Ask HN: What are non-social media ways to share photography/art | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are non-social media ways to share photography/art

6 pointsrPlayer65549 comments

Hello all,

I bought a camera and I found that I love taking pictures. However after a year or two of taking pictures I’ve found myself in a rut. I don’t know what to do with the pictures or how to share them with others because I cannot use social media (other than HN and LinkedIn.) I personally have just found the scrolling and infinite content mechanisms are way too addicting for me, so I stay off of it.

This leads to my photos just sitting in Dropbox, often unedited because I don’t have motivation to edit them, because the most I’d do with them is share with family / a few close friends, and put them on a website nobody looks at. If I could find a way to share with others it might motivate me to put more effort into it.

I’m wondering if people have any ways they’ve found to share their art with others that doesn’t involve social media.

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No (anti)social for me.

I checked photo galleries a while back, with the idea of sharing in a limited way, so that my photos don't end up owned by stock agencies, and I have to hire a small army of lawyers to get them back, or fodder for AI. (see the recent "fair use" of books by buying them, tearing them apart and scanning them. )

The following reviews photo gallery sites, unfortunately, the reviewer owns a site, that ranks #1 on the list. That aside, the article gives an idea what is available, all the way to letting visitors buy prints. I remember an email exchange with Pixieset.

https://picflow.com/blog/best-online-galleries-for-photograp...

I like free tiers, but never let the photos out of home, except sharing via email or (shrunken) as messages. My mail client (Apple) offers to resize photos if the message gets large.

These may be overkill, so sites like smugmug may suffice. I have been taking photos for over 50 years, non-professionally (so it's fun) and always do a quick "best of batch" sort (I tag the photos) and a quick tune up. The jpegs I get (Nikon) are so good, that's all I need to get great results. But I have raw editing apps loaded up. HTH

Hey, I really relate to this. I’m not a photographer myself, just a photography enthusiast who happens to co-run a small platform called Glass (https://glass.photo). We built it because we were feeling exactly what you’re describing: the joy of making things getting slowly drained by the systems we’re supposed to share them through.

Glass is our attempt to create something gentler. A calm space for people who love photography. Not performance, not algorithms, not infinite scroll. There are no public metrics, no ads, no dopamine traps. Just photos, shown in full quality, in the order they’re posted, among people who care.

It’s not a viral growth machine, and that’s by design. It’s a small, sustainable, subscription-based community. No investors, no data mining. Just a place that exists because enough people want it to. If that sounds interesting, come check it out. And if not, I still hope you find a way to keep sharing your work. It’s worth the effort, even if the internet makes it hard sometimes.

Hey all — just wanted to share something we’ve been working on that might resonate with folks here.

We built Identipix (no social, no scrolling, no algorithms) as a way to make sharing personal event photos way easier — especially for people who don’t want to dump their work into traditional social media.

It’s meant for events, group outings, or photo walks: our AI figures out who’s in each photo and sends only their photos directly to them via WhatsApp(sms and email coming soon). The idea is to skip the hunt through 300+ images or having to build galleries no one browses. Everyone just gets their moments — instantly.

We started it to help photographers save time, and give guests something more personal than a public Dropbox folder. There’s no public-facing feed, and it’s built around privacy by default.

It’s still early days, but if you’re curious to test it at a small gathering, meetup, or even your next photo walk — let me know. We’re looking for feedback from thoughtful folks like this community. Happy to offer a few free uses for early testers.

Cheers — Anish Reddy identipix.com

Someone I know who is really into photography uses SmugMug, but they generally send me a link when they post something they think I'd be interested in.

A few years ago I tried out write.as, and they also have https://snap.as for photos. It was a little finicky at the time, but may have gotten better.

Without a social aspect, I don't know that you'll have any organic discovery, it will mostly be close friends who you send the links to.

I really only take photos when I travel, and usually just make a shared album on my phone and invite a handful of people to it.

Second post, more relevant: unless you will want to monetize your photos, 99.999% will never be seen/noticed unless you make a strong push (bots boosting views, etc)

If you don't care for the HQ/megapixels, you can always join Insta and "hide" it, so you can relive your photo-walk (as I do with my YYYY-MM-DD NameOfCity) and subfolder "Selection". Kinda like a photographic Journal. Offline for your ACDSee (you can find for free some archaic/portable version or use private Insta for your own date-sorted-photo-journal.

Make a photo zine. Hand sewn if you want to be fancy.

How to Make a DIY Zine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbwbnto35fs

You could try Flickr. I use it as a way to host photos, and sometimes get ideas. It's got a really useful capabilities based sharing mechanism.

Are there any artist groups in your area? You might like participating in critique groups, meet ups, or entering shows.

After a photowalk I make a "selection" subfolder where I pick the best photos (sometimes with a minimal crop/rotate) like one other commenter commented.

(Back in the day... when I went through my weekly/monthly-photowalks years, I used 500px because I wanted to have my "HQ" photos accessible online (but away from social media). For some reason I dumped them many-many years ago (I think they introduced some pricing setup that I was unwilling to follow. Then I "moved" to Tumblr because they had a nice setup (I remember you could upload a batch of 10-15 photos and have them mixed landscape and portrait and you could click to enlarge etc.) but my (unique) hashtags were quickly hijacked (imagine a brand new #sunsetinXYZisland tag being used for anal porn within the hour).

So now I keep everything on my laptop (and ext drive)(and Carbonite) and I have a 10+yo ACDSsee ultimate license and share nothing with no-on. Perhaps when I die, whoever "inherits" my digital archives may be interested to keep the "selection" subfolders, but I have determined that when we die nobody will care for the thousands of photos and GBs of videos.

My best friend died almost a year ago. We have been together to many-many concerts where he would record almost the whole concerr (VERY difficult to record a Metallica concert (or ten) while headbanging) to never watch these.

..all these moments will be lost in time.. (to quote one of the best movie lines ever from on of the best movies ever) (sorry for the pessimism, it's just that 'we' tend to spend time holding a camera (mostly on a smartphone) instead of living those moments, that they will eventually be lost in time...)

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