Earlier this year my pro account at flickr expired. I had the usual notifications prior to this and it casued me to start wondering what I wanted to do with my pictures. This wasn’t an easy question to answer as there are a lot of possible answers and an almost infinite range of answers already in existance. A few weeks ago I made my answer public and so far I’ve been very happy with the results.
So what did I finally decide to do?
The site is very simple. One picture per day, given it’s day on the home page and then an after life on a url defined by the date it was displayed. I came to realise that when I added a number of pictures to flickr only the final few were ever looked at and even fewer were really ever “looked” at.
Older images are displayed in date order. Images may have a title, but don’t need to have one.
It’s minimalist. But that was what I wanted. I wanted the site to be about the pictures. Not how I took it. Not where I took it. Not when I took it. It’s the picture stupid.
The machanics are even more straightforward. Upload an image (optionally with a title) and it finds the next available date to display it and makes the smaller versions (according to a defined list). Every day the front page finds the image for that day and displays it. A tweet gets sent every day with the title and a link to the permanent url for the picture. Simple.
I added support for pingbacks and added an RSS and an Atom feed. Twitter and Google+ buttons followed (but are never used).
The results are interesting. I’m getting as much feedback as I ever did from posting at flickr. The number of views of images is higher (only by a small margin) than the better pictures on flickr.
It’s a work in progress, but so far I’m happy with my choice and have found the self imposed limtation to be liberating rather than restrictive.