer with a dial-up connection to Ozemail and we are still waiting. After several minutes not a single photo had appeared on the screen. Broadband is essential both for the Zenfolio user and for any visitors.
[Click here to go to the dpexpert sample site on Zenfolio]>
*
Posted by terry at June 28, 2006 06:00 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/949
Comments
What's your Zenfolio referral code? I'm about to sign up from my 14 day trial, and you will get a $5 credit while I get a $5 discount. Since I heard about and signed up to ZF via your article, I'd like you to get the credit.
Thanks,
Aaron
www.pano.com.au
Posted by: Aaron Spence at June 30, 2006 06:59 AM
I have just had 3 weeks in Canada before attending a wine conference in Oregon. I used flikr to show friends and family our travel pictures. It caused a few problems with the tedious/onerous sign up required. Some family simple gave up. I investigated Zenfolio and .mac as alternatives. Flikr is the easiest for me to run so I ended up just opening it to public view and emailing the address, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinotrules which works fine. Many of my friends and family still have dial up so Zenfolio was a real problem when I trialled it.
Posted by: David Lloyd at July 7, 2006 05:30 PM
Forgot to add that another friend tried something called Ringo but he was most unimpressed, especially with explicit ads appearing near his photos.
Posted by: David Lloyd at July 7, 2006 05:34 PM
A little late, but anyone can feel free to use it!
Zenfolio referral code: 72C-ATY-BXG
Zenfolio is great!
Best of luck,
Josh Kill
Posted by: josh at January 31, 2008 06:27 AM