Service Update
October 25, 2024
Average time to restore an individual gallery from Archive: 12 hours
Frequently Asked Questions
The Archive is cold storage for your galleries that are 14+ months old. Archiving only applies to galleries that were last modified by you (the photographer) more than 14 months ago – meaning older shoots. When galleries are moved to Archive, they are stored in an inactive state. An Archived gallery is not immediately accessible, but any and all galleries can be made available again if either you (or your client/gallery visitor) requests to restore the galleries to an active state.
Your images are safe, accessible and have not been deleted. They are housed with cloud service providers, such as IBM, Microsoft and Amazon. As the account holder, you are readily able to restore and manage galleries from the Archive tool. To simplify this process, the tool is built with an intuitive search function. You can find galleries by the gallery name, group name, and even keywords
Archived Galleries are available within your Zenfolio account in the area called Archive, you can find this in the Photos drop down menu in your Edit View, as well as linked via an icon in your Organizer section. Restoring is simple: just click on a gallery, navigate to the information panel on the right hand side, and then click the option to restore.
Galleries actively moving to your Archive are visible until the process is completed. During this time some images may appear as a loading symbol, as those have completed the transfer. However, it’s only when all images are moved that the gallery will appear in the Archive section where they can be Restored. Since you are likely visiting these galleries because you wish to access them, we’ve put in place an action to automatically trigger their retrieval as soon as you attempt to download the full gallery! You will then see a link pop-up to the Retrieval page showing the status of their restoration.
If the gallery was public, or the link was given to clients/visitors, they can navigate to the link and be brought to a landing page offering them the option to Restore the gallery and enter their email address to be notified as soon as it’s ready!
Once the gallery is restored, favorites selections will be available once again. Additionally we have added a one-click Restore to your favorites lists.
Because Archiving is a platform-wide change that affects all Classic accounts, presently there is not an ability to opt-out. However, you can choose up to 20 galleries that will never be moved to the archived state through your gallery settings.
For our full Archive Guide, please follow this support link:
https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/18737627866131
In most cases, galleries and images will be restored without any manual intervention from Customer Support. If a gallery is taking longer than 24 hours to restore, or if you are receiving an error message in an active gallery, please reach out. Some automation solutions have been put in place for stuck retrievals. If a gallery contains photos that are not readily available, the automated solution may ask for an email address to deliver photos to you (or to the client requesting the photos) once the photo retrieval has completed. But please contact us directly if you see any additional delays longer than 24 hours.
When contacting support, please include the following information. This will help our team assist you more efficiently. We kindly request that you prioritize your requests for gallery restores to those that are urgently needed or appear to be stuck.
Via Chat: Provide the exact name of the gallery(s) along with your name and email for follow-up.
Via Email: In the body of your email, please copy and paste the exact name of the gallery(s) and provide a short description of the concern. i.e. gallery restoring more than 24 hours, gallery archiving more than 24 hours, error during archive, etc.
Archiving was introduced to respond to several pressing needs at once:
- In recent years, data transfer and active commercial storage through cloud storage providers have surged to nearly four times their historical rates. Our goal is to ensure that data storage remains sustainable, your images are safely kept, and subscription costs are lower.
- To improve the speed and responsiveness of the platform by separating never or infrequently-used images from those that are regularly accessed. These changes also strengthen the security of the billions of images you’ve entrusted us with given we have moved all customer photos and data to a state-of-the-art cloud-based environment. This enhances the overall performance of the platform, increases the scalability, and strengthens the data security of our services going forward.
While we sent many emails and dashboard notifications about this, not all of our photographers received these. We realize this change may have caught you unaware.