My photo blogging process
Many people have written about their blogging process, and that usually applies to how they publish the written word. My process for blogging is simple and most likely resembles many others, so I thought I would write about my process for publishing photo blog posts.
My photo blog is hosted on my own domain name: Photos by Stephen Gower. The blog itself is built on 11ty, and is updated deployed via GitHub and Netlify. That's the technical aspect, which is only important to the end result. I don't have markdown enabled on the blog so everything is written using standard HTML tags.
The first step in publishing a photo post is choosing the photo. I use different equipment depending on what and how I'm shooting - you can view the devices I use if you're interested. Most of the time I prefer to use photos taken with my Sony A5000 but as the aphorism goes, the best camera is the one you have with you1. Sometimes the photos just choose themselves even if I'm shooting with a specific image in mind.
Once I've chosen the photo, I paste it into Gemini to generate Alt text. I upload the image to Flickr and use the alt text for the description, and choose some sort of meaningful title.
I use Flickr because I'm nervous about clogging up free GitHub and Netlify accounts with high-quality images - I don't know if there's any limit to either and I don't want to find out the hard way. Flickr has a limit to how many pictures you can upload, but I'm nowhere near that limit and if I ever do, I'll consider paying for some extra space. Additionally I like the way Flickr images embed in my posts.
Once this is done, I create the actual post. I do this in one of two ways: on my desktop computer via Visual Code Studio, or else I use GitHub's web interface. I should create a template, but what I do instead is take a previous post and copy the frontmatter and edit to suit the new post: a new title, meta_description, date, tags, and a new meta_image for social media. I usually fill in the description last based on the content of the post.
Speaking of the content, I try to keep it minimal - no more than a paragraph if I can help it. The primary purpose of the blog is to showcase my pictures and it's not "for writing". I provide some context, and specify the devices used (if applicable).
I copy the embed info from Flickr and surround it with <figure> tags; at this point I need to copy the alt text information into the alt field because Flickr just uses the title. That's not helpful at all. In <figcaption> tags, I repeat the alt text and then copy the camera settings (which I copy from Flickr's photo information).
Once it's all done, I double-check that everything looks good and then commit & push the update to the blog! If I set to a future date the post won't appear live or in the RSS feed until that date & time, but otherwise it'll publish right away. I'll manually share the post using Buffer to share to Bluesky and Mastodon simultaneously.
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This past weekend, for example, I brought my camera but used both that and my cell phone to capture images. I had my 28-70mm lens on the camera and didn't want to constantly change lenses, so for wider shots I switched to my phone (in 64MP mode). This was really handy and meant I didn't lose out on great shots.↩