Web Site Review: Zenfolio — An Online Photographer's Paradise

Photographers and writers are invisible performance artists and are known only by their work, not by their physical presence. While singers, actors and dancers perform in front of an audience, a photographer's audience usually never sees the actual performance, but only the results. It is the results, however, that the photographer wants the audience to see.

It's a rare photographer that keeps their work under wraps and away from the public and away from view. Normally, images are to document an event, publication or to be exhibited. I would feel safe in saying a large majority of photographers are amateurs and never put their work in front of the public. Of this demographic, there is a healthy number dabbling in fine art and semi-professional work (getting paid for their images, but not gainfully employed, full time as a professional photographer).

Zenfolio provides a service to photographers wanting to exhibit their images, possibly sell them, but don't want or can't technically maintain a proprietary Web site. Whether you are a novice, hobbyist, semi-pro or professional, Zenfolio has features to accommodate you.

Using Zenfolio's services is much like having your own web site, except for the costs of programming, on-going maintenance, and installation of a shopping cart for selling pictures, which can be both expensive and difficult to set up.

I created a trial account on Zenfolio to examine what they offered and also to experience the uploading and settings available. Zenfolio's trial account allows you to have two weeks to evaluate whether Zenfolio has what you need and, to be fair, I didn't find it lacking any essentials. In fact, I'm hard pressed to determine what, if anything, is missing.

After the two-week trial, Zenfolio offers three tiers of service: Basic, for $25.00 per year, has no bandwidth limit (you can feel free to have every one of your relatives, friends, clients and the general public view your pictures without any additional costs), but initially, has a two-gigabyte limit for image storage. If you stay at the Basic level, you get an additional gigabyte of storage for every additional year you maintain your subscription. The maximum file size per image is 12 megabytes, which should be plenty; the Unlimited tier, for $50.00 per year, offers the same per-image size, but the Premium level ($100 per year) has a per image limit of 24 megabytes.

Article Author: Dennis Hays

Dennis Hays started out as a wedding photographer in Miami and Orlando, Florida, over 30 years ago. Since then, he has managed photo labs -- during the days of film -- and worked in various areas of the industry. …

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