Some time ago, I distinctly remember saying I would never rebuild my photo gallery again. I was done. No more tweaks, no more mass migrations. It was all done. Now, I know I write long, and many of you may not care about the old or new build story, so feel free to skip to the bottom to see the new gallery in action.

Back to the story. I had previously found a solution that met my three main needs.

A. Ability to handle BOTH photo and video

Video is the death of bandwidth, and over the years, I have found fantastic tools for photo galleries that then died on video. Some were professional websites, such as Google Photos or SmugMug. Others were plugins for my own website, like NextGen Gallery, or standalone, installable gallery websites like Piwigo and Coppermine.

Some were absolutely perfect. Except they almost all failed on being able to include video. The most popular solution for many photographers is simply “no video”, just pics. Compelling but lame. 🙂 The second most popular solution is to put your videos up on sites like YouTube or Vimeo or DailyMotion and accept that you’re likely to get advertisements coming with them. Maybe you’re okay with that; maybe you WANT that, and you’re trying to build a brand that will get sponsors interested. That’s not me.

I uploaded a boatload of videos to Dailymotion almost 10 years ago and totally forgot I even tried their site. They emailed me the other day about one of the videos not loading properly, and I was, like, “Who are you and how did you get this number?” 🙂

In the end? I had previously embraced Flickr for a series of reasons (I’ll address others below too), but most importantly? With a paid subscription, you could upload unlimited short videos! I couldn’t upload a pirated copy of Thor: Ragnarok or another long movie to stream, but I could upload a video of Jacob playing a song for a recital.

B. Easy embedding into WordPress

I have a website already. My goal was not to send people to Flickr. I just needed to get my stuff onto the web and then to embed it in my website. I hunted around and found a great plugin called Photonic Gallery; it’s designed to create a nice gallery look with photos and videos from various sources. It will work with SmugMug, YouTube, and other sources that have been added in recent years, but mainly for me, it connects to Flickr. I won’t say it was the easiest of connections I’ve ever figured out between plugins and my website, but it generally “worked” after some advanced tweaking.

Now, shhh, between you and me? I hate the Flickr website. The screens are archaic, the interface slow and counter-intuitive, and it feels like it hasn’t changed since 2005. I didn’t care; it worked. When almost nothing else did. I had a working model.

C. Integration with my photo management software

Many photographers and web designers don’t care about this step. They’ll upload everything manually, and they don’t care too much about the initial workflow…photographers may eat it, or web designers can script it. But here’s the thing for me — I’m not primarily a photographer nor a web designer. I’m a blogger. And I can’t code for the life of me.

And I’ll state my bias up front — I absolutely hate Adobe. I can handle the external trappings, subscription models, pricing, all of that. Not happy about it, but I could live with it. Except for one thing. It treats your image files like Apple does music files — it wants to manage ALL of them with its own proprietary tagging and overhead. And it is almost impossible to “opt out” of the system so that your own browsers and other tools can work with the same files. To put it simply, neither plays well with others.

After looking around a lot, I ended up trying Mylio. I had never heard of it before. It is a bit proprietary in the way it manages files, but you can at least see the internal file structures, which look like a simple folder/file system. You can find your files with any file manager, though it’s obviously better not to MOVE any files out of a structure Mylio already built.

But it handles videos just fine. I never really nailed down all the differences between certain types of tags and pic coding, but it generally did what I needed it to do — manage all my photos AND give me a direct upload option for Flickr. Not a GREAT upload outcome, more dumping it in a general processing folder or preexisting folders, but that was often more a problem with Flickr than Mylio.

So, if everything works, why break it?

I hate to say it, but cost is a huge factor. I pay for my website, I pay for backups, I pay for software, and I pay a separate fee to both Mylio (for an annual subscription) and Flickr (to host the photos and video). And with retirement looming, I’m looking to curb recurring expenses I don’t need. Nothing drastic, just prudence and conservatism.

But the biggest factor is just, well, annoyance. I hate that I have a website and can’t just host my photos and videos directly on it. I’m literally paying three companies to host my photos and video — the host provider to host the WordPress site, Flickr to host the actual files, and Backblaze for backups so I don’t lose everything in a flood or fire. Again, even in 2026, there are few integrated sites that will let you manage photos and video AND stream from them. Store or serve, not both. And I have great options to back up all my photos for free to Amazon. As long as I don’t want to store much in the way of video. Or any.

I’ve been doing the Flickr thing for quite a few years now, and I wasn’t planning on modifying anything. Except my workflow was gnawing at me a bit. Processing in Mylio was a bit too much overhead, and recently it started messing up. Ghost folders that were duplicates of other folders, and if I didn’t notice it had the exact same address in the backend, I could have ended up deleting a bunch of photos as suspected duplicates that were not in fact dupes. I could have done a complete catalogue rebuild, workable for the most part. But then something weird happened. It got stuck in a loop, or at least I think the software did — I ended up with 26K photos in one folder, with 15-20 files duplicated dozens of times each, plus a couple that were well over a thousand copies each. Another folder went from 75 files up to over 50K files! Sure, I ran a duplicate remover tool on the folders and it brought it back down to the originals only, but the second process took over 14 hours to complete.

And I wasn’t really excited to get back into updating all of my gallery because the Flickr interface is so painful, even with the direct link. In fairness, I failed to try it since I upgraded my home internet speed. It might have seemed less painful at 8x the previous speed.

So I started looking for a new way to manage my photos, and while researching options, I also came across a simple “static” website option you can build and upload yourself. No biggie, there are lots of these things around…wait, does that thing say it can handle native video? Not embedded from other sites? That can’t be right…

Didn’t I say I couldn’t serve video directly?

The true answer falls into one of those gray zones a bit. My host provider, like almost all hosts, has clauses in its agreements stating that you cannot host videos on your website. This is to stop you from trying to create a YouTube clone on a small server and killing their bandwidth, since it is, in theory, an all-you-can-eat digital buffet. Unlimited bandwidth because the sites are so small, they don’t care. Their pricing model covers moderate usage and occasional mini-spikes. Streaming a pirated movie would show up REAL fast. But after they upgraded some of their internal servers at one point, I saw reference to embedding a video in the website. And I was like, “Huh?”. So I tried running a video on the site, and it worked just fine. I reached out to them to say, “Sooooo….what does this mean?”. They basically said the rules say no so they can block people who abuse it, but a personal little gallery is beneath their time unless I turn into some influencer. Hah.

Except one of the problems then becomes, “How do you manage it in WordPress?”. WP has a media library, and almost all gallery plugins use it by default. Which is fine if you’re uploading 100, 200, 1000 photos. 10K? 20K? 30K? That gets a bit problematic. Particularly as WP likes to create multiple versions of the same photo — thumbnail, small, medium, large/original, extra large, so they are all resized first. I have unlimited space, but I don’t have unlimited iNodes. Every file takes an iNode, and my current install uses about 45K iNodes, out of what used to be a limit of 150K iNodes per site. So that was space for about 100K more iNodes, and if each photo added 5 each, that meant that anything above about 15K would start slowing my site down and put me in serious jeopardy for just regular blogging. Plus if I just want to add a quick post image, I don’t want to sort through 30K of my photos.

But this new-to-me tool, called jAlbum, is basically a simplified HTML website builder. It is more like a throwback to what people used in 2002-2005, except with 2026 power and management. You give it your photos, move them around, say “build,” and if you give it your credentials, it will upload them directly like the simplest website ever, with only one or two images per photo and minimal overhead. Oh, and I found a small surprise when I checked my space usage. I totally forgot that when I upgraded my servers by one level a few years ago, my iNode usage went up to 300K per site. Ka-ching.

It couldn’t be that easy, right?

My brain had a mini explosion. It handles video? I can put it on my own site? And it doesn’t bloat? Nah, it can’t be that easy, right?

Hmm…it REALLY does handle video.

Hmm…I don’t have to have the videos in a different part of the page, I can put them right next to photos in the gallery. Huh.

Let’s try importing or embedding directly in WordPress posts and pages. It does that too. Actually, more easily than Photonic and Flickr.

Admittedly, it doesn’t work well with Mylio. But, well, Mylio may not even be the tool of the future, so maybe that isn’t a concern. Maybe I should figure that out first. I did a side quest and decided to jettison Mylio, ending up with a FREE, well-supported software program called DigiKam. It’s not perfect, I imagine nothing is, but it does everything that I want it to do and more. I dropped all my other projects and gave it a full test. Videos, bad tags, photos out of order, storytelling needs, tags, untags, categories, captions, comments, titles, people, face recognition. Son of a biscuit — it all worked. It has quirks, as any software does. But pretty solid. So, then, I tested how well it would work with jAlbum. How about drag-and-drop from one software to another? Holy doodles.

I’m still working through the quirks of the workflow. So far, I’ve only transferred 280 photos from Mylio to DigiKam and uploaded 7 folders with 94 images to the website. And it’s holding.

If you want to see the simplified version, I’ve embedded it below, or you can see the full version at Photos. I’ve done 1987, 2002, and most of 2003 so far. Heck, I was even able to add a tag cloud and Disqus comments. Not bad for a bare-bones HTML site. Particularly as it saves me about $250 a year hosting it myself. And I am no longer annoyed by having to store/host it in a second or even third location.

If you get a chance, let me know what you think. It’s not as powerful as some commercial sites, but it seems to meet my needs.