I’ve been thinking a lot about photographs lately and how to present them on my website. A few friends are too, each from different angles.
Jeremy is repatriating his photos from Instagram, while Tantek is exploring the idea of using Flickr as a CDN, and I’ve been expanding my approach to responsive images to also include RSS feed readers.
Tantek and Jeremy are going to be at IndieWebCamp in Berlin and it starts in just a few hours. I won’t be able to attend all of it remotely because of the time difference, so I’m going to pitch in with a few thoughts in advance.
I thought it would be helpful to take stock of what’s already out there and document common patterns with live examples. Here are the main ways I’ve seen people showcase their pics:
- Notes
- Photoessays
- Albums
Plus a few ways that are less common but very intriguing, like Series and Stories.
Most Common Types
1. Photo notes are posts of a single image. Each picture is timestamped with its own URL.
Here’s some neat examples:
2. Photo essays are blog posts that have multiple images, alternating between pictures and a textual narrative that weaves it all together.
This is probably the most popular type. Winnie Lim has beautiful examples of photo essays that are travelogues documenting a trip, like this recent one to South Korea.
3. Photo albums are collections of multiple images, typically in a grid format with minimal or no text at the album level, optionally with a caption or more info at the individual photo level.
Naz Hamid recently added a Photos section to his site with a few starter albums, like this cool one of his New York trip.
Less Frequent Techniques
There’s a few other interesting ways to present images that I don’t see around as much but that are great food for thought.
Series:
Series are albums grouped together into a sequential set. Stammy does this at photos.paulstamatiou.com and they’re straight up gorgeous.
Looking at them again now, I can see why the idea stuck in my head. It’s such an obvious yet clever way of showing all the albums while grouping together the related ones.
I love how the series of three albums from his Africa trip not only have their own landing page, but also how the series sits directly below the album for Amsterdam and above the Caymans on the main photos page, all in a natural way that’s easy to distinguish.
So clean. None of the nonsense I usually see in Apple Photos about collections vs albums.
I’m definitely going to steal this idea for grouping together related albums, like when I have ton of photos from a big multi-night bicycling trip. In fact it might also be a great idea for grouping together blog posts of similar topics, like chapters in a book. Very thought-provoking.
Stories:
Stories are slideshows with a mixture of photos and short-form videos, as well as sometimes only text, usually in a vertical format. They can be the temporary kind that disappear after 24 hours or can stay up permanently.
Muan pioneered the concept of showing stories on the web and they have super fun examples on their home page.
What’s nice about this open web version of a story is that each photo or video in the slideshow has their own permalink, like this one of a bottle of maple syrup, which make them so frictionless to share. It’d be nice to also have a permalink for the larger story the photo is in so you could get the context, but it’s easy enough to browse their home page for more examples. And frankly it’s really fun to hop between stories.
Even more impressively, they also created a helpful spec for stories to encourage others to do the same. Joe Crawford used this same spec to create a “reels” section of his site for vertical videos and the related JSON feed.
There’s something really interesting about the format of vertical photos and videos that makes it especially relevant in the mobile era, even if it hasn’t broken out of Instagram jail yet and spread to the open web in large numbers. I tried to emulate a similar treatment by including both photos and vertical videos in my blog post about getting stuck in the mud on a training ride.
The disappearing kind has a bad reputation as engagement bait for addictive behaviors on Instagram and yes, there are real dangers of getting sucked into perfomative behavior that’s damaging for self-worth and mental health.
But I also find that there’s also a freedom to posting things that I know are temporary, one that paradoxically will often create things that are worth keeping. Making stories on Instagram lowers the activation energy for sharing things with friends in way that delays the curation and editing part of my brain. The effect is very similar to how posting a short thought on a microblogging platform is so easy and frictionless that it can seed good ideas for a larger blog post later.
These days I often find myself going through my stories archive to port over images and videos to other platforms for longer term sharing, so maybe I’ll give the stories format a try on my site one day.
Food For Thought
Looking back through this cross-section of sites, it triggered a few questions:
- Can photos live in more than one place?
- For example, can a single picture be in both an album and a photoessay? Naz’s photo album of NYC links to the article about the same trip, and the article links back to the photo album. It’s like a two-way connection where the album and article are different views of the same photos, one visual, the other narrative.
- Do albums have to be sorted by narrative or chronology?
- Or maybe they can be organized in other ways that cut across time, such as by topics. E.g. bicycles, landscapes, food, etc.
- If photos live in albums, essays and categories, should a photo’s permalink include links to the different representations?
- Would it be helpful or distracting to have a slug with multiple links, saying something like: “As seen in this album and this article, under these topics”
This was fun to think about and I’m glad I documented the lay of the land, even if only for my own creative inspiration.
I’m curious to see what comes out of the jam sessions this weekend! Wishing good luck and safe travels to everyone attending this year.