For a number few years now, Gwynne and I have been venturing forth most weekends with our cameras. Mostly, we head for natural areas and wildlife refuges, and mostly in search of birds to photograph. We've both had an interest in photography beyond that for even longer, but haven't really done anything to make an outlet for the photos we've taken. So the search begins for such an outlet...

Prior work

I had previously built a prototype web gallery that focussed more on a fancy interface and newish tech. I used webcomponents (specifically Polymer and it's successor Lit ) to create a gallery that had images fade in and out as you scrolled down a page (and as an alternate view, a more conventional gallery), but that was more a technology demonstation than a photo display site.

Things I tried

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic

LRC has the ability to generate web galleries directly, with a few different options and the potential to plug in more. And they're not bad, but not quite what I wanted. And I could write a new plug in, but I want to focus on the photos here, not the tech, and there would be too much tech to learn.

Thumbsup

Static website generators seem to be the rage these days (or maybe that wave has crested already?), so I searched and found thumbsup, a dedicated website generator. The generated galleries aren't bad, but not quite what I wanted. And I could write a new plug in, but I want to focus on the photos here, not the tech, and there would be too much tech to learn.

Adobe Portfolio

So, maybe a static generator wasn't the way to go. Maybe some sort of dedicated photography platform would be better. I looked at some options and tried out Adobe Portfolio, which does a lot of things really, really well. Easy to customize for my own domain. Very good integration with LRC. And it's not bad, but not quite what I wanted, and there was no way to write a plugin or extension.

General Purpose Static Website generators

Perhaps a popular general purpose website generator would have features or plugins for generating photo galleries. I looked at Hugo and Hyde more than a smidgen as well as looking into others. And they're not bad, but not quite what I wanted. And I could write a new plug in, but I want to focus on the photos here, not the tech, and there would be too much tech to learn. Hugo is written in Go, which might be fun to learn sometime, but not something I want to take on for this endeavor. Hyde is written in Python. Yay, I know Python, but it is still stuck on Python 2 (for the official release, as of this writing), and that's a dead end. They do have support in dev versions, and if I wanted to get into the tech, that would be fine. But I don't.

I was beginning to notice a trend here

I wasn't going to find something that did exactly what I wanted out of the box. It just wasn't going to happen. All of the things I'd looked at had some very appealling aspects and in other circumstances, I'd go with them. But I could just accept that things would be exactly what I had in mind and go with something easy (which would be Adobe Portfolio). Or, I could accept that I'd be doing some tweaking at mininum and probably some coding and find a system where I at least knew the basics and could code and tweak efficiently.

Pelican

So I started looking exclusively at static website generators written in Python, which I know well. Pelican, as it turns out, also uses Jinja2 for templating, which I'm also somewhat familiar with. So the architecture would need learning (that's always a given), but the technical components were old friends.

A Pelican plugin, pelican-photos, does a pretty good job of creating photo galleries. In fact, it's good enough, that I can start out, at least, only tweaking a theme's templates and not actually coding a plugin. So, I'm modifying a theme called Attila, create galleries with the plugin, and starting the website...

...which is what you're viewing right now.

Please check back. More content will come, photographic and otherwise. More tweaking and coding to the system will undoubtedly come to pass. We'll both see what happens.