Online Proofing/Ordering for clients

<p>I have been shooting weddings for a few years now and have never had a client ask to have an online gallery so that family members could order prints. I typically just give them all the images on DVD and make any additional prints on my own.<br>

BUT someone has finally asked me to have such a gallery and I am left questioning which site to go with and how much additional I should charge the client to set that up.<br>

I have been looking at zenfolio.com, digiproofs.com, and imagequix.com all of which seem to be pretty legit.<br>

So my questions for anyone... Do you use any of these? How do you like it? How do your clients like it? And what do you build into your costs to set up this service for each client?</p>

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<p>I don't know a lot about the other two services you mentioned, but I can vouch for Zenfolio. I don't use them myself any more, but I did use them for years and it's a good service. It has excellent tools for organizing and managing images. It makes it easy to protect your photos by controlling the maximum image size, by preventing right-click & download, and by giving you easy tools for watermarking images if you wish to. Its partnership with Mpix (the back end printing service) works easily and really, really well. Mpix makes good prints, and Zenfolio lets you set your own prices. If you don't upload high-res print-ready files in the first place (I didn't), Zenfolio will alert you when a print is ordered and you can replace the online image with one suitable for printing. And yes, they make it easy to create private galleries for showing proofs to clients, which is one of the main things I did with my Zenfolio account. They've introduced some new features in the last six months: got rid of flash and gone to HTML5, blogging, support for video, and more. And the price is just about the best you'll see for this combination of features.</p>

<p>By the way, SmugMug (which I used for a while, too, several years ago) is similar to Zenfolio in its general feature set and might be worth giving a try, too. You can get a free trial account with both services.</p>

<p>Will</p>

There's lots of them. I'm using printroom.com.

<p>I would recommend Zenfolio for the price/value and general service.</p>

<p>MARIO<br>

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<p>I like smugmug. The pro version is what you need if you want to set your own pricing. It runs $150/year so you really need to use it for more than 1 wedding. There are less expensive alternatives but I like control over pricing and labs. Bay Photo also has a hosting service, but remember with all of these types you need to have the final edit on the site because they get the picture they order as is.</p>

<p>I use Exposure Manager. They don't print their logos on the back of the prints or products, and you make your galleries a subdomain of your site (good for SEO).</p>