How my photo blog came together

I’ve received some comments about my new photo blog, especially the albums section, so I thought I’d share a bit about how it all came together.

Photography and writing have always been two of my biggest interests. At first, I tried to mix them into one blog, but it never felt right. They both deserved their own space (apparently, my hobbies don’t like sharing).

Luckily, my Micro.blog Premium plan gives me up to five blogs, so splitting them was easy. MB isn’t the only platform that allows this, of course — Bear and Scribbles do it really well too, just to name a couple.

Albums

One of the things I like about MB is the ability to create photo albums (collections). Using a simple shortcode, you can drop an album anywhere you want. If it doesn’t exist yet, MB creates it automatically. Very handy!

The thing is, there’s no built-in way to list all collections as albums. So I made a page myself with basic HTML. Each album has its own page with just that collection, and I manually added breadcrumbs for easier navigation on small screens (a plug-in for breadcrumbs anywhere would be amazing, though).

Styling

The albums page started out simple, just a CSS flex grid with my theme’s colors. But then, as these things go, I got ideas.

First came background photos for each album. Then a subtle filter effect. Then the number of photos in each album (done manually for now, but maybe one day MB will add that feature).

And the ideas just kept piling up…

Enter AI

At some point, the ideas were coming so fast I asked ChatGPT for help. It definitely saved time, though not as much as I expected. There was still a lot of trial and error (turns out, AI doesn’t read minds… yet).

I know a bit of HTML and CSS, which turned out to be not just useful but necessary. If you don’t, you can still give it a try (and I think you should) — just don’t expect it to be a stroll in the park. On the bright side, you’ll learn a lot along the way.

Some mistakes even became features. The underlining hover effect on the albums, for example, happened because ChatGPT misunderstood what I wanted. It kept my original underlining and added yet another one, which I ended up using instead (with some tweaks) because I thought it looked nice.

Managing it all

Even when I only had one blog, I always posted photos from my phone. Now, with several blogs, I stick to the official MB iOS app when posting pics. That way, everything goes to the right place automatically (there’s also a dedicated photo app called Sunlit, but it hasn’t been updated in years and lack recent features).

When I’m uploading a bunch of photos to a new album, I use the Mac app. It makes the process quick and easy (at least as “quick and easy” as uploading dozens of photos gets).

I also made an Apple Shortcut for Blaugust photo entries that copies the date, place, and camera model to the clipboard. Here’s an example.

As for creating new albums or updating the albums page, I still do it all by hand. But since it doesn’t change that often, it’s fine.

Wrapping up

I know this might sound a bit complicated. I often feel the same when reading about other people’s blogging workflows or those legendary Obsidian setups. Annie’s post How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner still makes me laugh every single time.

Anyway, this is what works for me. Whether it works for you is another question entirely.

Happy (photo) blogging! 📸