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In 2012, Apple shut down its MobileMe service, forcing me to look for another provider to host my photo galleries. At the time, I chose Zenfolio because they were reasonably priced and offered the features I was looking for. I benefitted from a promotional sign-up deal, paying just $80 for the first year, including unlimited photo storage. It then went up to $100 the second year, and by now, my renewal fee would be more than $200.
Over the years, Zenfolio added many features, though almost all were aimed at professional photographers who wished to sell their work on Zenfolio. They also added other features that were of no or little use to me, while many things I would have liked to see implemented, such as support for HEIF, the High Efficiency Image File Format for photos and videos, were left out. Given all this, I knew that I would sooner or later have to migrate to a different platform.
Still, I hesitated because of the huge amount of work such a migration represented. In the roughly twelve years as a Zenfolio customer, I have built nearly 300 galleries containing about 15,000 photos and well over a thousand video clips. Many of these galleries are public, some are private (i.e., protected with a password), and a few are hidden (i.e., they are not visible at all and can only be accessed if one has the URL). Earlier this year, Zenfolio announced that they were implementing an archiving system and that any gallery older than a certain number of months would be automatically archived. This was totally unacceptable to me: many pages on my main web site link to certain galleries, and of course these links would fail if the target gallery were archived. Clearly, something had to be done.
I chose to migrate my galleries from Zenfolio to SmugMug. This entailed the following:
I began this process towards the end of August 2023, and after spending several hours a day for two weeks, I was able to complete it. Links to galleries on this web site should now go to the correct gallery. One thing that cannot be helped is that the URL of every photo, video, and gallery has changed, so if you have saved shortcuts to certain items, they will have to be modified.
Here are some links to the new galleries:
All in all, I find SmugMug to be a better fit for my needs. They, too, cater to professional photographers, but they also offer a plan for people who, like me, just want to display photos and have no need for shopping carts, price lists, and order forms. I thus do not have to pay for features I don't need, but I still get to store an unlimited number of photos, I can still use my custom domain, and I benefit from several features I was missing before. All in all, I am very pleased with the move to this new platform. Do you like the new galleries? Did you prefer the old ones? Use the email link at the bottom of this page to let me know!
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