[winstonrc]

I have two places I store photos: a gallery[0] of curated photos on my personal website, and a larger stream of photos backed up to my NAS.

The photos on my NAS replicate what I capture with my phone. I actively delete photos of the mundane such as a random snap of food I cooked. I let the iOS photos app automatically create albums of people and places and display those as a widget on my home screen. I go through it every now and then to clean it up from bad photos that accidentally got uploaded. This collection has survived a transfer from Android to iOS since it is platform agnostic.

My gallery on my website is for hosting things I want to be shared and has a higher standard for what I select. I also don’t have social media, so when people ask where they can view photos of my trip, I point them to my website. Right now it has photos from vacation trips that were mostly shot on film. It’s more artistic in nature and features landscapes rather than humans. The idea is to capture the essence of the photo albums of the past that my older family members have. I can always go to my website and view photos from a trip. Shooting those photos on film makes the shots more deliberate and more limited in nature. I could always get them printed physically to place into a photo album, but I’m happy with storing them digitally for now to reduce clutter. The gallery feature itself is something I really enjoyed building.

I like the balance of viewing subjectively more interesting photos in my gallery but also being able to see the behind the scenes photos with my family in my digital collection. I’m waiting for a way in the future to more conveniently display my photos locally on a digital photo album such as a docked iPad.

[0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/gallery