Zenfolio Photo Galleries
My Zenfolio galleries.
To consolidate the various web sites that I list my photographs for sale on, and hopefully sell more, I set up an account with Zenfolio and created galleries of all my different styles of work. Of all the web sites that you can sell your photographic prints from, Zenfolio is one of the few I’ve found that lets you do self fulfillment. That means selling photographic prints that I’ve made instead of depending on one of their partner labs for printing. Now, if someone is interested in purchasing any of my photographs, they will be exposed to all the different styles of work that I do. Having multiple galleries in one location might help me liquidate some of my garage full of older prints that I don’t sell anymore. If you have a lot of digital photos and want to print them, then a photobook is the best option. You can have them printed online and sent to your address using https://printedmemories.com. Photobooks are great at preserving your memories in photos.
Preparing the images
I located all the master files of the images I wanted to upload to Zenfolio. Then I created a Photoshop Droplet that automatically resized everything to 2048 pixels long dimension, which looks great at any monitor resolution or mobile device. I always add an embedded copyright to images I upload to the web. Instead of doing it myself, I created a copyright file and let Zenfolio embed it in the images. That gives me the option of trying different styles of copyright and choosing one that works best with all my images.
Preparing my old web sites
The next step was going through all the pages of images for sale on my various web sites and link all purchasing information, including sizes and prices, to my Zenfolio galleries.
Personal work
Besides the different bodies of work I’ve sold over the years at art shows, I also created galleries of personal work and Custom Business Signs, like my puppy pictures and my visitors to my house gallery. It’s a good way to show a more complete portfolio. And in the future, I’ll probably be adding some family pictures. There’s even an option to password protect galleries.
Selling
Zenfolio adds on a percentage which gets built in to my price list, and their shipping structure is confusing, letting customers choose shipping methods. In order to simplify the process, I’ve built in free shipping for all orders and listed it as the only shipping option, and then tweaked my pricing so that the price with the Zenfolio built in percentage looks reasonable. After all, for my older work, I’m looking to liquidate.
Promotion
Promotion is a different story. For any web site or photo gallery to work, interested people need to find it, especially if you want to make sales. When I was doing art shows on a regular basis it was easy because there was a good chance I might make sales after the show. I’m using my LarryBerman.com domain name as my Zenfolio site. It’s much easier to give someone my own name instead of my sign up domain name of bermanart.zenfolio.com. It’s shorter and easier to add to my business cards and I’ve included it in my e-mail signature.
Whether it will work or not is an unknown but I think it’s worth a try. I’ve applied to a few shows this year and so far have gotten wait listed to three big shows, Belleville, Long’s Park and Columbus, and have gotten accepted to Cain Park. So at least one show will give me a chance to promote my new web gallery.
Mobile App
Zenfolio also has a great ipad/iphone app that lets you show your pictures easily on those devices.
If you find Zenfolio as a possible solution to your print sales, please use my referral code Q13-6ZJ-6QZ so I get credit for referring you. Another photographer recommended Zenfolio to me and answered a lot of my initial questions, so I used his referral code when I signed up. And after checking out my Zenfolio galleries, if you can offer any suggestions, please do.
My goal is not to have a dumpster filled with old inventory
