Zenfolio 2023: Innovations, Accolades, and Growth
January 11th, 2024
As we looked back on our 17th year supporting photographers worldwide in creating successful, sustainable businesses, we wanted to begin by sharing some of your accomplishments. In 2023, Zenfolio photographers collectively created 1,677,820 galleries and uploaded 217,019,572 photos to their portfolio websites. You all worked hard this year providing invaluable services to your clients and making your professional dreams come true. We are proud and honored to be part of this journey with you!
While you were busy behind the lens, we were behind the scenes innovating. In our continual efforts to find new ways to streamline and automate photographer workflows and provide a modern, professional portfolio and gallery experience for you and your clients, we added new features and expanded upon others.
From helpful videos to informational blogs, and from exciting new tools in your account to help your business to our stellar customer support teams–our primary goal is to assist in your growth and success. Check out how our efforts manifested last year:
Visual 1st Award for Best Business Potential
Zenfolio publicly debuted our AI Smart Site application at the Visual 1st conference in San Francisco, California. This presentation of the groundbreaking AI website builder for mobile devices and the overwhelmingly positive impact it will have on our existing and new members was recognized with their “Best Business Potential” award.
Your favorite educational content.
In 2023, we created hundreds of blog posts and videos to help you grow your business and utilize the tools in our platform. Here are some of your favorites:
Most read Zenfolio articles:
Sharing photos with clients–the best services and apps.
Delivering images to photography clients can be time-consuming and stressful. We’ve prepared a comprehensive comparison of some of the best services and apps for sharing photos so you can find the best option for your needs.
2023 State of The Photography Industry
The State of the Photography Industry 2023 Report provides insight into industry trends, coping with inflation, how photographers package and market their services, and sentiments about AI.
Tips for using social media to grow your photography business.
Maximize your online reach and attract more clients for your photography business with these valuable tips for using social media. From creating a strong brand identity to maximizing your online presence, these strategies will help grow your business.
Top viewed YouTube content:
Getting Started with Zenfolio: An Introduction to the Interface
How to Create a Price List and Start Selling Products on Zenfolio
Using Zenfolio’s Lightroom Classic Plugin
2023 in reverse: the year in feature releases.
December
New! Custom Layout block.
Custom Layout block is a powerful way to design and organize your portfolio website content.
Now with even greater control to configure multiple columns and rows in a single block, then add images or content to display the way you want–optimized for mobile devices.
Fine-tune your content blocks with text and font styling, spacing of elements, borders and background colors. The options are infinite but the block system is simple.
To make designing easier, use the Suggested Layouts as a creative jumping off point. Our design team has created a number of gorgeous designs to begin customizing your website in incredibly creative ways.
Sitewide Website Search: help guests find photos fast.
Looking to make it easier for your guests to find the photo they are looking for? Website search adds a search icon and box that allows your visitors to search through all the media that are available on your website, folders and galleries. The search will find folder, gallery and file names, metadata and keywords associated with the media.
November
3D mug preview.
Mugs are already a hot selling item, but sometimes it’s really hard to imagine what the photo on the mug will look like with a flat preview. We want to help you sell more mugs by giving your clients a superior shopping experience. Introducing the new 3D Mug preview.
Coupons for packages.
Coupons and discounts are fantastic ways to encourage your customers to order more photo prints and products. We’ve made coupons even better by adding Coupons for Packages. Now you can discount your packages to give additional incentives to purchase.
October
Folders – More customization. More security.
Custom Folder Cover Photo: now you have greater control to use an image from galleries or upload a custom image.
Password Protection: now you can add a password to website folders to control image access with an extra layer of security.
Gallery Access Settings: revamped and simplified
No more confusion. We completely revamped the Gallery Access Settings for galleries making it much easier to choose the right settings for your galleries and greatly reduce issues with clients not being able to view their photos.
Coupons & Campaigns Page: enhanced.
Coupons are a very powerful way to sell more photo prints and products. But maybe you don’t always have the time to implement them. That’s why we built Campaigns. It’s easy to send prebuilt coupons and campaigns created for the most popular seasons of the year. Simply opt in and we’ll do the rest.
September
New! One Vision Imaging photo gift products.
New Products! Enhance your price list and give clients more options to order their photos on keychains, buttons and photo mugs.
Contact Management enhancements.
Streamlined Manual Contact Addition – now fewer clicks are required to manually add contacts to a gallery. First and last names are now optional for more flexibility.
Table-Based Gallery Contacts – now the contact list appears in a structured table format, taking up much less screen space. You can more easily sort by table headers and perform bulk actions like updating and removing contacts.
“Add from Existing” Feature Enhanced – now you can more efficiently add bulk contacts to a gallery from an existing contact list.
Now include VAT in your selling prices.
New updates improve VAT reporting, customer receipts and regional control.
July
Add Custom Code Blocks to Your Site
You can now add a Custom code block to your website that supports HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
August
New! Mpix photo gift products.
New Products! Enhance your price list and give clients more options to order their photos on photo mugs, magnets, buttons and keychains.
June
New! FAQ Block
Your clients have questions and we are excited to announce we’ve made it easier for you to answer those questions before they’re even asked.
Our new FAQ Block has three different layout options of beautifully designed FAQs to make your site look even more professional.
Your Clients Can Now Download 4K Video
You now have the ability to allow your clients to download 4K videos. Simply choose Original as the download resolution.
Enhancements to the SEO Modal
Zenfolio has powerful SEO capability embedded in the core of our website builder to help drive more traffic to your site. The most recent changes to the modal make it much easier to access and update.
The name of the page is now shown at the top of the SEO modal to maintain context with a link to our SEO help article. You can now access the SEO modal of another page even if you don’t have the page selected from the left hand navigation and it will navigate you over to that page and open the SEO modal. We’ve added more space for typing alt text in the modal as well.
Footer Customization
You can now remove the Business Name, Address, and Phone Number from the footer by simply leaving the fields blank.
Additionally, we’ve added a new custom line for your footer to provide you with the ability to add custom text.
May
New! PayPal is now available.
We are thrilled to announce that PortfolioPlus and ProSuite subscribers can now add PayPal as a choice for processing client payments. Learn more.
Try out our new transparent navigation.
We are excited to provide our subscribers with a transparent navigation option. This top requested feature can be set to varying opacity. In the Website Editor, click on the Navigation Block to enable this setting.
March
ProSuite now offers unlimited storage and 4K video – read our PetaPixel review!
Never worry about storage again and impress your clients with the highest quality video. “There are few platforms that come close to offering this many services for at most $40 a month.” Jason Scheider, PetaPixel Editor-in-Chief READ FULL REVIEW
Selling enhancement – Quick Shop.
Our Quick Shop feature which allows customers to purchase the most popular items in just one click can now be added to customer favorites, making it easier to access.
February
Create coupons without an expiration date.
Coupons are a fantastic tool to help you boost sales. Zenfolio coupons can now be created without an expiration date. When starting a new promotional campaign, you can activate the coupon code to start immediately, or you can pre-schedule coupons so they go live on a specified date.
Easily share direct links to folders.
You can now simply copy and share a direct link to a folder. Choose Copy Direct Link under the folder menu. Your new folder page will contain the same layout and design as your current folders on your website.
January
Knowledge is power. Connect Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for an in-depth view of your website.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful tool that helps you understand and improve your website traffic performance. You can now add GA4 to your website without the need to code. All you need is to copy the Measurement ID from your Google account.
- Once you have the ID, log in to your Zenfolio account.
- Go to website settings and expand Tracking & Analytics.
- Paste the ID in the Google Measurement ID field and save.
Once you save the changes, the ID code will be embedded on each page of your website. This is a quick way for your business to implement Google Analytics to get better visibility into how your site is performing. If you need step-by-step guidance on connecting GA4, read our help article.
Schedule your client emails in advance.
If you’re a ProSuite subscriber, you can now schedule your client emails in advance. To create a scheduled email, head over to where you normally send a gallery email, and use the new schedule email button. Want to view or edit your scheduled emails? Click on the CRM icon and then click on the scheduled emails tab.
Customize coupon banner images.
Coupon banners are a great way to promote special offers or sales. You can now customize the look and feel of the coupon banners by using your own preferred imagery. This applies to both desktop and mobile banners.
And that’s not all…
2023 was bursting with helpful content and new accomplishments–too many to cover here! Visit our release notes and blog to see what you missed, and stay tuned on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, TikTok or Pinterest to keep up with what’s coming next.
