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The Background

I've been using Flicks as a place to host my annual photo galleries for quite some time, since 2013. And as ancient and rigid Flickr is, it still does few things well, or at least well enough. Namely, the gallery display - it's not ideal but it does what it should: shows photos and related information such as title, description etc. Sure, there are ads, and it's clunky, but it's tolerable, and my photos are not that important to make a fuss over the presentation; I just like them being available to view.

The Problem

Flickr's free tier limit of 1000 items worked for me for a long while as I only add some 50-80 photos a year, but it wsa inevitable that it runs out some day. And so the day has come. I don't mind paying for services, but given that Flickr interface and UX is not great, IMO it's not worth the price, and other extras they include in the Pro tier do not interest me: I just need a photo gallery, that's all.

The Solutions That Were Not

There are quite a few alternatives out there, and I've tried several - but none worked for my case, for various reasons:

Google Photos

I already use Google Photos for personal photo storage (its key advantage is, it serves as a image source for the smart TV screensaver), so having a dedicated album for annual "best of" collection was a logical choice. However, the problem with Google Photos is when public link is created, it automatically shares the album with people who view it, if they're logged in to Google (and many people are), and so not only the album appears as shared in their Photos, I also see them in the shared list - and that's not at all what I want.

500px

Looked promising, good price, but editing photo title/description after upload was a major pain, and then what killed this option for me was gallery view mode - even though I chose paid account, for the non-logged-in viewers the gallery showed a blocking ad pop-up that required to wait for a few seconds, and then click a "Proceed" button, and then after a few photos it appeared again. That's just utter disrespect to both viewers who'd like to see the photos, and authors who want their photos viewed. I get the ads, but not blocking adds. That's just abhorrent.

Photobucket

Nice and clean photo upload, but viewing gallery looks like a stock NPM photo library and doesn't show any photo caption/details till user finds the info icon. For the price that tops the Flickr, that looked underwhelming.

Ente

Good price and generally simplistic interface (which is good), but viewer experience was more like a management interface than a photo gallery. This would've probably been my option had the DYI approach (described below) failed.

Others (Instagram, Dropbox, Shutterfly etc.)

There were other options too, but they all had downsides - too much a social network, too business-oriented, too fearmongering marketing strategy (I'm looking at you, Dropbox) etc.

The Solution

With the research above yielding unsatisfactory results, I thought that I already have another place to put the photo assets, that being Cloudinary - I use it for photos, screenshots and various images I use here in blog or on website or elsewhere. I knew that Cloudinary has a rich image/video transformation/presentation layer, so I gathered it must have plenty of libraries I could use to build own solution. And on top of that, open-source image gallery libraries were always abundant for any platform, so I was certain there'd be something for Vue (which is what my portfolio website is using).

And both were certainly true:

• Cloudinary has guidance for Vue (among other systems such as React, Angular, pure JS and more): https://cloudinary.com/documentation/vue_sample_projects
• There's a lot of photo galleries for Vue to pick from - Galleria, PhotoSwipe, vue-gallery and so on. I've picked lightGallery as the one that seemed most suitable for my needs OOB.

With a bit of Cursoring (which essentially did exactly what I'd done with copy-pasting, only much faster) and certain amount of cursing (see caveats below), it all worked out, so here it is, my best photos of 2025 here on personal website.

Caveats

• The solution is very rudimentary as I had very little time, so the year is hardcoded, there' no galleries list (and there's no other galleries yet), and there's no dedicated upload.
• Cloudinary's internal upload is good, and tagging is easy, but adding extra information such as caption and description is tedious. Not much tedious than 500px though, but this one's for free.
• The solution uses Cloudinary CDN listing functionality, which required un-disabling "Resource list" resource in Security settings, and is not the best approach as it allows anyone to list all my public resources. Works for my case, but anything more complex would need a backend.

Pros

• Cloudinary is a generous platform for non-profit creators, and the functionality they provide is amazing. So for now, it's free.
• The technology is well known to me, so I have a freedom to adjust is as I please, expanding however I want. With modern LLM tools, it's also fast.
• It's all within my website now, which is a set of static pages hosted on Netlify (another amazing service with a great free tier)