Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

jfriend · May 16, 2006

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com.

With the usual suspects like pbase or flickr or imageshack, I know how to explain why many users would rather choose smugmug. I don't really know zenfolio and it seems to be gaining some attention and users. I was wondering if anyone else (in the dgrin community or at Smugmug) corporate has any pithy set of reasons why Smugmug is better than zenfolio? I'm not trying to challenge Smugmug, just looking for ammo on how to explain why Smugmug is better.

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

bwg · May 16, 2006

jfriend wrote:

As a frequent participant in the "which photo sharing service is the best" threads in other online forums, I've just recently started to see a bunch of fairly positive references to Zenfolio, http://www.zenfolio.com.

With the usual suspects like pbase or flickr or imageshack, I know how to explain why many users would rather choose smugmug. I don't really know zenfolio and it seems to be gaining some attention and users. I was wondering if anyone else (in the dgrin community or at Smugmug) corporate has any pithy set of reasons why Smugmug is better than zenfolio? I'm not trying to challenge Smugmug, just looking for ammo on how to explain why Smugmug is better.

Anyone have anything on Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

ever since your first post about zenfolio, i've checked it out quite frequently. they have a really nice interface...hard to really find things to pick at. I noticed it wont fit 800x600 resolutions and i dont see any feeds but that's about it off the top of my head. i didnt sign up so i cant speak for their customization and/or administrative controls. i looove their browse and search though.

onethumb · May 16, 2006

jfriend wrote:

One thing I noticed while browsing a few galleries on their site is that it feels really, really fast when browsing. As best I can tell, they must be prefetching images that you are likely to go to. Costs them bandwidth (if you don't go to that image), but it seems to be pretty effective in enhancing browsing speed.

We used to do this, too, since it's worth the extra bandwidth for speed, but in real world use, it wasn't noticeably better.

I haven't had a chance to play with them yet, but just hazarding a guess, I'll bet they're fast because they're new (Jan 2006) and don't have half a billion JPGs and millions of browsers per day.

I've heard great things about them, so we'll definitely check it out and see if there's anything we can learn - but we're so busy just implementing customer requested features we don't have a lot of time to do competitive research.

Don

jfriend · May 16, 2006

Any ideas for a response?

onethumb wrote:

We used to do this, too, since it's worth the extra bandwidth for speed, but in real world use, it wasn't noticeably better.

I haven't had a chance to play with them yet, but just hazarding a guess, I'll bet they're fast because they're new (Jan 2006) and don't have half a billion JPGs and millions of browsers per day.

I've heard great things about them, so we'll definitely check it out and see if there's anything we can learn - but we're so busy just implementing customer requested features we don't have a lot of time to do competitive research.

Don

This is the text of a posting in different online forum that caught my attention and I was trying to figure out if there was a pro-Smugmug response to:

Damnit, Alex - I had read enough that I was all set to go to smugmug until I saw your post and checked out Zenfolio! What a great layout they have. It was instantly a breeze to go through an album, hover for more detailed exif (as opposed to it coming up on another page in smugmug) and for a larger version of the photo, and, yes, a very nice slideshow! And from what I understand, Zenfolio is still young with plenty improvement in the works. Very difficult decision indeed!The only thing I see missing in my quick perusal...is there no comment system?

onethumb · May 16, 2006

jfriend wrote:

This is the text of a posting in different online forum that caught my attention and I was trying to figure out if there was a pro-Smugmug response to:

Damnit, Alex - I had read enough that I was all set to go to smugmug until I saw your post and checked out Zenfolio! What a great layout they have. It was instantly a breeze to go through an album, hover for more detailed exif (as opposed to it coming up on another page in smugmug) and for a larger version of the photo, and, yes, a very nice slideshow! And from what I understand, Zenfolio is still young with plenty improvement in the works. Very difficult decision indeed!The only thing I see missing in my quick perusal...is there no comment system?

I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Don

bwg · May 16, 2006

onethumb wrote:

I had heard something about the slideshow being great, too, so I went and checked it out.

Not to knock them, or anything, but I was pretty underwhelmed. The browser takes up my entire screen, but the photo is still tiny.

My biased opinion is that our slideshow rocks theirs - our images fill your entire display, not just a small portion of it with an ocean of black around it.

But maybe I'm missing something... Has anyone else had any experience with them? Is there something about the slideshow that's magical that I'm missing?

Don

i like their slideshow interface...how you can get thumbnails of the images at the bottom, see your position in the slideshow and change the speed.

Features-wise you have them covered, but interface wise they are a notch above IMHO. Someone recently told me that people's visual impression of a product is a very important factor in their overall willingness to use it.

i also like that i can go full screen:

the photographer/image info sidebar on the right is also cool. updates when you highlight a different photo.

MPerdomo · May 16, 2006

Im not really that impressed by them.

I prefer Smugmug's simple layout to the Zenfolio approach.

Also, according to the features listing, they don't support printing photos or customization

And I doubt they will have the same customer support as Smugmug. They look interesting, but I am a loyal Smugmug customer, and probably will be for a while.

peestandingup · May 16, 2006

The speed of clicking from one photo to the next with them is definitely faster & I do dig the layout, its very clean looking. Parts of the slideshow are kinda cool, like the hover effects for photos on the bottom & changing of the background color by hovering. But, thats about it. I found the transitions kinda jerky & not buttery smooth like ours.

It does say that selling prints & downloads are coming soon. Hmmm, interesting. Smugmug still rocks though!

Baldy · May 16, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

Features-wise you have them covered, but interface wise they are a notch above IMHO. Someone recently told me that people's visual impression of a product is a very important factor in their overall willingness to use it.

Competition brings out the best in everyone and I noticed that they have a more polished look, starting with the buttons. We've been thinking about Project Polish for awhile, and they just accelerated the process.

DanielB · May 16, 2006

they're slideshows pretty cool but what really grabs me about it is that mouse-over background color thing on the right... thats really cool:D

jfriend · May 16, 2006

Some UI feedback vs. Zen

Baldy wrote:

Competition brings out the best in everyone and I noticed that they have a more polished look, starting with the buttons. We've been thinking about Project Polish for awhile, and they just accelerated the process.

OK, while we're on the subject here's some UI style feedback:

Gallery page numbers in Zen are buttons, not just text. This makes them both look better (more polished) and makes the clickable area larger so they aren't so hard to hit with the mouse on a high res screen. Here's what their's look like:

The ability to see EXIF data with a mouse hover over the upper right corner of the image and don't have to click, open a new window, then click to close like in Smugmug. Here's what theirs looks like:

Smugmug's version is looking pretty tired:

After I've hit next a couple of times, I absolutely love that they are doing pre-fetching. In the cases where I'm paging through a gallery at the large size, the pre-fetching makes a huge difference and really makes it feel snappy.

Their Send Link functionality seems cleaner.

Smugmug's style picker has always look unfinished, unaligned with anything and generally wasteful of nearly a whole line of space in the UI. Basically, windows drop-down lists look ugly these days. This is what I'm talking about:

rainforest1155 · May 16, 2006

jfriend wrote:

Gallery page numbers in Zen are buttons, not just text. This makes them both look better (more polished) and makes the clickable area larger so they aren't so hard to hit with the mouse on a high res screen. Here's what their's look like:

[...]
Smugmug's style picker has always look unfinished, unaligned with anything and generally wasteful of nearly a whole line of space in the UI. Basically, windows drop-down lists look ugly these days. This is what I'm talking about:

The page numbers are text, too, but with an added background image that provides a very prominent hover effect. I would like to have something similar for smugmug, too.

Concerning the style picker: It has always bothered me that the thing wastes a whole line of the precious window height on customized sites. I've fixed them to the top right edge on my site by giving a specific pixel position, but I don't like it that way. Would be much better if we could have something like 'smugsearch' for the style picker, too! That way everybody could position it in the header or footer were he wants it.

Sebastian

Matthew Saville · May 17, 2006

Zenfolio just looks like a clone of SM to me.

SM has a booming business, they are really a niche in my opinion because they offer WAY more than any other host out there. Naturally, someone else will want in on the action. It's called capitalism.

Zenfolio has simply joined in on offering the exact same things that SM offers. They listened to a few complaints from SM users and made differences in those areas, they made a nice snazzy interface that is essentially the same as SM but a little more slick looking, and ta-da, everyone goes "wow!"... But to me, it's just "something new" more than it is "something better".

Personally: I'm already nearly 5,000 images deep with SM, I already have hundreds of people who know my site is on SM, and I've already had more than enough of trying to learn new interfaces and whatnot. So I ain't gonna jump ship by any means, no matter what Zenfolio would offer. If anyone were to say "you should go to Zenfolio, they're so much nicer", that would only tell me I need to put more time into pimping out my current site.

However, they have yet to announce who they are going to team up with for a printing service. And if it's WHCC or MPix, I would really demand an "upgrade" of SM's printing options. We STILL have no panoramas nor true B&W prints, not to mention metallic prints or finishing services...

But that's a subject for another topic and another day.
-Matt-

jfriend · May 17, 2006

Let's not get off course here

Matthew Saville wrote:

Zenfolio just looks like a clone of SM to me.

SM has a booming business, they are really a niche in my opinion because they offer WAY more than any other host out there. Naturally, someone else will want in on the action. It's called capitalism.

Zenfolio has simply joined in on offering the exact same things that SM offers. They listened to a few complaints from SM users and made differences in those areas, they made a nice snazzy interface that is essentially the same as SM but a little more slick looking, and ta-da, everyone goes "wow!"... But to me, it's just "something new" more than it is "something better".

Personally: I'm already nearly 5,000 images deep with SM, I already have hundreds of people who know my site is on SM, and I've already had more than enough of trying to learn new interfaces and whatnot. So I ain't gonna jump ship by any means, no matter what Zenfolio would offer. If anyone were to say "you should go to Zenfolio, they're so much nicer", that would only tell me I need to put more time into pimping out my current site.

However, they have yet to announce who they are going to team up with for a printing service. And if it's WHCC or MPix, I would really demand an "upgrade" of SM's printing options. We STILL have no panoramas nor true B&W prints, not to mention metallic prints or finishing services...

But that's a subject for another topic and another day.
-Matt-

So Since I started this thread, I want to make sure nobody interprets my motives here. I am not suggesting that Zenfolio is better than Smugmug or that anyone should think about switching and nobody should need to feel defensive. I did see some online postings by users (currently members of neither service) who thought that maybe Zenfolio "looked" better than Smugmug (superficially), so I started the thread to see if there was any good competitive ammunition to explain to them where Zenfolio was weak.

In the meantime, Baldy mentioned that maybe it was time for Smugmug to get a few cosmetic improvements so I thought it worthwhile to point out a few places where I like the cosmetics of Zenfolio vs. Smugmug.

To summarize, the point of this thread is to both help point out where Zenfolio is weaker than Smugmug and (since Baldy opened the door), to contribute ideas for how to improve the look of Smugmug.

Baldy · May 17, 2006

jfriend wrote:

OK, while we're on the subject here's some UI style feedback:

Great post, John. Very specific and helpful.

We're on a polish mission at the moment with a lot of focus on buttons and pull-down menus (I hate how rough the current ones look), so this is useful.

pronvit · May 17, 2006

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen

so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

jfriend · May 17, 2006

Perhaps misinformed about Smugmug

pronvit wrote:

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen

so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

I think you are misinformed a bit about Smugmug. In my opinion, Smugmug has the best image quality out there. They even recently upgraded their algorithm to remove JPEG artifacts from a few of the smaller thumb sizes on certain kinds of images. They did not regenerate all existing images so you might be looking at a few old images or reading some older complaints.

I'm not sure what you think Zenfolio does with dynamic resizing that Smugmug doesn't. In Smugmug's slideshows, images are automatically generated to fit your screen size. And, with a feature just released yesterday, it's even possible for a user to generate any size image they want.

flyingdutchie · May 17, 2006

Baldy wrote:

Great post, John. Very specific and helpful.

We're on a polish mission at the moment with a lot of focus on buttons and pull-down menus (I hate how rough the current ones look), so this is useful.

For changing gallery styles, I customized my site to not use the drop-down box but to use the top menu-bar instead... If smugmug ever is going to change the current drop-down box, i hope the overall way it works (behind the scenes) does not change (i.e. onchange on dropdown, causing a HTTP POST with certain input-fields having specific values). If this would change, i need to change quite a bit of JavaScripting

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

pronvit wrote:

smugmug
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

Check out this thread - SM is thinking of a XL (1024x768) photo síze. Also you already get dynamic images sizes with the fullscreen slideshow like jfriend said.
Is there still a problem foreign characters? Could you point me a gallery where that happens - maybe the SM team wasn't notified about it. I know that there's still trouble with foreign characters in smugMaps - I see it with my German umlauts.

pronvit wrote:

zenfolio
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen

Really? My standard gallery view at their page contains a big picture and there's a bar on the right that let's me switch between photo info and thumbnails.

If you decide to go with smugmug be sure to use a coupon - that'll save you 5$ in your first year and the referrer 10$ - here's mine.

Sebastian

pronvit · May 17, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

Check out this thread - SM is thinking of a XL (1024x768) photo síze. Also you already get dynamic images sizes with the fullscreen slideshow like jfriend said.
Is there still a problem foreign characters? Could you point me a gallery where that happens - maybe the SM team wasn't notified about it. I know that there's still trouble with foreign characters in smugMaps - I see it with my German umlauts.

Really? My standard gallery view at their page contains a big picture and there's a bar on the right that let's me switch between photo info and thumbnails.

If you decide to go with smugmug be sure to use a coupon - that'll save you 5$ in your first year and the referrer 10$ - here's mine.

Sebastian

1. I saw that thread, XL size is very good idea.
2. russian in captions itself is ok. but the problem is deeper - SM doesn't use UTF8 encoding so it's not possible to use different languages on one page and russian chars are encoded using char codes, eg. "Театр". browser converts this to russian text almost everywhere, but for example if you hold mouse over image text will be shown as "Т...." in popup. I think UTF8 is must-have. russian keywords just don't work, when I add russian keyword it doesn't show anywhere

3. what bar?? on the right I can see only short image info and two thumbnails for prev/next image, no way to get thumbnails for all images in gallery like in 'smugmug' view mode

onethumb · May 17, 2006

pronvit wrote:

I'm currently choosing my photo hosting service. I almost stopped at smugmug but after reading this thread I don't know what to choose. So here is comparison:

smugmug
+different modes of view
+APIs, hacks,...
-poor image quality (JPEG comression artifacts are terrible)
-large image size isn't large enough for big resolutions
-problems with russian captions/tags (and also some other tags don't work for some reason)

Does anyone have an account at Zenfolio yet who can post comparison photos? I'd like to verify that our image quality is "poor" (generally, we feel we're the best on the net. But Zenfolio is brand-new, so they may have us beat).

We're adding an XL size (1024x768), and we also support custom render targets, so you can link to images of whatever size you want (1920x1200? 2048x1536?). Just specify the resolution as part of your URL and we'll resize it for you dynamically.

We support UTF-8 in many places in SmugMug, but we're not 100% yet. We plan to be 100% shortly, but we're still testing that. Plenty of Russian, Asian, and other non-Latin users are using SmugMug, with non-Latin captions, so I think that should work.

pronvit wrote:

zenfolio
+images are dynamically resized to fit browser window (so any resolution is ok)
+ability to password-protect any photo (not only entire gallery)
+very good image quality
-no commenting, keyword/calendar browsing
-there's no view mode with large image and thumbnails on one screen

so I can't decide what kills me more - poor navigation options and absense of commenting on zenfolio or poor image quality and size on smugmug..
it this can be fixed, smugmug can become best photohosting service

Hmm, I haven't seen any evidence of the images being dynamically resized. As far as I know, we're the only photo sharing site that *does* do this. Their "fullscreen slideshow", for example, is really just a huge browser window with lots of empty space and a small image. But I really haven't spent much time on their site, so maybe I'm missing something? Got a URL I can see?

Password protecting individual photos is interesting. We haven't really heard that request, but we can think about it.

Again, I'd be shocked if our image quality didn't stack up against theirs.

Don

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

pronvit wrote:

2. russian in captions itself is ok. but the problem is deeper - SM doesn't use UTF8 encoding so it's not possible to use different languages on one page and russian chars are encoded using char codes, eg. "Театр". browser converts this to russian text almost everywhere, but for example if you hold mouse over image text will be shown as "Т...." in popup. I think UTF8 is must-have. russian keywords just don't work, when I add russian keyword it doesn't show anywhere

3. what bar?? on the right I can see only short image info and two thumbnails for prev/next image, no way to get thumbnails for all images in gallery like in 'smugmug' view mode

2. Oh I see - there are already a couple of threads (here, here and here) and JT even said something about it being tested long ago - let's see if we can't get the stone rolling again.
Concerning the keywords: yeah that's a problem by design, because the keyword is part of the URL in the browser - like my 'dailyphoto' keyword - therefore I don't know what can be done about this.

3. Use this link from the first post and click on the featured gallery "month 2 - face making". Do you see the thumbnail sidebar now? Looks like they also got different view styles, because the not featured galleries display in the other style without the thumbnails at the side.

Sebastian

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

We support UTF-8 in many places in SmugMug, but we're not 100% yet. We plan to be 100% shortly, but we're still testing that. Plenty of Russian, Asian, and other non-Latin users are using SmugMug, with non-Latin captions, so I think that should work.

Hmm, I haven't seen any evidence of the images being dynamically resized.

As I've posted over here the <meta>-tag still doesn't contain UTF-8. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ne_nau.gif" border="0" alt="" >

As for the dynamic resize: click on any picture and they'll show a lightbox with one resized to your browser window (keeping a fixed black margin) - here for example.

Sebastian

bwg · May 17, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

3. Use this link from the first post and click on the featured gallery "month 2 - face making". Do you see the thumbnail sidebar now? Looks like they also got different view styles, because the not featured galleries display in the other style without the thumbnails at the side.
Sebastian

they have different templates you can specify for your gallery. they only appear to be owner-selectable though, not user selectable.

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

they have different templates you can specify for your gallery. they only appear to be owner-selectable though, not user selectable.

Thanks BWG, that clears things up. So did you sign up for an account?

Sebastian

bwg · May 17, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

Thanks BWG, that clears things up. So did you sign up for an account?

Sebastian

nono. free 14 day trial. just checking out the competition is all.

pronvit · May 17, 2006

I uploaded two files http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/sm.jpg and http://pronvit.1gb.ru/p/zf.jpg with images from SM and zenfolio. can you see artifacts around flower or just when green color ends on top? these images are from my accounts pronvit.smugmug.com and pronvit.zenfolio.com maybe the difference isn't very big but it's disturbing sometimes and when we're talking about profesional photo hosting, image quality is most important thing I think

russian tags work in flickr.com for example, try http://www.flickr.com/photos/pronvit/tags/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0/ so problem isn't in URLs

thanx for tip about different zenfolio layouts.

password-protecting individual photos are quite useful - in many galleries I can have photos that I don't want to show everybody and I can protect them. on SM I need to create separate gallery and move them to it - this isn't good for photo organization

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

bigwebguy wrote:

nono. free 14 day trial. just checking out the competition is all.

So you didn't just grab a screeny from there help pages.
Cool, would probably do it too, but time doesn't permit it at the moment.

Sebastian

onethumb · May 17, 2006

rainforest1155 wrote:

As I've posted over here the <meta>-tag still doesn't contain UTF-8. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ne_nau.gif" border="0" alt="" >

As for the dynamic resize: click on any picture and they'll show a lightbox with one resized to your browser window (keeping a fixed black margin) - here for example.

Sebastian

We can't <meta> UTF-8 until we're 100% converted, otherwise things break.

Don

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

pronvit wrote:

russian tags work in flickr.com for example, try http://www.flickr.com/photos/pronvit/tags/%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0/ so problem isn't in URLs

Cool, didn't know that you could even use russian characters in urls.
I'll make a feature request about this right away as I can't use German umlauts in keywords either! Correction - I've filed a request over here.

Sebastian

rainforest1155 · May 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

We can't <meta> UTF-8 until we're 100% converted, otherwise things break.

Oh, yeah I alwas forget about the 80,000,000 photos that need to be handled. It's like the timeline feature I still haven't received, too. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/mwink.gif" border="0" alt="" >

Sebastian

Zenfolio vs. Smugmug?

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