14 days with SmugMug and Zenfolio

Long time DC member Jibz writes a mini-review of SmugMug and Flickr:

"We recently got a digital video camera, so I was looking for a convenient place to make our photos and videos available to friends and family. This led to a trial of SmugMug and Zenfolio, and I thought I would share my experiences with my fellow DonationCoders.

I have been using Flickr as a place to put photos for friends and family in the past, and I have been quite happy with the way their service works. I had a pro account for a year, but when it expired, I didn't really feel there was a big need to renew it. Flickr only allows you to upload very short videos, so I had to find a different solution -- I considered using YouTube for videos, but having to use hidden links as security would mean I had to send a bunch of new links every time I uploaded something. It would simply be more convenient to have both photos and videos in one place.

I had heard a lot of good things about SmugMug over the years, especially people always praise their zealous support -- I had an image of a company run by geeks who cared about what they did, which seemed like a good fit .

While looking through some reviews of SmugMug I found out about Zenfolio (and a couple of other sites, but I was aiming for a place with both video and photo support), which I had not heard of before, but I got the impression it was "the other site" in that segment.

So, I signed up for a 14 day trial of both to see how I would get along with them..