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Dying to switch from Zenfolio? Please read.
brotherjug
Registered Users Posts: 32 Big grins
I have a fairly large portrait, commercial, sports, and event photography business and am beyond desperate to find the "perfect" place for my galleries. Currently, I am using Zenfolio, and while they offer every option imaginable (they really do), their servers are unreliable, and their sense of design is terrible. It's the most unintuitive portal out there, by far. You need to provide your clients with so much documentation. And you have to ask for their patience when the servers are down, or sluggish as hell.
So, last month, I decided to embark on yet another deep evaluation of Smugmug. I talked with some nice folks at a recent WPPI trade show and thought I would give their system another go. Last year I went through the same process and hit some insurmountable snags.
This time, though, I went into it with a open mind.
But the same snags exist and it's mind boggling that they have never been addressed.
Here they are:
1. If you want your Event galleries to look different than your Portrait ones, you have to customize each those individually every time you create a new gallery. When it comes to content and design of a gallery (not security settings, etc.), you can only create a template for ALL Galleries. No way to easily create multiple gallery designs without having to do them one by one. I guess Smugmug wants you to have the same look on all your galleries, which is weird. For example, I don't want Breadcrumbs on my portrait galleries, but for my commercial client galleries, they are crucial.
2. The Event thing. So, after I create a gallery for, say, a wedding client, I have to then awkwardly navigate to my Account settings and now create an Event to add the gallery to just so the ability to select Favorites is turned on for the client. It's really a pain to do all that. it really is. Not to mention that this Event "landing" page looks NOTHING like the gallery. So, I can customize everything but the client landing page? Weird.
3. Inability to customize some of the Shopping Cart. Let me explain this one. So, I have a school portrait client with dozens of families who do not want their childrens' photos to be viewed by anyone other than the family. So, I create a search page that the parents can use to look up just their kids' photos ( I use the name of the child as the keyword. For the "private" families, I use a random code). No one can see the entire gallery of images this way. HOWEVER, when you are in the shopping cart, there is a link to " See this photo in the Gallery" and it take you right into the gallery with all the kids' photos. Seems like it would be better if this linked to the search results page instead and not the whole gallery.
Anyway, Smugmug offered a workaround that has me creating a separate gallery for each child. Really.
So, I guess, unless a school wants all their students images public, I can't take them on as a client if i am using Smugmug, unless, of course, I create a gallery for each student. One school has 1000 kids.
Just one photogrqphers thoughts.
And if I am wrong, please correct me.
So, last month, I decided to embark on yet another deep evaluation of Smugmug. I talked with some nice folks at a recent WPPI trade show and thought I would give their system another go. Last year I went through the same process and hit some insurmountable snags.
This time, though, I went into it with a open mind.
But the same snags exist and it's mind boggling that they have never been addressed.
Here they are:
1. If you want your Event galleries to look different than your Portrait ones, you have to customize each those individually every time you create a new gallery. When it comes to content and design of a gallery (not security settings, etc.), you can only create a template for ALL Galleries. No way to easily create multiple gallery designs without having to do them one by one. I guess Smugmug wants you to have the same look on all your galleries, which is weird. For example, I don't want Breadcrumbs on my portrait galleries, but for my commercial client galleries, they are crucial.
2. The Event thing. So, after I create a gallery for, say, a wedding client, I have to then awkwardly navigate to my Account settings and now create an Event to add the gallery to just so the ability to select Favorites is turned on for the client. It's really a pain to do all that. it really is. Not to mention that this Event "landing" page looks NOTHING like the gallery. So, I can customize everything but the client landing page? Weird.
3. Inability to customize some of the Shopping Cart. Let me explain this one. So, I have a school portrait client with dozens of families who do not want their childrens' photos to be viewed by anyone other than the family. So, I create a search page that the parents can use to look up just their kids' photos ( I use the name of the child as the keyword. For the "private" families, I use a random code). No one can see the entire gallery of images this way. HOWEVER, when you are in the shopping cart, there is a link to " See this photo in the Gallery" and it take you right into the gallery with all the kids' photos. Seems like it would be better if this linked to the search results page instead and not the whole gallery.
Anyway, Smugmug offered a workaround that has me creating a separate gallery for each child. Really.
So, I guess, unless a school wants all their students images public, I can't take them on as a client if i am using Smugmug, unless, of course, I create a gallery for each student. One school has 1000 kids.
Just one photogrqphers thoughts.
And if I am wrong, please correct me.
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Comments
As a simple example, I carry several different logos for the page headers, and they are all present on each page, HOWEVER, there is CSS which turns them off or on based on a specific identifier. So I pick a folder and all subfolders or galleries in that folder will carry one header, automatically. There's no need to customize each one (or customize any, explicitly), and the school or team logos then appear on each gallery automatically based on where in my overall folder organization it is. So if at the top you have Event and Portrait separated, and folders and galleries beneath them, you can customize appearance in that way, e.g. taking off breadcrumbs. Do it once in CSS, done.
What you can't do is change things like security settings, that's gallery by gallery (with some things like unlisted able to be inherited). You can set them up as quick settings and apply, but you have to remember to do so.
I don't know anything about (2) or (3). Though for (3) you might look at unlisted galleries and see if that's still true.