Around January of 2025 I launched the first version of this site. I was quite proud of it! I utilized the Flickr API to dynamically populate the website from the contents of my Flickr profile. I could upload photos to Flickr, and they would automatically appear on my website. Pretty neat, right? I was even going to write a detailed blog post explaining how you could you do it yourself.

Then it all went to shit. On May 15, 2025, Flickr announced new changes to free accounts which affected the API access as well. This essentially crippled my website, forcing all images to be 1200px at most. Of course, I was mocked as a freeloader when I went to complain about this on reddit (complaining on reddit usually fixes my problems, so I’m a bit confused by this one)…

So, I started a nearly year-long detour to develop a photography CMS for SSR or static websites: Photoserv ! Photoserv is developed with Django and runs on a server as a Docker-Compose stack.

Photoserv allows you to upload and organize photos by albums and tags. It will handle size generation, metadata aggregation, and expose a REST API you can use to display data. I integrated it with Astro for the new version of this website (you’re reading it!)… You can take a look at the Astro loader here!

Was this an extreme measure? I don’t think so. Ultimately, this is a statement against living at the whim of other organizations for a hobby I care so much about — now my website and personal portfolio is fully under my control, forever. And you can be certain that this project will be maintained forever until I die for a long time, because this is something I actually use in my photography workflow now. There does not exist an alternative on the internet. And I like it.

So, go try it out if you think it would be useful. The project is MIT licensed, so the best way you could thank me is by contributing yourself.