Preparing your photographs for upload

The following are general guidelines for preparing digital photographs before uploading to your Zenfolio account.

If you are mainly interested in using Zenfolio for online presentation of your photographs, you should upload digital files resized to about 1,200 pixels along the longest side. This will more efficiently utilize your storage space and reduce the time it takes to upload files without compromising quality.

If you or your visitors are planning on ordering prints and other products requiring high-resolution digital files, you should upload original full size photographs without downsizing. Please see related sections describing supported file formats and maximum file size for more specific details.

The most common file format used for photographs and pixel artwork is JPEG. When you save a JPEG file you have to make a decision on the amount of compression to apply. If you plan on printing 11"x17" or larger, we recommend setting the compression quality setting to the equivalent of 9 or 10 (on a scale from 1-12, with 12 being no compression) as used in Adobe® Photoshop®.

Our experience and research have proven that setting compression quality higher than 10 does not provide for any increase in quality while generating significantly larger file sizes. And while compression quality setting of lower than 9 is commonly used by many users, our evidence shows that depending on the subject, particularly large prints made from those files may show artifacts. Of course, if you never plan on printing anything larger than 11"x17", then you can use compression quality setting of 8 with excellent results.

If you apply sharpening algorithms to your photographs in addition to what is already processed in the camera, you should apply the right amount of sharpening for the photo size you upload.

Zenfolio will resize your photos dynamically to make them fit on the computer screens of your visitors. Zenfolio uses the highest quality resizing algorithms to generate display images, and applies small amounts of additional sharpening in order to compensate for the loss in contrast when reducing size. The resulting images contain all the fidelity of your original photograph giving you access to a number of smaller size display images for online presentation.