Zenfolio Review: Why Some Photographers Avoid It in 2024

Zenfolio Has So Much to Offer, But a Few Issues Too

Zenfolio was born with a simple mission in mind – to give photographers an easy, all-in-one solution for displaying, sharing, and selling images online. This zeroed-in approach makes it a go-to website builder for many professional photographers, designers, and artists.

But is this just a case of clever marketing? Is Zenfolio really the best website builder for photographers? Or does it just offer a slim selection of tools that you could easily find elsewhere – perhaps for cheaper or with more features included?

Testing Zenfolio on everything from templates and ease of use to features and pricing, I discovered that it has a lot of potential. It has a good selection of baked-in features for photographers, including all-in-one solutions for getting bookings, selling, and creating client galleries, as well as some great photo organization and protection tools.

But the selection of templates is not the biggest – nor does Zenfolio offer the most flexible customization tools. Crucially, the storage on the lower-tier plan isn’t very generous, though it’s adequate for smaller galleries.

You can try Zenfolio for free for 14 days, but before you take the plunge on a paid plan, you might want to read on to discover whether this website builder is the right choice for you.

Zenfolio’s Designs Look Good – All 12 of Them

Zenfolio offers a total of 12 templates – most of which you can use for either single-page or multi-page sites – and 8 preset gallery layouts. For the most part, they are well-designed, with tasteful color combinations, clean lines, and animations that enhance (rather than distract from) your photos.

All templates are mobile-friendly, meaning your work will look good on all kinds of devices, and they are all available on every plan.

Overall, the selection isn’t huge, especially when compared to some of the “big name” builders (Wix, for example, has over 800 templates1). This lack of option is important because the Zenfolio point-and-click editor only provides basic customization tools. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Still, the fact remains that Zenfolio’s templates look good and are explicitly designed with photography in mind. You can rest assured that your photos are in safe hands here.

Designed by Photographers, for Photographers – And It Shows

Zenfolio wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t come with plenty of useful tools for photographers baked-in. Alongside standard features you’d expect from a photography website builder, like photo storage, display tools, social media integrations, and plenty of sharing options, Zenfolio comes with a few pleasant surprises.

Photo Management

You’d expect any photography website builder to have photo upload and management tools. But Zenfolio takes it to the next level with a whole variety of useful, well-thought-out features to help you keep your work organized – and even maximize sales.

From your Zenfolio dashboard, you can upload and organize your photos and videos (you get up to unlimited storage, depending on which Zenfolio plan you choose), create new galleries, add tags to photos, and set permissions:

• Galleries: You can set up new galleries by genre, theme, or event.
• Permissions: You have full control over who gets to see what’s on your website. For instance, you can create open galleries to entice new customers and showcase your work, and password-protected galleries for customers to proof and order. Clients can even add comments to individual photos.
• Tags: You can easily organize your work using tags, which let you search for specific image types and even create new galleries containing only certain types of images.
• Watermarks: This easy-to-use tool lets you add custom, protective watermarks to all your photos.
• People filter: Using face recognition, the People Filter tool lets you sort through all of your photos looking for specific people – great for weddings and events.
• Control downloads: You can set downloads on and off for different galleries or even individual images, as well as restrict sizes for free and prepaid downloads.
• Lightroom Plugin. If you have Adobe Lightroom, you can integrate it with Zenfolio. It makes uploading photos to your site easier, and you can sync changes if you edit any photos.

You can also track client gallery interactions from your Zenfolio dashboard – seeing which photos are client favorites, monitor sharing, and enable proofing and downloading. It’s a great way to step up your business practices and profit from your popular photos.

E-commerce Tools

Rather than just helping display and manage your photos, Zenfolio helps you sell them with a selection of integrated e-commerce tools and partnerships with print labs around the world. Just keep in mind that you need to have a PortfolioPlus or ProSuite plan to get access to e-commerce tools.

Once your online store is set up, Zenfolio’s system takes care of managing orders and collecting payments, while the partner lab handles the order fulfillment and ships directly to your client.

Zenfolio imposes a commerce fee of 7% of your order subtotal, meaning the price before tax and shipping costs. It’s a bit high for premium site builder plans. And that’s in addition to Stripe or PayPal payment processing fees, which are usually about 3% of the total order cost.That is, so long as you don’t mind paying a service fee of 9.9% on sales for order processing.

Not only can you sell digital and print images, but also more than 100 photo products, including gifts like canvas prints and wall art. That said, your options will depend on which partner print labs are operating in your area. In mine, for instance, the variety was limited.

You can create your own price list or use Zenfolio’s suggested pricing structure, based on what other photography businesses are charging for the same kinds of shoots.

Marketing Features

Zenfolio is generous with its marketing features. Every plan allows you to track digital downloads and send personalized email invitations for clients to view private gallery pages. You can even send email invitations that match your site’s design, which helps with branding. The higher tiers can launch email campaigns and manage client lists.

And that’s in addition to decent SEO tools. While I prefer Squarespace’s fully integrated suite of SEO tools1, Zenfolio has enough to cover the basics. You can optimize your pages’ meta descriptions and specify custom meta tags. You can also integrate your account with Google Analytics and other third-party tools.

BookMe Integration

Designed by photographers, BookMe automates booking, scheduling, gallery creation, and even commerce for professional photographers – saving you up to 40 hours a month.

Just be aware that on the first two plans, BookMe is a paid add-on. But for some, it will be worth the cost. You can add BookMe to your website to automate a number of functions:

• Booking and payments: BookMe syncs with your calendar to show your availability, session types, and packages. Clients can book and pay for everything instantly.
• Client galleries: When a client books a package, BookMe automatically creates a client gallery, ready to upload their photos. After the shoot, the client can log in, and proof and select photos to order.
• Fulfillment: When a client makes an order, BookMe instantly redeems, processes, and dropships the products to the client’s door, without you having to lift a finger.

You can alter the BookMe widget’s brand and colors and add it to any website. The easy user interface works well on all devices so that clients can book packages with you on their computers or mobile phones.

So Easy It’s a Beginner’s Dream

I really can’t fault Zenfolio on ease of use. It perseveres every step of the way to make things as easy as possible for you, the photographer.

After you sign up for the free trial, the setup wizard helps you build an outline of your website by choosing a template and then adding images to your first gallery. You’re then taken to the Zenfolio dashboard, where a quick tour will show you how everything works. This introduction left me feeling confident I knew what I was doing.

Whatever you’re working on, the same sidebar menu is always on the left. Gallery management, website editing, SEO, etc, all have their own pages – but you can switch between any of them by clicking the left sidebar. This interface is more centralized than most other builders I’ve used and makes navigation efficient.

Point-and-Click Editor

This feeling of ease and confidence continues as you start customizing your site. When you load up the website builder, you are greeted with a short introductory video – no getting lost here!

The point-and-click editor is relatively simplistic. There are enough tools to customize your website adequately, but you’re never going to get lost in all these features – this isn’t Wix. But there are some advanced features here and there. For example, you can choose whether to display page elements, like text, on mobile devices or not.

Rather than endlessly tweaking individual elements, the design aspect is more about making site-wide changes. So you can pick a background color, an accent color, a font pairing, a button style, and then rearrange and reorder elements.

I felt I could do enough to make my site look like my own, but given the limited overall number of templates, it’s not going to be radically different from all the other Zenfolio websites out there.

Galleries

As you’d expect from a website builder for photographers, Zenfolio makes it super simple to create new galleries, organize your work, and set permissions.

From the “Galleries” tab in your dashboard, you can see and manage the galleries you have created and edit gallery presets – which are settings you can apply to all galleries automatically. There’s also a useful graphic at the bottom that tells you how much storage you have left.

Adding new folders (which is how you store photos on Zenfolio) or galleries (how they display on your website) is as simple as clicking a few buttons. Should anything be unclear, Zenfolio adds little explainers (hover over the ? to see more).

Once your photos are uploaded, more pop-ups explain the process of giving access to clients and guests, and creating collections. It really couldn’t be more simple.

Setting Up E-commerce

Getting your photography shop set up is – you guessed it – easy. There’s a handy three-step list to guide you through the whole process.

First, you need to create a price list. You can create multiple ones for different shoot types. If you’re not sure, Zenfolio can auto-fill your price list based on what other photographers are charging for similar shoot types and products.

Otherwise, you can fill in your price list from scratch. The automated options will create prices for packages and individual products.

You can then assign your price lists to different galleries. For instance, you may want to link your “Portraits” price list to that family photo shoot you did the other week and your “Weddings” price list to the wedding the week before.

Finally, you can connect to Stripe to ensure you get paid. It’s as simple as a few clicks, and then you’re open for business.

Zenfolio’s “Award-Winning” Support Is Helpful, But Not Always There

Zenfolio describes its customer support as “award-winning,” so I expected great things when reaching out to them. The result was so-and-so.

On top of the how-to videos scattered across the Zenfolio interface, there are several different avenues of support, including live chat, email support, and a range of self-help resources.

Agents are available 24/7, in theory, but the live chat is only “live” between the hours of 6am and 6pm, Pacific Time. Any time outside of that window, you submit an email ticket and have to wait for a reply.

I’m not on Pacific Time, so when I loaded up the chat screen to fire off a query, all agents were offline. I sent off my email anyway, not expecting a speedy response. A good six hours later, I received a helpful response (with a useful screenshot) resolving my query.

This isn’t what I’d call a 24/7 service (what if I was having a midnight emergency?), but in the interests of fairness, I decided to hang around a bit to see how responsive the live chat was during the online time window.

At 8.06am PT exactly, I fired off a message about bulk-importing my website content. Less than 1 second later, an agent called Stephanie was writing me a friendly and helpful reply.

I tried again an hour or so later and received a response within 30 seconds. When they’re online, they seem to be pretty on the ball.

My verdict? If you’re on Pacific Time, you’ll most likely have quick and reliable support whenever you need it. Those living elsewhere in the world will have to contend with longer wait times. It’s not ideal – especially in emergency situations – but it’s not bad.

No Free Plan, but Competitive Prices

Rather than a free plan, Zenfolio offers a 14-day free trial and three competitively-priced paid plans: Portfolio, PortfolioPlus, and ProSuite. The main differences between the three are the amount of photo storage offered and the e-commerce tools

The cheapest Portfolio plan comes with 15GB of photo storage (the maximum file size for individual photos across all three plans is 100MB). You get access to all basic tools like website templates, SEO tools, galleries and image finding, the People Filter, security, and social media integrations.

However, if you want to sell your work via Zenfolio, you’ll want to upgrade, as the Portfolio plan has no e-commerce features.

PortfolioPlus includes all of the above, 150GB storage, and some basic e-commerce tools, including prints ordering from OVI in various sizes and frames.

The highest-tier ProSuite plan gets unlimited storage, advance ordering capabilities with print labs, and lets you extend your product range by linking with additional labs. This is the plan for you if you want to make a thriving business from your photography, with a wide variety of product types.

If you want to use the BookMe tool, it comes free with the ProSuite plan. You have to pay extra to use it on the PortfolioPlus and Portfolio plans, making the ProSuite plan an obvious choice if you want to automate business activities.

Considering the features they offer, Zenfolio’s prices appear surprisingly reasonable. However, the limited storage on the first paid plan feels a bit restrictive, considering high-resolution photos take up a lot of storage space.

Pixpa1, for instance, offers fewer features on its lower-tier plans, but all of them come with unlimited storage.

Cancellations & Refunds

It may be super easy to take out a subscription and get your Zenfolio website up and running, but cancelling your membership is not quite so simple. That’s because – unlike some website builders – Zenfolio doesn’t have a dedicated button for doing this buried in your account details.

Instead, you have to fire off an email to customer service so they can trigger the cancellation for you. Or you can find the Cancelling your account article in the support center and click the “Cancellation Request” button.

Note that Zenfolio only offers refunds on annual plans and only within 30 days of signing up or renewing your subscription. If you cancel a monthly subscription, you won’t get your money back. Make sure you cancel your third-party apps, too, and back up your content, as there’s no guarantee you can recover it after you go.

If you’ve only signed up for the free trial and have decided Zenfolio isn’t for you, there’s no need to worry as your free membership will automatically expire at the end of the 14 days. Once your trial ends, your account and photos will remain online for an additional 14 days before being deleted.