Zenfolio Team Blog

We are reopening submissions for more candidate photos to be featured on our Home page.

You can find more details and submit your photos in this forums post.

The theme is Winter and Holiday Season, and the deadline to submit your photos is Friday, November 30th

The top 10 winners will be featured on our Home page.

We are looking forward to seeing more wonderful images from you! You can see the finalists from our previous contest in this collection.

We are on our way to New York to exhibit at the PhotoPlus Expo taking place this week. If you have not been to PhotoPlus Expo, it is the best photography-focused trade show on the East Coast held once a year.

We will be presenting Zenfolio service and answering questions at the Mpix booth #1628. We will also be handing out show-special discounts. If you are in the NY area or thinking of going to the show, stop by and say hello.

TRADE SHOW HOURS:
Thursday 9:00am-5:00pm
Friday 9:00am-5:00pm
Saturday 10:00am-4:00pm

Over the last two weeks we have received over 250 submissions for featured photographs (see the original post). We would like to thank everyone who took the time to submit the photos. The submitted works revealed many great artists, and it took us almost a week of discussions to narrow down the submissions to 30 finalists. 

We are now asking for your help picking out the winners. Over the next 7 days we invite you to vote for your favorite photograph to be featured on the Zenfolio front page. We also encourage you to visit the galleries of the artists whose images are selected. There are many more gems to be found.

Here is how to vote:

1. Review the collection of finalists »
2. Vote for your favorite photo on this forum post »

Thank you very much for your participation!

We are looking for submissions of photographs that can be featured on the Zenfolio.com front page.

For the next two weeks we are asking you to send us links to photos that you feel should be featured. Our creative staff will review the submissions, pick 20 candidates, and will post them for further voting. The top ten photos that receive the most votes will be featured on the Zenfolio.com front page (given owners’ permissions, of course).

Photos featured on the front page usually get a lot of views and clicks to the owner’s galleries so it is a great way to get good publicity.

Submission guidelines

1. ORIGINALITY. The photographs should be dramatic, original, and unique. They should make people stop, stare, and want to explore more work by the author.  Yes, you can submit your own photos, if you’d like.

2. HORIZONTAL ORIENTATION. Photos need to have horizontal orientation with an approximate aspect ratio of 6 x 4. This is due to the layout of our main page where vertical or square images will not work well.

3. ZENNY. We like images that play well with the overall design of our Web site. Subjects on white background work especially well. Black and white photography is always welcome. Also, images with orange, and blue colors compliment our color palette.

4. APPROPRIATE. We are looking for a variety of content. Portraits, nature, wildlife, pets, studio work, objects – anything goes! However, it goes without saying that the content should be appropriate for our front page.

How to send us your proposals:

1. Find the photograph that you like on Zenfolio

2. Click the Send Link button located in the top-right section of the screen

3. Copy the address of the photograph and paste it in the reply to this forum post. It would be preferred if you can include a brief explanation of your pick.

Price lists are a powerful feature of the Zenfolio Premium plan and we decided to talk about how to use them effectively.

Price lists define products, prices, and ordering options for the photos you are offering for sale. These are the prices and products available on your pages when visitors click the Add to Cart button. A price list can mix products from several vendors, as well as include custom products fulfilled by you directly. With Zenfolio, you can create as many price lists as you need.

Note, that if you are not planning to make profits on selling photos, you do not need price lists. You can simply allow your visitors to order prints at the minimum base lab prices, and all the products from our fulfillment partners will be available for ordering.

Price lists become active when they are assigned to a gallery or to an individual photo.  Price lists are managed in the SELLING section of your account and they are assigned to galleries and photos by using the Print Ordering section in the Toolbox.

Price list assignment works the same way as the Access Control - nested items can "inherit" settings from their parents. A typical flow of creating a price list is as follows:

Create a new price list, give it a name, and add products you would like to offer for sale:

1. Click the Selling button in the main menu
2. If you are planning to fulfill your own products, you will need to add your custom products and specify the settings in the "My Custom Products" section
3. Click the Price lists link on the left, and then the Create New button on the Price Lists page

Set your prices by either using a formula or by individually typing them in for each product. There are three approaches to setting prices:

• Use the formula - this is the quickest way, where you specify the markup over the base lab prices, and the selling price is automatically calculated for all products in the price list
• Type the desired profit for each product - the selling price will be calculated for you
• Type the selling price directly - in this case the profit will be calculated automatically.

Probably the best way is to use a mix of the three methods. First, set the prices as a batch, using the formula, and then override the values by typing the profit or the selling price directly for certain products.

Specify Ordering Options for each price list:

Ordering options allow photographers to control the ordering and fulfillment process. First, you need to decide if you would like to review and approve orders placed by your customers. By default, orders are submitted to our fulfillment partners as soon as they are placed. However, you can turn on the approval option, and orders will not be submitted to a lab until you approve them.

The way the approval works is when the order is placed, you receive an e-mail notification telling you that you need to review and approve a pending order. (It is in your best interest to review and approve orders quickly so your customers do not wait). During the review process you can adjust cropping and replace the originally ordered files. The replacement feature can save you a lot of time. You can retouch only the photos that were ordered and then upload high-resolution files to be used for printing.

In addition, price lists allow you to specify which options are available to customers when they place orders. You can disallow customers to change Cropping, Color Correction, and Color Conversion options, so that the photos are printed exactly as specified by you.

Assign the price list to a gallery or photographs.This step, performed in the organizer, is very important, as it activates the price list:

1. Select a gallery or a photo in the organizer
2. Click the Edit button in the Print Ordering section of the Toolbox, and the Print ordering popup will open
3. You can choose to allow print ordering at base prices, or select one of the price lists created in the step 1.

The list of products available from our partner labs will be changing from time to time. When this happens, we will be sending e-mail updates, inviting you to check your price lists and make sure that they are up to date. Also, remember, that when you are logged in, and order products from your photos, the prices will be adjusted to base lab prices after the products are added to the shopping cart. 

Some of the upcoming improvements to price lists include enhancements to price lists management, the ability to export price lists to Excel, as well as printing price lists. If you have any suggestions, we would like to hear them!

Once in a while, a new product comes along with enough innovation to change the game. For a long time the only way to display large photographs was to frame them and place behind glass. Later on, canvas prints came out bringing texture and frameless presentation to our walls.

We now have a new product on the market called "fotoflōts" and as the name suggests, it allows you to "float" your photos on walls without the frames and glass and without the texture of canvas.

fotoflōts can stand on a desk or hang on a wall, and they come in a variety of sizes. Printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper and mounted to a 1/8" thick acrylic, they are laser-trimmed to the exact size. Fusing print and acrylic, the process produces a smooth polished edge that's attractive and modern.

Another innovation is the magnetic mounting system. There are magnets on the back of the print which line up perfectly with a desk-stand or wall-mount. This allows you to swap prints in your room very easily or rotate them throughout the house. This is very cool and easy to use, and I encourage you to take a look at this product next time you are looking for a nice way to display printed photos.

Zenfolio members receive special discount on all fotoflōt purchases. And the best part is that you can access your Zenfolio galleries and photos directly from the fotoflōt site by providing your user name and password. The fotoflōt Web site has more information about this.

I’ve noticed recently a few messages in the Support mailbox asking about watermarks, so I decided to offer some clarification.

The term “watermark” dates back to paper production process, when initials, logo, or family heraldic was embedded into paper, visible when a sheet of paper is held to the light. In the digital photography world watermarks are images that are embedded into photographs, preventing unauthorized reproduction of images. Adding a watermark is the strongest protection against unauthorized use since watermarks cannot be easily removed without affecting the image. Creating a good watermark requires a fine balance between protecting your image, and maintaining good viewing experience.

Assigning watermarks is one of the features of the Zenfolio Premium plan level.

To create a watermark file you need an image editing application, such as Adobe Photoshop. We recommend using a PNG file with the resolution of 800 x 600 pixels – this size will result in the least amount of distortion when a watermark is resized. Start with an empty transparent image, and then add text, logos, or shapes. Save the file in the PNG format with alpha channel transparency. A small challenge is to make sure that the watermark is visible on lighter and darker images. This can be easily achieved by adding a dark drop shadow to a white watermark. In this example a dark shadow was added to white letters, which makes the watermark work well with light and dark images, even if the watermark is semi-transparent.

The next step is to upload the newly created watermark file to a watermark template in your Zenfolio account. Click the Manage Watermarks link in the Watermark section of the Toolbox (or go under PREFERENCES | Watermarks), and click the Create New button. Then choose the option to upload the image, point to your file, and click the OK button. The watermark will appear as a thumbnail in the list.

Now you can refine position and opacity of your watermark. Double-click the thumbnail of the newly uploaded watermark to edit it. You can simply drag the watermark to the desired position, and change its opacity by using the slider. We provide 4 sample images for previewing how the watermark will appear on horizontal, vertical, and black and white images. Give your watermark a descriptive name, and you are ready for the next step.

The last and most important step is to assign watermarks to your photos, many people forget about this step.

Note, that if a watermark is applied to many photos at once, it may take some time to process all display image sizes, so please be patient.

To create a new watermark template, you can create it from an already uploaded file by giving it a different opacity and position and saving with a different name. For example, you can create one watermark in the top left corner, another one in the bottom left corner, and pick the one to use based on the content of the target image, so that the watermark does not impair the viewing experience.

And to confirm, watermarks will not appear on ordered prints they are only used for online display images.

If you ever wanted to have a gallery that is not visible on your Home page but can be accessed by anyone with a URL, this is fairly easy to do with a handy Access Control trick. Some people refer to it as a "hidden" gallery.

Zenfolio offers powerful access settings, just need to be creative using them.

1. Create a new Group on your Home page and make it Private under Access Control.
   
   This group will not be visible to your visitors, only to you.
   
2. Inside this group, place a gallery with photos, and make this gallery explicitly Public under Access Control.

The result is that no one can navigate to this gallery through your Home page, but if you send someone a direct link to the gallery, they can view it without a password. This is not real security, but it works well for many situations when you want to keep photos semi-private.

Similarly, if you have a gallery with photos and you want to link to them from forums and other sites, but do not want regular visitors to find their way into this gallery, you can do the same: make the gallery Private, and make the photos inside the gallery Public for linking.

Are you taking great photos and wondering how to best turn your hobby into a business? Becoming a professional photographer is a challenging path and the Zenfolio Premium account takes away a big burden of presenting your work to clients and fulfilling orders.

In addition to online presentation, Zenfolio can help you turn your passion into a business with the flexible and easy to use e-commerce platform, which allows you to:

·         Automate the selling process by using Zenfolio fulfillment partners

·         Sell your own custom products and fulfill them directly

·         Create multiple price lists and assign them selectively to galleries or individual photos

·         Review and approve orders before they are sent for fulfillment, including replacing photos with higher resolution edited files and adjusting cropping

·         Use coupons to promote your business

·         View detailed reports of your selling activities

All this functionality is available now in the Premium subscription plan. And we are not stopping there. Our platform will be continuously enhanced based on the feedback from our users.

In response to many questions we saw on the forums and in messages addressed to Support, we have put together a document that talks about the capabilities of our selling solution. If you are considering selling your work online, this document is for you. 

Download PDF File (Selling your work on Zenfolio)

[I'm the Director of Experience and Co-Founder of Zenfolio] 

Business Week has an interesting article about Apple's design process. Apple is one of the companies that inspire us, so it was interesting to learn that our processes are not that different from what Apple's. That's why I decided to write about how we develop software at Zenfolio.

We believe in agile development. We are strong supporters of the principles described in the "Getting real" book by 37Signals. Some of these principles are: build less, stay lean, hire the right customers, interface first, and more. (By the way, the book can be read online for free, and I strongly recommend it to anyone as it has applications outside of software development.)

By now, we've settled into a predictable 2-month release rhythm - every 2 months we have something new to show to our customers. Why 2 months? It just works. Two months is short enough to keep the service exciting, react quickly to feedback from customers, and adapt to changes in the marketplace or technology. At the same time it is long enough to deliver meaningful "chunky" features and enhancements, while keeping the service stable by spending enough time testing new functionality. 

For the benefit of the readers who may not be familiar with the software development process, I ‘d like to explain the concept of "regression" testing. Every change, no matter how small, introduces a risk of breaking something in the existing functionality, also called regression. Please re-read the previous sentence again. This is one of the most crucial axioms of software development. The consequence of this fact is that as the service becomes more complex, we have to go back and re-test everything after making changes to the existing features or adding new functionality, no matter how small the change. That's why 2 months is not such a long time. It includes time to develop new features, fix bugs and address design issues, then test, test, and test again. So far, we have been lucky enough not to let any major bugs out. We hope to keep it that way.

In reality, the life of a feature starts long before the official clock starts the 2-month countdown. Prior to coding every feature goes through the design and planning stages. While the topic of feature selection and design deserves a separate post, I will refer back to the article about Apple's approach. Same as Apple's fellows, we allow ourselves to dream. We imagine how a feature would work if there are no technical restrictions, we ask ourselves "what is the ultimate customer experience"? Then, for each feature we produce numerous mockups, diagrams, flows, which go through multiple product and development team review cycles. It is not uncommon for us to go through 7-10 iterations before we settle on a concept, which is then refined to a "pixel-perfect" mockup. Most discussions happen around visual representation of features in a form of "cognitive walkthroughs" where we play with paper mockups while trying to envision how a feature will behave when implemented.

The Requests for New Features forum is a good indication of how long our pending feature list is. Not only is it long, but it is also a living, breathing organism, which is feeding and thriving on customer feedback.  It will never get shorter. Even if Zenfolio grows to the size of Adobe or Microsoft the feature list monster will still outgrow it by large, thanks to the creative genius of our customers. The list will wiggle its long tail and scream at us to continue adding more and more features. That's why we have to constantly prioritize and maintain a very strict discipline about what goes into each release. Stepping back and looking at the big picture is our way of achieving clarity when deciding on priorities.  For example, from day one, Zenfolio's goal has been to be a stable, fast, and secure service, so any work needed to make this happen will automatically take over other features.

To sum it up: we try to move fast, we adjust based on customer feedback and changing environment, we put design first, and we are staying focused. In my future posts I hope to dive deeper on some of the aspects of software development at Zenfolio.

Recommended reading:

• Apple's Design Process - article from BusinessWeek
• Getting Real - book by 37Signals

The latest March 2008 issue of the Studio Photography magazine includes an article about how Zenfolio helps a wedding photography studio handle all their Web hosting and fulfillment needs.

The article was written by one of our customers, Choco Studio, and includes a comprehensive review of how they use our services.

Link to the article.

Help us grow Zenfolio organically by telling your friends about it.

We have always had a referral program where we matched the discount given to a new person by giving you referral credit. If a new person used your referral code during signup, he/she received instant $5 off, and you received a $5 referral credit.

For the month of March, we are going to double the referral credit you receive. You will get $10 for every person who uses your referral code and pays for an upgrade. The person has to actually sign up for an account in the month of March in order for you to get double the credit. An e-mail confirmation is sent to you when you receive credits.

What are the credits good for?

The credits can be used to renew or upgrade your account, purchase a gift subscription, and to pay for ordering prints and photo products. The credits never expire and there is no limit on the number of credits you can earn and spend. We have users with over $400 in credits they earned through referrals. Credits cannot be redeemed for cash.

Your referral code can be found at the top of the Toolbox in your account. It was also sent to you in the e-mail when you signed up. Send it to your friends and anyone else who might like to use Zenfolio.

Please be discreet

Please do not flood public forums with your codes. Some forums do not allow this practice and might ban your account if you do that.

[I am the founder of Zenfolio and the person responsible for most of the bad decisions. Hopefully, some good decisions, too.]

Creating Zenfolio 

Writing this first blog post made me think back to the beginnings of Zenfolio as a concept. Back then, photo hosting was a really crowded market with every portal and every company in the photo industry announcing free photo sharing services. I often get asked how in such an environment did we convince ourselves that people would pay money to host photos?

Three things made me believe this was a good idea:

1. Being a photographer myself (a hobbyist photographer I should add), I knew I would pay money for such a service as I refused to throw my photos on one of the advertising-driven sites;
2. I did not believe that anything “free” was going to last;
3. It was clear to me that there was room for a quality service rich on features and focused on an online viewing experience.

Fast forward to 2008 and a lot has changed in the industry. Several free and consumer-based services are no longer around (ImageStation, iciclelanding.com, and Yahoo! Photos to name a few). Flickr is mainstream and chose to stay in the social interaction space around photos. Phanfare is reinventing itself to the grievance of many users. And more people are realizing that anything “free” is ultimately going to cost them a lot in time wasted or future investments. In short – we were right.

In a little over two years that Zenfolio service has been live, our customers have told us many times how much they appreciated our commitment to keeping clean online presentation free of advertising and that our efforts in preserving good usability and elegant design were much appreciated. Our Premium users are telling us that turning their passion into a business was never easier, and the number of people switching over to Zenfolio Premium from other “pro” services is a real proof of that.

We take criticism for not building out the service fast enough but in many ways this measured rate of growth is deliberate. It allows us to preserve the quality of service and really focus on delivering the best in service. So far, we have been successful in that, with zero down-time and no major usability problems.

We are not in any hurry to turn a quick profit and run, or to get the most eyeballs. We are building a business that can be sustainable and long lasting. As others have learned, the growing pains can be damaging to the reputation and to customer relationships, and we are doing our best to avoid making such mistakes.

For us, quality will always be more important than quantity and when it comes to building software for artistic expression, making it perfect is worth the effort. As the name Zenfolio implies – we are striving for perfection which is always elusive.

Introducing Forums and Blog

The introduction of this blog and the user forums marks a new milestone in the growth of Zenfolio as a company – we are no longer communicating one to one with our customers, we are communicating one-to-many and many-to-many which helps us grow organically as a community of like-minded people focused on our passion for photography. 

We have big plans for making future blog posts informative and interesting to many of our users. We are also planning for guest appearances from other bloggers covering general photography subjects, so if you have a suggestion of a topic that would be interesting to cover, let us know.

You can sign-up for the blog RSS feed to be automatically notified when there are new posts. We also encourage you to bookmark the user forums page to get access to the latest information and to become active participants.