Zenfolio Admits That It Had a Rough Decade
Once an industry leader in the photography website space, Zenfolio has had a rough time in recent years. Photographers have lamented the company’s steady decline, frequent back-end changes, high prices, and user-unfriendly changes. While the company continues to improve its product offering and platform, it acknowledges some of its missteps.
Zenfolio was founded in 2005 by a group of photographers who believed there was a need for a photography-first website solution. They were right, and Zenfolio quickly amassed a significant following and user base when the platform officially launched in early 2006. E-commerce features arrived the following year, as did a printing integration with Mpix.
The company expanded into the United Kingdom and Europe a couple of years later, which in turn helped spur continued growth throughout the early 2010s. The company introduced new plans, was among the first platforms of its kind to support HD video hosting, and added blog tools to the mix.
With this sort of success, it should come as little surprise that Zenfolio attracted the attention of larger companies and became an acquisition target. Art.com purchased Zenfolio in 2013, which instigated additional growth along with new features for high-volume photographers and large galleries.
As Zenfolio and its users found out, this growth — photographers had created more than 20 million galleries on Zenfolio by this point — came with challenges. Zenfolio’s back-end system could not handle the weekly influx of millions of user images and the growing catalog of over four billion photos.
“Technical issues began to surface as the system came under pressure from heavier usage and constraints around its ability to scale,” a Zenfolio spokesperson tells PetaPixel.
In late 2017, Zenfolio changed hands again, scooped up by Centre Lane Partners, a private equity company. Centre Lane Partners installed a new management team in mid-2018 and began a full review of Zenfolio’s platform and business strategy.
At this point, Zenfolio’s new owners decided that, alongside trying to stabilize the existing “Classic” platform, the company should also develop an entirely new platform from the ground up. This would be a massive undertaking that would take years.
The first obvious fruit of the labor, NextZen, launched in late 2020. This initial platform had just one plan at launch, one designed for photography portfolios. Plans with e-commerce features followed in 2021.
Unfortunately, as longtime Zenfolio customers know firsthand and Zenfolio admits now, the focus on the next-generation platforms came at the cost of the “Classic” Zenfolio experience many still wanted to use.
“Internal Zenfolio resources focused heavily on the ongoing development of NextZen and moving all 20 petabytes of Classic member data to the Cloud. As a result, attention and the effectiveness of communication with customers using the Classic Zenfolio platform suffered,” the company says.
Further, the Classic Archive tool, which was introduced in August 2023 and intended to curtail increased cloud storage costs, had a shaky rollout. Photographers were very upset about how the transition was handled, including some who lost access to their images and had popular galleries archived. Zenfolio admits it acknowledged its communication failures too late.
Zenfolio Classic still exists, although Zenfolio’s CEO, John Loughlin, still emphasizes NextZen’s importance today and moving forward.
“Over the past two decades, Zenfolio has grown from a small start-up with a bold vision to serve photographers through simple websites to a multi-brand company with powerful platforms used by photographers across the globe. Its history has been marked by periods of sustained innovation, significant growth, occasional and regrettable missteps, but always by a commitment to support and invest in the photography community and industry,” the company concludes.
Regaining the trust of its longtime users, both those who have stuck around — Zenfolio says it has tens of thousands of users across Classic and NextZen platforms — and those who have already left, will be challenging.
“I joined Zenfolio on April 3, 2008… it became slower over the years, but still responsive enough for me… until this year,” a photographer wrote on Reddit last year. The user lamented Zenfolio’s lackluster support, worsening user experience, and, worst yet, missing photos.
One commenter agreed with the original post, saying they had canceled their account after using Zenfolio for 12 years. Another photographer left the platform after a decade.
Most users have taken particular issue with archive and gallery visibility issues, including one who said earlier this year that Zenfolio’s archiving implementation harmed their business and could cost them hundreds of dollars per year to rectify.
“This has been a long time coming but their latest transition to auto-archiving and limiting the number of active galleries is too much,” another photographer posted.
“I liked Zenfolio and hate to leave a company that’s worked so well for me for so long but I don’t think it’s working for me anymore with these new changes in place,” they concluded.
Zenfolio hopes to avoid this exact situation moving forward, as it says it is committed to restoring trust, improving communication, and, hopefully, delivering the features and performance that attracted so many photographers to the platform during its first decade. Zenfolio still offers many impressive templates and features for photographers, so the potential for a return to form is there, whether someone wants to have a sleek, modern online portfolio or sell directly to clients.
“Today, Zenfolio continues to build tools for photographers to grow and succeed, while balancing the lessons of the past with the needs of an ever-changing industry,” the company explains.
Image credits: Zenfolio
