We are very happy to announce a new print partner available on the Zenfolio platform: Photobox. Photobox print lab is based in the UK and has production facilities in Ireland, London, Paris, and several other locations throughout Europe.
Photobox offers a range of print sizes on Fuji Crystal gloss and matt papers, as well as specialty photo products. To enable Photobox products in your account, click Edit in the Print Ordering section of the Toolbox and tick the checkbox next to it. All Photobox products are available for shipping anywhere in the world, excluding US and Canada, which are served by the Mpix lab.
As part of this announcement we are very happy to introduce support for multiple currencies on Zenfolio. This multi-currency project has been in the works for many months and represents a major leap in photographers' ability to service customers globally.
This means that you can immediately start selling Digital Products and Custom Products in 18 currencies:
| Australian Dollars | Singapore Dollar |
| Canadian Dollars | Swedish Krona |
| Euros | Danish Krone |
| Pounds Sterling | Polish Zloty |
| Japanese Yen | Norwegian Krone |
| U.S. Dollars | Hungarian Forint |
| New Zealand Dollar | Czech Koruna |
| Swiss Franc | Israeli Shekel |
| Hong Kong Dollar | Mexican Peso |
Our partner products are now available in several currencies; you can see specific prices listed in the corresponding product tables:
NOTE: we have made sure that nothing has changed for the current US based customers
in regards to their prices and price lists; it is business as usual.
Price lists can contain products in multiple currencies, you will need to first add a new currency tab to your price list and then add products to each currency separately.
Digital Products do not belong to any one currency and can be added to any currency in your price list.
Each Custom Product has a currency it belongs to. If you would like to offer the same custom product in several currencies, you need to define new custom product per currency and then add it to a corresponding currency tab in the price list.
Coupons and Shipping Methods are also set up per currency. You can use the same coupon code across coupons in different currencies.
The balance for each currency is maintained independently in your Zenfolio account. Payouts are available to request via PayPal in the specific currency, if you have a balance in it.
For more detailed instructions on how to configure and sell products globally on Zenfolio please refer to the Guide to Selling Globally on Zenfolio.
Orders placed in currencies other than the USD have the following service fee rates applied:
| Products fulfilled by Zenfolio partners: | 15% |
| Digital products (downloads): | 10% |
| Custom products created and fulfilled by you: | 5% |
There is now a separate Sales Tax page under SELLING to configure tax rules for your orders. When you specify sales tax, it will apply to partner-fulfilled orders as well as your custom orders. Sales tax can be setup per state or per country. There is an option to apply tax to shipping charges as well.
We are very happy to announce a less expensive shipping option available for Canada when ordering from the Mpix lab. The new USPS First Class mail service will deliver orders with 50 prints or less in print sizes equal to or smaller than 5" x 7" for US$5.50 / C$6.70.
Sales reports have been redesigned to make them more useful and easier to read. In addition, a new Taxes report was added showing sales taxes and/or VAT broken down by country.
By popular demand, a Flash-based embeddable Slideshow is now available under MORE RESOURCES. You can create a standalone slideshow from any gallery or collection in your account in almost any size, and then post it to any Web site that allows including objects. This is similar to embedding a YouTube video. Adding music to slideshows is coming in the next release.
We know that many of you have been waiting patiently for the ability to collect payments for custom orders you fulfill yourselves. With this release we have added the ability for you to use your own PayPal account in the Shopping Cart so clients can pay you directly through a seamless Checkout experience.
We have also lowered the service fee for self-fulfilled custom orders to 4% (down from 6%). Combined with the new option to use your own PayPal account for collecting payments, Zenfolio now offers the most complete solution for both photographers wishing to fulfill their own orders and those who wish to use Zenfolio print partners.
We have studied carefully how many professional photographers integrate Zenfolio into their workflow and came up with an innovative way of making Zenfolio an even better client proofing site.
Premium users now have a choice of adding an external portfolio web site in place of the Zenfolio Home page. Your Display Name and the Home link on all your pages will take viewers to an address determined by the preferences you set. You will find this feature in the Preferences of your Premium account.
We have added fotoflōt as a new vendor to the Zenfolio E-Commerce platform. Photographers are now able to sell frameless fotoflōt prints by setting their own prices and making a profit. fotoflōts are innovative products printed on real photographic paper, bonded to hard acrylic surface, and laser-cut to size, resulting in extremely precise edges. They come with innovative magnetic mounting hardware for displaying on your desk or hanging on a wall. Try ordering one and you will be hooked!
See the complete list of available fotoflōt products and prices.
We are very happy to announce that you can use the Eye-Fi cards to upload wirelessly to your Zenfolio account from any Wi-Fi enabled location. The Eye-Fi card stores photos like a traditional memory card, and fits in most cameras. When you turn your camera on within range of a configured Wi-Fi network, it can wirelessly transfer photos to your Zenfolio account. Learn more about the Eye-Fi cards.
We continue to bring you the benefits of our partnership with Mpix as they make available new products and services:
We know many of our Premium users are looking forward to selling digital downloads on Zenfolio, and they are finally here!
With the introduction of Digital Products, photographers have the ability to define almost any downloadable product with custom licensing terms, at any price. Here is what is included:
To learn more about how to create and offer digital products, refer to the Guide to Digital Products on Zenfolio.
The new price list editing pages are many times faster than before and allow you to manage many products easily. As part of this redesign we have introduced separate formulas for each product category including a dedicated formula for framing and mounting. Look for more more related features coming soon including export to Excel and printing.
You can now use plain words to create easy links to group, gallery, or collection pages (such as http://demo.zenfolio.com/weddings). You can use letters, numbers, and some punctuation including dash '-' and a slash '/'. This works with custom domain names as well.
We have overhauled the Reports to make them more consistent and easier to understand. We've added a Summary report and a Coupons report under SELLING > Reports. The Summary report makes it easy to view high level financials for any time period. Coupons are now accounted for everywhere in the reports.
New setting in Customize Visitor View > Options provides the ability to hide the path to the Gallery/Collection/Group (also known as breadcrumbs) displayed at the top of a Visitor page.
Private paths no longer display in breadcrumbs on Visitor pages allowing you to create "branches" in your organizational hierarchy. This really helps keep visitors focused on specific galleries or groups. For example, if you have a private group in the middle of a path to a gallery, the path leading to that group and the group itself will be hidden from your visitors.
Released a plug-in to export to Zenfolio directly out of Windows Live Photo Gallery. If you are not familiar with this product from Microsoft, it is a free application used for managing and previewing photos on your Windows XP or Vista system.
In addition, the following enhancements were released:
More canvas gallery wrap sizes available from Mpix:
By a special arrangement with Santa, we are very happy to bring you the Photo Comments and Guestbook functionality in time for the holidays. We know some of you have been waiting for this feature for a long time, and we apologize for taking so long.
This is a fully functional implementation and includes the following features:
By default, all current users have this feature turned OFF. If you would like to enable it, select the item you would like to apply this to in the Organizer (such as your home page or a specific gallery), then click the Edit link in the Access Control section of the Toolbox. You can enable both Photo Comments and the Guestbook under the Comments tab in the Access Control window.
In addition, the following enhancements were released:
We continue to extend our integration with the Mpix Lab:
Our next release will include selling digital products, which we have been working on concurrently.
As promised, we are working hard on having more frequent feature releases. This release was supposed to be a small update but we kept getting more features completed and tested so now we have a pretty big update rolled out.
We have added support for Google Analytics to collect detailed visitor statistics. You can find the new Visitor Tracking page under the PREFERENCES menu. This is available for all Zenfolio plan levels.
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to collect aggregate information about visitors to your Zenfolio pages, such as the number of unique visitors over time, their location, length of visits, and much more. For more information about Google Analytics visit the main Google Analytics home page.
We have a new Theme designed called Eco. This design was inspired by clean air and green leaves. We hope nature lovers will find it particularly suitable for nature photography.
We have been wanting to change how photos and galleries are sorted for a while, and this is finally here. Now the sorting criteria you select for a gallery or group is going to apply all the time, no longer do you need to resort after uploading new photos. In the process we have also fixed a bug where sorting of sequentially numbered files was not consistent with desktop sorting.
We continue adding support for more Mpix products:
Brand new Frame Editor with support for new frames and options:
Also note that we had to rename matboards to backboards to eliminate the confusion with the framing mats introduced as an available option.
By popular demand, we are introducing a large 200px thumbnail size. Photos uploaded after September 12th, 2008 have this new thumbnail size available immediately. Photos uploaded prior to September 12th, 2008, will have this thumbnail size generated the first time it is accessed, which may take a few minutes.
Current users need to explicitly select this new thumbnail size under Customize Visitor View > Options when looking at the Home page or Group and Gallery pages. There are three Auto settings there now:
Our next release will include user Comments functionality which we have been working on concurrently.
This release includes many improvements to the Visitor pages as well as new products and changes from Mpix. Zenfolio Premium users will also find many new features related to customization and ordering.
In preparation for the upcoming release of the Comments functionality, we have rewritten all Visitor pages. Visitor pages now load much faster, navigate smoother, they are easier to customize, and include underlying support for the comments and other upcoming enhancements.
We have decided not to wait until the comments are ready, and release these changes to the site with many improvements that can be utilized right away.
There are many new options available for customizing Visitor pages now under Customize Visitor View > Options. With these options available, you can really make your pages clean and simple:
Other improvements to Visitor pages include:
For a complete list of Visitor page changes, please read the release notes.
We have been working closely with Mpix on adding many of their products and services to the Zenfolio site. With this release, the following products are now available for ordering to you and your customers:
Here is the complete list with previews and descriptions. We continue to work with Mpix on adding their newest products, which should become available very soon.
Additional changes affecting ordering from Mpix are:
With a large number of print products now available on the site, we are introducing product Categories for easier Add to Cart navigation. Click the Add to Cart button in this gallery for a preview. Premium users can still enable “flat view” in their price lists, if desired.
One important change that we know many of you have been waiting for is the ability to hide vendor name from the Checkout flow, customer e-mails, and order packaging. This is now possible with all current vendors. Premium users can make this change under SELLING > Selling Preferences.
Other new features include:
And last but not least is Premium users can request profit payouts using PayPal now. There is no fee for PayPal payouts, and the way we have implemented this, PayPal does not charge you fees, either. This is really a win-win situation for everyone.
For a complete list of all the features and improvements in this release, please read the release notes.
We have updated the Prints & Products pages to include more details and make them easier to read.
We have also worked with the Imagine Your Photos company to lower the image resolution requirements for their photo products. You can see the new requirements posted on the updated page.
It is now possible to Replace a Photo with an updated file while keeping the original links and metadata intact. You can do that for a single photo or as a batch operation for any number of photos at once. The interface allows to batch upload files into a separate gallery first to make it easier to replace a large number of photos, or upload new files directly in the Replace window.
All pages on Zenfolio collecting sensitive credit card and personal information are now protected with the best SSL encryption technology from VeriSign.
VeriSign is the leader in SSL encryption and their Extended Validation (EV) certificates include secure transmission of information and verification of business identity. For more information about VeriSign EV certificates and benefits see VeriSign for Consumers.
In other news, Zenfolio and fotoflōt have teamed up to offer Zenfolio users an innovative way to display digital images. fotoflōts present photographs without glass, frames or mats using breakthrough digital imaging and mounting technologies.
Zenfolio members receive a 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 user name and password.
We are happy to introduce a new fulfillment partner to the Zenfolio e-commerce platform. Please welcome Imagine Your Photos gift fulfillment company based in Miami, Florida. The IYP Photo Products company delivers the highest quality photo merchandising by using the latest imaging and transfer technologies on a variety of surfaces. You can find out more about the company and their products here. The new products are available immediately to ship anywhere in the world, and we will be adding more products from them over time.
If you are an existing Zenfolio customer, and would like to make available the new IYP Photo Products, you will need to enable them under the Print Ordering or add them to your price list.
One of the best services the Mpix lab offers is the Color Correction service. An actual trained and experienced technician analyzes each image and makes subtle adjustments to ensure the best color reproduction, sharpness, and density. And the best part is that this service is included free of charge.
We have always offered this service from Mpix but it had to be explicitly selected in the Cart. We were so impressed with the results that it is going to be turned ON by default now. For those who do not care for it, you can still disable it in the Cart and in your price lists.
We are adding three new value products from Mpix. The three value sizes are 3.5”x5”, 4”x5”, and 4”x6” printed on Kodak Professional Endura E-Surface Color paper. The best part is that these prints are only 19 cents each. The new products can only be ordered with no color correction applied.
This release also includes several new features and a number of bug fixes. Here is the list:
With this release we have significantly increased our storage and transaction capacity. A lot of work has been done behind the scenes to ensure smooth growth and scalability.
Please visit the newly released User Forums and bookmark them. With your help, we hope to make them a valuable source of information and a place where we can exchange ideas.
Zenfolio Team Blog will help us better communicate our thoughts and ideas about the service, as well as generate discussions around photography subjects in general. Please visit often and leave comments.
Many Zenfolio Premium subscribers have been asking about this important feature: you can now select an option to approve orders placed for your photos before they are sent for fulfillment to a Zenfolio partner lab. That means that you can review and make changes to orders before they are printed.
Here is how it works:
To select the option to have your orders approved first, open a price list from the SELLING>Price List page, and make the choice at the top. Don't forget to Save. This is also where you can edit the message displayed to your customers about the potential fulfillment delay.
We have also updated the upload protocol to make it more robust and resilient to file upload interruptions caused by fluctuations in Internet connection quality.
After a short break from getting the Premium plan released, we are back in the saddle. By popular demand, you can now give a gift of Zenfolio at any subscription level. Simply pay for a subscription and then send an e-mail with activation code to that special someone. Your billing information will not be saved in the gift account, and you get full referral discount (total value of $10). You can also use your account balance to pay.
Something else we have been working on for a while is a more streamlined Shopping Cart checkout. Registration is no longer required when buying prints and other photo products. While there are advantages to opening a free account during the checkout, the default option is to continue with a Guest checkout.
We have also improved Cart pages by removing information that was not needed, and by adding Ordering FAQ with answers to the most common questions that may arise during ordering.
Building up on the available Zenfolio Public API, we have two new upload tools available.
A small but useful addition is the ability to read the IPTC Copyright field from uploaded photos, and copy it into the photo Copyright field on Zenfolio. This happens automatically when you upload original photos.
Lastly, a small update to the way the Cart link is displayed at the top of Visitor pages. The Cart link is now displayed only if something was added to it.
As many of you know, we have been hard at work on a new Premium subscription plan, and it is finally here. Big thank you goes to our Beta testers who provided the feedback and helped us put the polish on.
The Premium plan lets you create a fully-functional Web store with customizable look-and-feel and flexible price lists. Here are the highlights:
The price lists can be assigned to individual photos or entire galleries. This process is completely transparent to clients, who experience the ease and simplicity of ordering prints and other products, and receive a package delivered directly from the lab.
In addition to fulfilling products through Zenfolio partner labs, photographers have a choice of creating and fulfilling their own custom products. Zenfolio Premium subscribers can offer products fulfilled through any lab of their choice, or they can print photos themselves.
Create and assign custom watermarks with full control over placement and opacity. Supported watermark file formats include JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and PNG with transparency. Original uploaded photos are not watermarked so they can be used for ordering prints.
For additional visitor page customization, you can replace Zenfolio logo and links with your own name to make it look more personalized (available under Customize Visitor View). This powerful option makes the site look yours with a click of a button. Combine that with using your own domain name and you have a branded Web store with all the benefits of Zenfolio under your name.
You can create your own coupons including percent-off and amount-based discounts with expiration dates, specified number of uses, and order minimums.
Review and download detailed sales reports compatible with any spreadsheet program. Reports include Orders, Products, Customers, Coupons, and Photos based on any time period and sorted any way you want.
Zenfolio Premium plan subscribers can upload files up to 24MB each to support super large print sizes. And, of course, there is no storage or bandwidth limit.
The Zenfolio Premium subscription plan is priced at USD$100 per year. Until December 31, 2007, current and new users can sign up for the Zenfolio Premium plan at the special discounted price of USD$80 per year. This special price will stay with you for as long as you remain a subscriber.
For orders fulfilled through the Zenfolio partner labs, there is a service fee of 12% which includes credit card transaction fees and customer service. For custom orders fulfilled and charged by photographers directly, the service fee is 6%.
All current Zenfolio users, including Basic and Unlimited subscribers, will have access to all the Premium features until November 30, 2007. This allows you to try before deciding to upgrade. NOTE: if you do not upgrade by November 30, the Premium features will be automatically removed from your account along with any related items you create during the trial, e.g. watermarks, price lists, custom products.
This is a small update as we get ready for the rollout of a new Premium subscription level.
The Premium subscription plan will include more professional features such as offering products for sale at custom prices, creating and applying watermarks, and a complete front end to order fulfillment. It should be available as soon as we are finished hunting down bugs.
In the meantime, current users can enjoy these new features:
They are really worth checking out:
It is now a lot easier to control which galleries and photos are allowed to be printed, as well as to manage which Zenfolio partner lab should be doing the fulfillment. If you are not into making your photos available for printing, just select your Home page in the Organizer and confirm that "Do not allow print ordering" option is selected.
You can now access Slideshow directly from the Edit View while working on organizing your photos (this is for you, fishpix).
Lastly, we have increased the file size limit for uploads to 12MB per file to accommodate the latest swell in camera sensor sizes.
Small update was released today. The main additions are:
Additional bug fixes and small improvements are also part of this update. Here is the complete list:
This latest release includes almost exclusively the features and enhancements requested by our users. Some of the requests were so popular that we were getting questions about them daily.
Here are the highlights of the new features:
For a complete list of updated items read the release notes.
Public Zenfolio API is made available for third-party development of software applications, plug-ins, utilities, and tools interfacing with the Zenfolio service.
The Zenfolio API provides outside developers with the same features and functionality of the Zenfolio platform used internally for our own development. The Zenfolio API is platform-independent and is based on open standards. It can be used from any programming language on any platform as long as it supports sending and receiving HTTP requests.
The following Help chapter provides detailed information describing the Zenfolio API.
As the first example of using the Zenfolio API, David Holmes has written a plug-in for Apple Aperture. The ApertureToZenfolio plug-in allows for uploading of photos to Zenfolio directly from with the Aperture application.
This is something we have all been waiting for: the ability to order prints and photo products directly from Zenfolio. It is here now, and, boy, is it exciting!
Zenfolio team has been hard at work for months integrating with not just one, but two very different photofinishing labs. And the underlying e-commerce platform allows us to add more labs in the future including different geographies.
Zenfolio is very excited to have full integration with EZ Prints and Mpix. Read more about these partner labs under Prints & Products.
And be assured that with this foundation in place, we are working on extending the E-commerce platform to allow photographers to set their own custom pricing and sell for profit in the near future.
This is a major release marking our first anniversary of going live with the service exactly one year ago. The following features and enhancements are immediately available:
Built from the ground up for photographers, this is the most powerful and streamlined shopping cart of its kind. The Cart features such innovations as ordering products from multiple vendors, applying additional services such as mounting and framing, and performing precision cropping using advanced cropping tools. The end result is a smooth checkout flow making purchasing a continuous and elegant extension of viewing photos.
Purchasing a print or a photo product begins with an Add to Cart menu on a photo page and takes a user through the vendor and product selection in easy to follow steps. The Add to Cart interface is fully integrated with visitor pages matching them in Theme and style.
A robust cropping tool is available as part of Cart configuration. Cropping options include:
Introduced three new themes:
Preferences: Email Notifications: you are now in control of e-mail messages you receive from Zenfolio. You can select what types of communications you would like to receive and opt out of the ones you don't.
For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.
As Microsoft is nearing the release of a major upgrade to their most popular Web browser, Zenfolio site is now fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
The official Web browsers supported by the Zenfolio site are:
Other Web browsers may work but are not actively tested.
This update addresses Slideshow usability and fixes several issues.
A few people have pointed out that the captions in the Slideshow were too intrusive and covered up sizable portion of images. We have addressed the issue by introducing mouse-over captions with subtle notification.
Transitions, or fades, can now be disabled for those who do not fancy them. And we have labeled the playback speed controller to make it easier to find and use.
The front page is now cleaner and easier to read. We have added new work from some outstanding featured photographers. We are very proud to have such talented and enthusiastic users.
The Overview page was redesigned completely, and we have added a lot of screenshots. It now looks more polished and presents information in a more organized fashion.
The Tour was updated with the newest features.
There are also a number of fixes, for a complete list please refer to the release notes.
This turned out to be one big release with major new functionality and enhancements addressing user feedback.
Collections can be used to save links to photos from you and other Zenfolio users. You can now reference the same photo in several Collections without having to upload the photo many times. Collections are also great for saving together photos from several Zenfolio users taken at the same event or location. Or for collecting in one place your favorite photos on a specific subject. There are many ways to use Collections so be creative!
As opposed to Galleries, Collections hold only links to the photos but not the actual files. And if you wish, you can specify to not allow your photographs to be added to Collections by others.
Registered Visitors can save photographs from other Zenfolio users in Collections, and show them on their own Home page with a custom address. Registration takes less than a minute and subscription is completely free.
This was a highly requested feature that we are certain will make your galleries look even more custom. If you have your own domain name registered you can now setup the CNAME record for it to point to your Zenfolio account. It will become the address to your Home page and all the links to your photo pages and galleries will begin with it. If you are an Unlimited plan subscriber, check Preferences for more details.
By popular demand we are bringing out larger 120px thumbnails in addition to the existing ones. The new thumbnails have more than double the size of the original thumbnails. By default, smaller thumbnails are displayed for lower screen resolutions, and larger thumbnails are displayed for higher screen resolutions achieving the best presentation experience across all screen resolutions. Users can override this default in either direction on a per gallery basis.
Complete overhaul of current page layouts resulted in more functional pages and more customization options. All current themes received visual enhancements and improvements.
Other new features include:
For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.
Numerous enhancements and new features released.
You give us feedback and we keep making Zenfolio better. This update includes many usability improvements, bug fixes, and new features. The following is an outline of main changes:
For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.
Zenfolio service is now open to subscribers.
Big “thank you” to our Beta users and the hard working team at Zenfolio for finishing everything in time for the launch.
Zenfolio service now features complete photo management and organization functionality including galleries and groups. Six beautiful Themes combined with page Layouts create truly impactful and elegant presentations.
The service also features industry-leading access control management applied from the Home page level down to individual photographs including options to password-protect, limit access to a list of users, and making items private as well as public.
We are particularly proud of the image processing quality we were able to achieve. The uploaded full size photographs are converted to display images in six different sizes using the best quality resizing algorithms available. The resulting images preserve the fidelity of the originals when displayed across all screen sizes.
And last but not least is the Search & Browse functionality. Powerful queries search descriptions, including keywords, categories, titles, and captions returning results in your choice of galleries or photographs. The Browse option gives visitors access to the Most Popular, Recent, and subject-matching galleries and photos with a single mouse click.
We are now officially in Beta with a limited feature set and a lot of enthusiasm from the users. We really appreciate everyone’s suggestions and feedback, more features and functionality will be rolling out in the coming months.