I finally revamped my photos site. I have meant to do this for over a year now, but didn’t get to it until now. The biggest change is no more SmugMug.

SmugMug seemed like a good idea a couple of years ago, but it failed to live up to expectations. Like so many other services with a similar licensing model, you don’t get to find out what the service is really like until you take out a paid subscription, and it turns out the really good features, such as the Loxley Colour integration, are severely crippled below the (prohibitively expensive) top tier subscription.

The main issues for me were that even with the (not cheap) tier-2 Portfolio subscription I could not control printing (e.g., paper selection) on per-image basis, which made it completely unusable. In general customising the site was awkward, and SmugMug would roll out updates that would break your customised site without you even knowing. And, not last, and certainly not least, you cannot get rid of that stupid name, even at the Portfolio level it’s always there, and it keeps popping up in the browser bar if you use a custom domain.

Anyway, I don’t have particularly complex requirements, so I ended up using a self-hosted Ghost, which has served me well in the past, with a bespoke theme called Elphin specifically focusing on imagery (WIP, but you are welcome to make use of it).

And yes, you can now get a normal RSS feed for my photos!