As you might have noticed, I added a photos page to this site. It’s something I’d wanted to do for a while, without ever really getting around to it.
I already had a small homemade gallery hosted on another domain, but that meant my photos were scattered across three different places: Instagram, that separate gallery, and my personal site. Centralizing everything here made sense - one place to maintain, one design to take care of.
The real trigger, though, was Instagram. It used to be a nice, minimalist app for sharing photos, until Meta’s acquisition slowly changed everything. Algorithms, ads, short videos everywhere - I put up with it. But the change of profile photo grids’ aspect ratio from square to 4:5 was the last straw - a decision that reframes everyone’s content without offering a real alternative.
I’m lucky enough to be a developer: I can build my own platform instead of putting up with it. I requested an export of all my Instagram data, pulled my old homemade gallery back out, and imported everything onto the site. I use sharp to process the images, along with a compression script that also handles metadata, so I don’t have to worry about file sizes for hosting.
Here are some of my recent photos:
Some of the images suffer a bit in quality, Instagram used to compress quite heavily. I’ll probably swap a few of them for higher quality originals over time, but it’s already a good starting point.
I hope to get into the habit of sharing more regularly now that I finally have my own platform for it.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy my photos!