Building my photoblog using Python

The origin story

I like taking photos.

I have grown fond of black and white ones, which have a simple, mysterious vibe that I enjoy. Some time ago, I started looking for a place to publish a few of my photos online. I found none. I don’t like Instagram, and other platforms were either too expensive, too ugly, or plagued with ads. In most cases, they looked more like a regular social media platform full of ’like’ and ‘share’ buttons than a place where photography actually matters.

At some moment during that research I found minorshadows.net, a black and white photography website owned by Anders Jensen-Urstad. I immediately fell in love with the simplicity of its design and with the fact that each photo takes as much screen space as it can. “This is how a photography website should look like”, I thought.

Anders’s website is powered by a script of his own: 1600pr.sh. I read the instructions and launched my photoblog: monocromo.

Taking the idea to Python

Anders’s script is great. But, as it usually occurs with these things, I wanted to make some customizations¹. 1600pr.sh is a shell script, and I lean towards Python. I decided that I would translate it from shell to Python to achieve three things:

• Make the customizations I wanted.
• Practice Python.
• Learn a little bit about shell.

It took me a while to figure out how to address the problem. Once I decided on the approach I took a full-day sprint and wrote monocromo.py, which is now the engine that powers my black and white photoblog. Essentially, it takes the core idea of Anders’s work and applies it into a object-oriented paradigm.

This is the structure of the project:

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/monocromo.py
├── monocromo
├── README.md
└── src
    ├── builder.py
    ├── cli.py
    ├── data.py
    ├── html
    │   ├── head.html
    │   ├── index.html
    │   ├── index.xml
    │   ├── link.html
    │   ├── newer.html
    │   ├── older.html
    │   ├── post.html
    │   ├── rss_item.xml
    │   └── style.css
    ├── photo.py
    ├── site.py
    └── utils.py

• src/photo.py is the core module. It implements a class Photo with methods to generate the different photo files.
• src/data.py implements a DataManager to interact with the text file that acts as a database.
• src/site.py includes a dataclass that represents the minimal configuration needed of the website to be built.
• The Builder in src/builder.py interacts with the three previous components and implements the logic to, well, build the website.
• src/utils.py includes utility functions.
• src/html/. holds the .html, .xml and .css template files.
• The CLI defined in src/cli.py provides a method to add a new photography to the database and another one to build the site.
• Finally, monocromo is the executable.

Next steps

The source code can be improved in several areas. It does a decent job —which means that I get what I want, but I have some ideas for it.

• Make the database file a YAML one. This will make easier to add some metadata to each photo.
• Improve the README and leave clear instructions on how to use the script.
• Add an About page.
• (Optional) Display some EXIF metadata in each photo.
• I already received a feature request that I intend to take.