A jekyll website for photographers

1. Easy setup and you get a site of your own for free.
2. To add new pictures, you need to just upload them. No code changes required.
3. This I like the most, you get to see EXIF data like aperture, shutter speed, iso etc when you click on any image automagically.

If you know a tad about tech and love taking pictures then this open-source project may help you setup a website to showcase all your creations without effort. And not just that, with this you need not pay a single dime to host your website as it's hosted by GitHub for free.

Just follow the below steps and your website would be live in no time:

1. Fork this repo by hitting the Fork button at the top right corner.
2. Enable github pages from the repo settings.
3. Upload your pictures to images/fulls and images/thumbs directory. You can do that on github.com itself or you can clone and push the images to your repo.
4. Add your own custom domain in CNAME file or just remove the file if you don't own a domain and use the default domain that github provides ([yourusername].github.io/photography).
5. Update baseurl field in _config.yml file with whatever domain you used in step 4.
6. And that's it, your website is set. To view, go to photography.ramswaroop.me (or whatever you have in the CNAME file) and if you don't have one, you can go to [yourusername].github.io/photography

And of course, you don't want my name at the bottom to show up. You can change it in _config.yml file as well as few other settings like your google analytics etc.

I have made this as an npm package with gulp to automate image resizing and thumbnail generation. So if you're lazy like me then you can just do the following before you push your images to github.

1. Fork and then clone the project to your computer
2. Go inside the project $ cd photography
3. Install all dependencies by $ npm install
4. Copy all your pictures (possibly jpg, the largest size available, straight from your camera) and put it inside images directory
5. Run $ gulp to resize the images and to generate thumbnails automatically
6. Push your changes to github.com by $ git add --all and $ git commit -m "a nice commit message" and then finally $ git push origin master

You can make the contact form work without the need of any server-side code. Just follow this article on github which uses a simple google script to send emails or to upload to a google spreadsheet when someone submits the form.

Thanks to AJ for the website template which I enhanced for jekyll.