Last year I created an ambitious home project called IMatch to Socials which automated the upload photos from IMatch to flickr and Pixelfed. It worked great until recently. Pixelfed was officially released last month and around the same time the Pixelfed upload code stopped working. I couldn’t find out why. I extended the script to post to Mastodon and couldn’t get it to work for other reasons. My mind turned to hosting my photo gallery here at The Quantum Garden Website.
Change of photo hosting location
My photos are now hosted at https://flickr.com/dcbuchan
I’m improving my photo editing skills which means updating photos I’ve already posted1 and I couldn’t do that with Pixelfed without a broadcast to everyone who followed me. I understand the design. It just doesn’t work for me. flickr on the other hand did allow updates in place, but to make the most of the platform’s display I had to include some personal information such as my home address in images. I hid as much as possible and to the casual visitor you’d never find it, but the information was still there in the original uploaded image.
I deleted my Pixelfed account yesterday. Today I deleted all my photos from flickr. I kept the account active because some members of the Bendigo Camera Club post there.
The first step was Migrating from Cloudflare Workers to Cloudflare Pages.2 The second was to adapt IMatch to Socials to pick up my images and create Obsidian pages for Quartz to upload. The third step, completed yesterday was the addition of maps and keywords. I also retired the original project and created a new version with just the code I now need. It’s called IMatch to Site and I’ve made some good design improvements already.
Pixelfed taught me the importance of alt-text for accessibility. I don’t have that active here yet. Instead I’m including the alt-text in the page description. It’s a short-term compromise until I get the new IMatch AI-tagging feature up and running. I’m crap at writing alternate descriptions. My thinking is too narrow and I’ll be leaning into AI policy to help.
I’m super happy with it all. I have full control over what information I display on the site, and I have full control of my photo assets. It was never about the likes, faves or comments; though nice. I enjoy displaying my photos the best they can be and without a public “gallery” there is little need to edit them properly. I now have that.
Footnotes
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In that post I describe why storing photos in Github was not a good idea. ↩