Publishing Photos

I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these:

Privacy

This is obviously the main thing, but to put up photos online we kinda renounce the notion of privacy. I already settle for owning the platform where they're published, and really there's not much else we can do about it if we want to put them in a public setting. Once we do, we lose control and we can't recover it.

"The files are out there. They've been downloaded. They're down. There's no up anymore."

—Sebastien Lütgert, Steal This Film

Ease of publishing

I use static website generators. 11ty, currently. They result in very lightweight websites with almost no dependencies, which is good for portability and ease of moving them anywhere. But when there are images involved, especially as the main body of content, things change.

With text content I kinda have a process. I developed a lightweight app that reads my local repository and presents me with a simple form to add/edit posts and pages. The app allows me to preview the updated website with the press of a button, and commit and publish the changes with another one.

With photos, we need to add to that the place where the photos will be stored, and how to integrate them with the contextual text around them. The story.

I haven't found a process that's simple enough to keep using it consistently. The current one I use for memories is fine, but it requires me to resize down the photos, and that breaks a fundamental part of the purpose.

One of the ideas I've had recently is to maintain a WordPress (or similar software) instance running locally to help with the generation of the different image sizes and to layout the pages or albums more easily, then generate a static output and publish that to GitHub and Netlify. But that only moves the complexity somewhere else: I need to maintain a local instance of WordPress, which I worked with for 10 years, and I don't know if I want to go back to that place.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Free as in Free Beer

Something important for me right now is that whatever combination of things I use to do these projects should be free. It's not that I don't want to pay, I do pay for a lot of software and cool things, but in this self-publishing world, making all of these things without paying a dime improves the experience for me. I feel subversive. I feel punk.

Anyway, this was just a brain dump while I have my morning coffee. I will probably add to this post while I keep thinking about all these things.

Cheers!