How to Migrate From Zenfolio

Zenfolio's help centre is direct about this. Bulk download is a per-gallery operation. In Zenfolio's words, "bulk downloads must be completed by the Gallery." The cancellation article says the same thing from the other side: "It is not possible to download all content at one time."

So there is no button that hands you your account. There is no API export, no FTP dump, and no archive file of everything. You work through your galleries one at a time. A studio with 40 galleries is doing 40 passes, and a studio with 400 is doing something that needs a spreadsheet and a few evenings.

Within a gallery, selecting multiple images gives you a zip file that you then decompress. Single images come down through the Photo Actions menu, the photo dropdown menu, or the Details column. That is the documented set of routes out.

Plan for it rather than fighting it. Build a list of every gallery with its client name, its year, and whether it still matters. Most studios discover that a third of their galleries are sessions nobody has opened in three years, and those do not need a careful export at all. They need a decision.

Zenfolio's plans page is geo-localized. The figures below were served in Canadian dollars to a Canadian visitor on 21 September 2026. A reader in the United States or Europe will see different numbers on the same page, so treat this as the shape of the pricing rather than the price you will be quoted.

The subscription is not the whole cost if you sell through Zenfolio. Zenfolio charges a 7 percent commerce service fee on every order, at all plan levels, calculated on the total selling price minus any discounts you provided and excluding shipping and sales tax. Payment processing is charged separately on top of that, at rates Zenfolio publishes as varying by country.

Price that 7 percent out before you decide anything. If you have a store switched on and take two orders a year, you are paying platform rent for a feature you are not using.

This is the part that surprises people mid-migration. Zenfolio automatically archives galleries whose last-modified date is older than 14 months. Zenfolio states the tool is "integrated into all Classic Zenfolio accounts."

An archived gallery is temporarily inaccessible to clients and visitors, showing placeholder thumbnails instead of your photos. You restore it, and Zenfolio documents that restoration takes 12 to 24 hours. The restored gallery keeps its URL and its settings, but the photos get new photo IDs. Zenfolio notes that new IDs can break existing favorites and direct image links.

Three consequences for a migration:

• Your oldest galleries are the slowest to export. Each one needs a restore request and up to a day of waiting before you can download anything. Request the restores in a batch on day one, then work on recent galleries while they process.
• Old direct image links are already fragile. If you have blog posts or emails pointing at individual Zenfolio image URLs, a restore can break them independently of anything you do. Plan to re-point them rather than to preserve them.
• The never-archive flag is limited. Zenfolio lets you flag up to 20 galleries never to archive, and sells a paid Archive Exclusion add-on for a full opt-out. Twenty is a small number for a working studio, which is itself a reason some photographers start looking.

Separately from the archive tool, Zenfolio galleries do not expire by default. Expiry is an optional per-gallery setting, and when a gallery reaches its expiration date Zenfolio changes its Access Control setting to Private, after which only the photographer can see it. Check whether past you switched that on before you assume a gallery is gone.

Zenfolio uses "cancel" and "delete" interchangeably in its own documentation. Cancelling terminates future renewals. Your content stays accessible until the account's expiration date. Once the account is closed, Zenfolio states that "all access to the account is disabled," and content is deleted permanently once the account reaches a permanently closed state.

Zenfolio does not publish a fixed retention window after closure. Recovering content shortly after closure means contacting support and hoping. Zenfolio's own advice is unambiguous: "It is highly recommend that you keep backup storage of your content outside of Zenfolio."

So the order is: export everything you want, rebuild what needs rebuilding, tell clients where their gallery now lives, and only then cancel. Cancelling first to save one month of subscription is how a migration turns into a loss. Your remaining paid term is the working window for the whole move, and it is cheaper than the alternative.

Nothing here is clever. It is a checklist, and the value is in doing it in this order.

• 1. Inventory. List every Zenfolio gallery: client, date, whether it is archived, whether the client still opens it, whether it has an expiry setting. Mark each one keep, rebuild, or let go.
• 2. Batch your restore requests. Every gallery older than 14 months that you marked keep goes in on day one, because each restore takes 12 to 24 hours.
• 3. Pull the files from your own drives, not from Zenfolio. This is the step most guides get wrong. Your masters are on your own storage. A platform download is a fallback for the sessions whose originals you have genuinely lost, not the primary source. Re-uploading platform copies degrades your archive for no reason.
• 4. Export the gaps, gallery by gallery. For the sessions you cannot find locally, use Zenfolio's per-gallery bulk download, decompress each zip, and file it into your own folder structure immediately so you never have to repeat the pass.
• 5. Rebuild the galleries that are still live. Active clients first, dormant archives last. A gallery nobody has opened since 2021 can be rebuilt slowly or not at all.
• 6. Send new links, then cancel. Give clients a short note with the new address, leave both up for a few weeks if your billing period allows it, then close the Zenfolio account.

clientgallery.io has a whole-account import, and it reads Pixieset only. It works by reading a Pixieset account through the dashboard endpoints Pixieset's own web app already uses, which is possible because those endpoints exist. Zenfolio has no equivalent path, so there is nothing to build against.

A Zenfolio move is therefore a manual download and re-upload. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. The good news is that the manual path is the better path anyway, because your masters should come off your own drives rather than out of any platform, and no import tool can do that for you.

One plan, 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, which works out to 8.33 a month annually. There are no storage tiers to choose between, no per-gallery fees, and no commission on anything, because there is no print store to take a commission from.

Uploaded photos are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of roughly 0.6 MB each, sized for fast viewing on a phone. That is the trade that keeps the price flat: clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs and does not warehouse RAW files or master video. Your originals stay where they belong, which is on your own storage and your own backups.

The rest of what a studio leaving Zenfolio usually cares about: galleries carry your branding with no platform branding anywhere on client-facing pages, they sit on your own subdomain, Face Search is included and runs entirely in the guest's browser without the selfie ever being uploaded, and there is a two-way Lightroom Classic plugin that publishes proofs from your catalog and pulls client picks back into it. Sub-galleries let you organize a long shoot on the studio side while the client still sees one scrolling page with a jump-to bar at the top.

One thing to know before you sign up: there is no seat model. No multi-user accounts, no roles, no separate login for an assistant. A two-person studio shares one account. If that is a dealbreaker, it is better to know now than in month three.

A migration guide that cannot name the case for staying is an advertisement. Here is the case.

If you sell prints and products through Zenfolio's commerce and you want a website and a store inside one subscription, stay. clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs and delivery galleries. It does not run a print store, it does not process orders, and it will not replace a storefront you are actively selling through. Paying 7 percent on orders you are genuinely making is a cost of doing business, not a leak.

If video is a real part of what you deliver, stay. Zenfolio's Advanced plan includes 150 GB of video storage, which the plans page describes as roughly 10 hours of 4K. clientgallery.io does not host video at all.

The studios who should move are the ones paying for a storefront they never use, fighting the archive tool on galleries they still want live, or wanting their price to stop scaling with how much work they did this year. If that is you, the move is a few evenings of gallery-by-gallery work and then it is done.

• Zenfolio, Plans and Pricing (plan names, monthly and annual rates in Canadian dollars, storage and photo capacities, video capacity). https://zenfolio.com/plans-pricing/ Fetched 21 September 2026.
• Zenfolio Support, How the Service Fees are Calculated (7 percent commerce service fee at all plan levels, calculation basis, separate payment processing). https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/7432680665619-How-the-Service-Fees-are-Calculated Article updated 10 July 2026, read 21 September 2026.
• Zenfolio Support, Downloading Back Original Uploaded Photos and Videos (bulk download is per gallery, multi-select downloads arrive as a zip, single-image routes). https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/7432727166867-Downloading-Back-Original-Uploaded-Photos-and-Videos Article updated 30 April 2024, read 21 September 2026.
• Zenfolio Support, Cancelling or Deleting your Zenfolio Account (cancel and delete used interchangeably, access until the expiration date, permanent deletion once closed, the backup recommendation, and the statement that it is not possible to download all content at one time). https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/7432726227859-Cancelling-or-Deleting-your-Zenfolio-Account Article updated 11 July 2025, read 21 September 2026.
• Zenfolio Support, Archive Tool FAQ (automatic archiving after 14 months without modification, placeholder thumbnails, 12 to 24 hour restores, new photo IDs breaking favorites and direct links, the 20-gallery never-archive flag, the paid Archive Exclusion add-on). https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/17382780697491-Archive-Tool-FAQ Article updated 15 April 2025, read 21 September 2026.
• Zenfolio Support, Setting an Expiration Date for Galleries (expiry is optional and per gallery, an expired gallery switches to Private and only the photographer sees it). https://support.zenfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/7432734798611-Setting-an-Expiration-Date-for-Galleries Article updated 23 April 2024, read 21 September 2026.

clientgallery.io figures on this page (price, fair-use ceilings, ZIP delivery behaviour, included features) come from the product itself and are current as of 21 September 2026.