Photo Site Generator
My photo portfolio site: once PHP on a Raspberry Pi, now a Vite script turning a folder of JPEGs into static HTML.
When I was fifteen, I spent the salary from my first summer job on a Nikon D32001, my first proper camera. I’ve been photographing whatever captures my imagination ever since. I wanted a personal way to share the results without using social media, which was the perfect excuse to build a portfolio site.
It started as a PHP site running on a Raspberry Pi in my room. To simplify maintenance, I replaced it with a small Vite script that takes a folder of photos and generates static HTML and several sizes of each image.
My only rule for good technology is that it must offer more value than the effort required to use and maintain it. The part of photography I enjoy is taking photos. The website itself is just a nice-to-have, so publishing must take almost no time. Committing a JPEG to a Git repository and pushing it is about the right amount of effort. It’s still one more step than the PHP version required, but I have taste in technology too, not just in photography.
- Nikon D3200: https://www.cameralabs.com/nikon_d3200/↩