I've been using pbase.com to share my photos for years and am thinking of switching to zenfolio. I know I've seen numerous links here in trip reports to that site so I was hoping some of you who use it could share your thoughts. Especially re ease of uploading batches of photos. Also, is there the ability to have rather extensive captions - not just a couple words? I'm not finding the info I want when I google zenfolio reviews - everyone just says it's great and easy to use with no specifics. Thanks

I switched from pbase to zenfolio a few years ago and am mostly happy with it. I switched because zenfolio seemed more modern and customizable, and at the time pbase was having a lot of outages.

There was a good community on pbase that does not exist on zenfolio, forums, contests, etc. You lose that if that is important to you.

The customization of zenfolio can be straightforward if you use one of their pre-existing templates, or rather complicated if you decide to customize one of those. In either case there is a bit of a learning curve.

If you look at their support forums you'll find lots of people complaining, some are valid complaints others are just rants, IMHO. For example some time ago people wanted zenfolio to support uploaded RAW images. They added that feature, then the site slowed down, now those people complain. But the speed has improved over time.

Uploading batches of photos is easy, and yes you can have extensive captions. You can customize where the captions go, how they are visible, fonts, colors, all kinds of stuff.

There was a free utility I used to transfer all of my existing pbase galleries over to zenfolio, including titles, captions, etc. It did a pretty good job, but screwed up some of the punctuation. I don't remember the name of it,

If you use Lightroom there is an addon that lets you export directly from Lightroom to zenfolio, which is pretty nice.

Guess it could depend on why you are considering the switch, why is pbase no longer working for you? Overall zenfolio is not perfect (what is?) but I haven't found anything better for my minor needs, basically sharing with friends and occasionally trying to bore Fodorites.

I've been using zenfolio for probably about eight years now (or whenever I got tired of webshots, before it died). I probably don't use it to its full potential (many use it to sell photos), but I have found it easy to use and to upload batches of photos, move photos between albums, etc. They've added more display options for customizing pages in the last couple of years. As noted above, there are options for using and displaying captions. There is now a blog function as well. I haven't tried it out but am planning to experiment before our next trip.

They offer a free trial, so that might be a good way to see how it works for you and the various display capabilities.

If you have your own website, or your provider offers web space you could consider Koken, which is easy to use, customisable, has a blog option and is free for the basic templates.

Thanks for the replies.

Nelson - Just the kind of info I was looking for.

Ms Go - I think your site is onelittleworld? If so that's one of the ones I was looking at that has me motivated to move to zenfolio, glad to hear you like it.


I probably will switch over, for one thing pbase is now more expensive for the amount of photos I have on it than zenfolio will be and it does look like zenfolio has more options to customize things. And I did see that there was a blog function - that might be a good place to put trip reports, especially if Fodor's changes things on this forum which they keep threatening to do. Unfortunately I don't have my own site.

The blog is easy to use and looks nice. I tried it a couple of times, but decided blogging wasn't for me. Several friends said it was really enjoyable to read.

But I paid 'em to say that.

Hi, yes ours is onelittleworld. I tried out the blog function for the first time--a very quick (and not very interesting) effort just to see if it might work for future trip reports and such. Basically, you publish the photos as normal in a gallery, and then when preparing a blog post, you can just go select certain photos to include. So that part is pretty easy. It took a little experimenting to figure out how to size photos and get two to appear side by side, but that became quicker as I went along. I also didn't play around with fonts, etc. I'm sure there is much more I could do with it, but it seems like something I might try to use in the future.

http://onelittleworld.zenfolio.com/b...s-across-paris

I think the blog looks great. You did a good job. I think I will switch over. Don't really look forward to the learning curve but it looks like it will be worth it. Thanks for sharing your experience.

If you do not need a running commentary as in onelittleworld, but wish to comment on the pictures themselves, you could use flickr. The albums can be grouped and pictures in the albums can be seen one by one as here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca...7623717915043/
which the viewer can see as a slide show by toggling on the upper right, but with no information.

or as a slide show that you set up when referring to the albums:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca...717915043/show
which can be seen with titles and other info by clicking on "show info"

Just wanted to thank you guys for your replies. I did switch to zenfolio and so far I like it alot. Learning curve was not bad and moving the photos didn't take that long. Now I need to do captions since those didn't move along with the photos - but it gives me a chance to re-visit all the places I've been. I still need to tweak the customization of each gallery. I will probably try out the blog function after my upcoming trip to Italy.

Thanks again - http://andiamo.zenfolio.com/

Isabel, love your gorgeous pics.

Isabel, loved your pictures which I looked at after catching your link in another post.

Ms Go I checked out your link and enjoyed your walk around Paris with narrative and pictures. Some of the pictures had no captions, but a white tag appeared in the upper right corner with the words "pin it". What does pin it mean?

Hi irishface, the "pin it" tag is for Pintrest, which I don't really use. There must be some setting in zenfolio that allows you to include that tag (I know you can include tags for other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which allows someone to share albums or individual photos via those sites).

Isabel, your site looks great and glad the learning curve wasn't too difficult. I still have some tweaking to do on older albums and obviously captions to add to a lot of photos. We just returned from New Zealand, and I'm going to try using the blog function for that--but first I have to get through lots of photos.