UPDATE BELOW ->

A little less than a year ago I wrote Where To Host Your Pictures For Sale, a direct comparison between Zenfolio, Smugmug, and Exposure Manager. If you haven’t read that, it’s a quick read that will give you the basics and foundation for this post. If nothing else you’ll realize why Exposure Manager did not make it to the second installment of the comparison.

Now after a year of using Zenfolio almost exclusively, and maintaining my Smugmug account for what is now somewhere around six years I have some more insight into the comparison between the two. I’m writing this article, as with the first one, to give my particular point of view that will hopefully assist someone else who is wondering where their money for a fulfillment partner will be best spent.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, (and I wouldn’t blame you, it starts to ramble right off the bat) and are just skimming for the answer to the question in the title, for me the answer is Zenfolio without a doubt.

Before I get into the meat of this comparison let me explain what I use the services for. For business purposes I need an image host/fulfillment partner to handle all of the following scenarios. Host and quickly present for viewing and sale to clients thousands of images from sporting events. Host, attractively display, and offer for sale photographs to portrait session clients at different rates than my sporting event. The same for wedding, architectural, and photojournalism. For personal, I want a place to share photos with friends and family as well as being a viable back up option. A place to host photos for posting in other locations such as forums and blogs. With that in mind this is a comparison between these two services only, there may be others out there that you feel may stack up, but for my needs these are the two that made it to the top and what I needed to decide between.
Organization of your photos:
Zenfolio - offers an organization structure nearly identical to your basic folder/file hierarchy that is not only very easy to build but equally as easy to manage. The components are folders, and galleries, folders can hold folders and galleries, and galleries hold pictures. So for example my your account I could have four folders labelled 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. In the 2011 folder there could be more folders labelled Gymnastics, assorted, running, family, portraits, wedding, high school seniors. In the High school seniors folder I could have galleries for each client, Jen Aniston, Mark Wahlberg, Jim Belushi, Kate Middleton, and so on. Now let’s say I had so many clients from East Side High this year that I want to keep them together, I just make another folder named East Side High inside the High School Seniors folder right along side the galleries. Imagine it just like the way you would organize folders and files on your computer. Once you have your structure built it is also very easy to manage, for instance if I had already started making galleries for all of the East Side kids and later realized I wanted to consolidate them, all I need to do is create the East Side folder and move the galleries into it. The moving process is not drag and drop easy but from the folder view it is as easy as two clicks, infinitely easier than the process of moving anything at Smugmug.
SmugMug - has a category based organization system. You can create main categories, so as in our example above we could have four categories labelled 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Within those categories you can now create sub-categories, so again we would create Gymnastics, assorted, running, family, portraits, wedding, high school seniors within those sub categories you can create galleries to hold photos, there is no option for further organization. Moving galleries requires entering the gallery, then entering the options area for the gallery, then selecting from a drop down, now that I write it, the moving process doesn’t sound harder, but in my experience it was harder than it sounds here.

The actual creation of folders and galleries:
Zefolio – has a link labelled “NEW” that is always in the same place when logged in and in the control side of your Zenfolio account. When you click the link a drop down offers the choices “Folder” and “Gallery” you can select either and your choice will be created within the folder that you are currently viewing. Bam! done, now here’s the ultra cool, super fantastic, incredible time saving wonderfulness of what you just did, the settings for the new folder or gallery automatically default to the settings of the containing folder. I set these preferences for each of the folders, then every gallery and folder created inside that folder is automatically set as default to the settings of the containing folder. So creating a gallery or folder is literally as easy as one click. Unfortunately this simplicity ends before pricing and watermarking, those two need to be adjusted for each gallery or will fall back to the site wide default. If you’d like the settings for a gallery or folder to be different than the containing folder, no prob, just change them in the settings of that gallery or folder. Global changes made to higher level folders will not affect individual changes made to galleries or folders within.
SmugMug – As with many things in SmugMug I have come to hate this process since experiencing the ease and efficiency with which it is handled in Zenfolio. When creating a gallery you have to go through a bit of a longer process to set up a default gallery, and it gets longer if you want things to be different than the blanket default. With SmugMug you can set up some site wide settings like Price and Security that your galleries will default to if left to default. If however you would like something other than default the gallery must be set up individually. They have some systems in place meant to improve the speed of this but none reach the level of ease of Zenfolio’s UI. For the gallery’s security setting you can pre-create “Quick Settings” give them different names then select them from a drop down menu in the gallery creation process. For pricing they let you chose to use pricing from an established gallery, not so quick when you have thousands of galleries that appear in the resulting drop down. I worked around this by naming a few galleries specifically for pricing to start with Z or X so I could just type the letter in the Gallery name field and they would populate the box. If you have navigated to the correct Gallery and sub-gallery then those fields will auto populate, otherwise you need to select or create a new category or sub-category. That isn’t particularly harder than Zenfolio, but if you mess up fixing it is easier in Zenfolio. Zenfolio definitely wins here.

Customer Interface:
I’m not going to be too in depth with this one because other than basic testing I don’t spend a lot of time on the customer side of the site. Also I only use Zenfolio the same way I used SmugMug and that is as a gallery host. My main site is a self hosted WordPress site that directs customers to the appropriate galleries on Zenfolio or SmugMug. You can see how it work at ChampionPhoto.

Zenfolio – One nice thing about Zenfolio is the ability to click the “Visitor View” link, this takes you right to what the site would look, feel, and operate like for your customers. I think SmugMug has a feature like this too, but I never used it so I’ll assume it wasn’t as easy to get to. I like the fact that the buying process is smoother with Zenfolio, a list which I can customize of “featured Products” is shown adjacent to the photos and seems to have had an impact on my sales. In my opinion it makes the viewing and buying of photos more seamless where with SmugMug you need to click the “buy” link which takes you out of the viewing process and into the buying process. This “Featured Products” pane may be contingent on the theme you select to present your Zenfolio site in. I have received  more comments on photos in my Zenfolio site in one year then I have in five at SmugMug, this could be due to changing habits in society, but it may have to do with Zenfolio’s UI being easier. When I first set up my account with Zenfolio I felt like browsing through photos was dragging a bit compared to SmugMug, but it was a brief phenomenon and I’ve had no issues with it since and no complaints from customers.
SmugMug – When I first set up my SmugMug account I felt like their overall browsing experience was very pleasing, well that hasn’t changed, browsing through photos on SmugMug is very nice, fast, and slick. I mentioned my opinion on the viewing/buying experience above. But I never heard any complaints from customers about the experience while I was using SmugMug. In SmugMug’s defense, when I first made the move to Zenfolio I printed fliers for my first few events boasting about the move to an easier to use website. At my first event I got a comment from a customer letting me know that she didn’t feel like the old site (SmugMug) was hard to use.

Image Sale Process
Zenfolio – Both sites offer you the ability to set proofing delays on your sales so that you can make adjustments to the image prior to sending them to the lab. Zenfolio does not allow you to set a time frame for this delay, it’s either delay or not. This is an issue if you are forgetful because the image will just sit in the queue waiting for your approval to be sent to the lab, as far as I know it will sit there forever. Zenfolio’s big win here is that during the proofing process if you decide to upload an edited image to substitute for the original it does not eliminate the original from the gallery. So if someone orders an 8×10 and the version on the site is a 2×3 ratio and cropping would wreck the image, you can upload an adjusted image to fit the 8×10 aspect ratio while still maintaining the one suited for a 4×6. That may not sound that important but when you’ve come from a site that will take the new image and stick it in the same slot as the old one essentially throwing away the original you are very grateful for this little piece of common sense. In the approval process Zenfolio allows you to customize a letter that is dispatched to the client letting them know that your proofing is complete and the image has either been sent to the lab, or they can now download it. Oh! that brings up another common sense feature, Zenfolio allows you to proof and replace digital downloads, did I mention that in the first blog post? Even if I did it’s worth repeating. When I complained to SmugMug about the fact that they didn’t allow professionals to proof digital downloads prior to them going to the client they reply was, well you can always email them an edited version. Well no kidding, thanks for nothing. Zenfolio also allows you to set the size of your digital downloads, I know I mentioned that in the first blog but it’s definitely worth repeating. Regarding the letter to the customer, Zenfolio does not offer a way to customize the default letter, meaning when you approve the order you have to edit and customize it every time, which is a pain in the butt and I have emailed them about it, odd with the common sense that they show in most other places.
SmugMug – Allows you to place a time frame on the proofing delay, this way if you are busy and don’t get to it your customer wont have to wait an eternity. That’s good as far as being timely, not so good if that image really needed to be edited and it just got sent to print because you were running a little behind. When you do set a proofing delay SmugMug tells your customers that the order is being proofed by the pro they ordered from so that it will be perfect for them. Or some manner of wording to that affect, but the word “Perfect” is definitely used. I asked them to change this because it basically opened the door for customers to give me a hard time. I believe something to the same feeling could be conveyed without using the word perfect. The truth is that for some of my events my pricing is such that I did not offer editing on prints smaller that 8×10, and since there is no way (with either service) to delay on specific products only customers would get this message promising perfection on orders that were not even going to be edited. On a few occasions this required refunding money to the client. SmugMug has a 100% satisfaction guarantee, if the print customer is unhappy for any reason they will make it right. I’m not sure if zenfolio has a similar guarantee, but to this point I have only had one issue with a customer and Zenfolio handled it with no questions asked.
My overall experience over the last year+ with Zenfolio has been a very positive enjoyable, and profitable one. There are quite a few features, many not mentioned here that make them a much better choice for me over Smugmug.
Each has a 30 day trial, my suggestion for that would be to concentrate on the mechanics of the site first, setting up galleries, price lists, permissions, organization, etc. Then if you have time play around with customizing the look, because while Smugmug ultimately offers a bit more freedom in the customization category, it can get overwhelming quick. As for basic customization, with digging deep into the site, I’d put them on the same level.
If this long drawn out blabber helped in anyway you can use any of the links here to Zenfolio which have my referral code attached to them and will result in credit for me.

UPDATE-> 01/04/12

I wanted to update, I have cancelled my SmugMug account and this brings up something I wanted to add.

1I had hundreds of thousands of photos uploaded to SmugMug in over a thousand galleries, for a period of time I considered SM to be my backup solution. I ended up abandoning most of these images because I could not find a migration solution that could handle the volume. So the point is to keep that in mind when uploading anywhere, if you are no committed to maintaining an account somewhere indefinitely, you’ll need to consider local backup. I could have downgraded my account to the lowest option and maintained it longer to salvage the images but decided against it.

Thanks again for reading the post.