Deploy a photography portfolio site on Netlify

A few days ago I had an idea to create my personal portfolio of photos that I shooted. So I want is to be a static site only to deploy my photos and some contact informations. I have looked for Hugo Themes but I don’t found anyone that I liked too much. So finally, I find a Aperture Theme by CloudCanon that was exactly what I looking for.

They provide a CMS for your jekyll site, but I wanted a total power to custom my new site with original code, so I cloned a repo on github and started a work.

_config.yml

Here`s we do a basic changes like title, baseurl, name, links etc. nothing special

Gemfile

Now we install bundled Gems into RubyGems (locally) using sudo: sudo bundle install . After we run a server: jekyll serve --port 5500 Probably, you will have a warning something like me:

This is due to a multiple versions of the same gems, check out: gem list eventmachine:

LOCAL GEMS

eventmachine (1.2.7, 1.2.5)`

run sudo gem cleanup eventmachine rb-fsevent ffi resolve a problem. After I have a jekyll version 3.8.3, so compare your current version of jekyll with that in a Gemfile, and if it’s different, replace with your current one. After type bundle update jekyll again jekyll serve. If you have an error like:

just shift author name email etc. values on the same line with others values and restart a server.

Link styles sheets

If you go now on a localhost (with the port that you choose - :4000 by default), and you see plain html text - you need to remove a baseurl in a _config.yml file if you added anyone before like this: baseurl: . Otherwise the paths to styles won’t be correct.

Uploads Photo System

Open an index.html in your favorite text editor (vscode of course). In the front matter (text wrapped in 3 dashes in a start of file) you can see a photos variable with image and caption for which one. And in the body we have a loop through all photos mentionned in front matter of index.html. By the way, the photos will upload in a uploads folder and the caption and src you have to add in index.html But I don’t want at first to add a photo in a folder and add a caption with image name yet in a front matter. This is a real pain and waste of time!

We can use site.static_files property to have access to our images in a loop. To avoid to have all the static files in our loop, we can add a condition that image path contains name of a folder where it is located:

{% for image in site.static_files %}
  {% if image.path contains 'uploads' %}
  
  <li style="background-image: url('{{ site.baseurl }}{{ site.image_fulls_loc }}/{{ image.name}}')">
    <a title="{{ image.name }}" href="{{ site.baseurl }}{{ site.image_fulls_loc }}/{{ image.name}}" data-id="#{{ image.name | slugify }}" data-caption="{{ image.name }}"></a>
  </li>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Custom a template

When I looked CMS By CloudCanon I really don’t liked that I can’t change this bold logo on a front page - this is one of the reason why I don’t use it (may be I’m just stupid and I don’t see how to do it x) So first of all I want to get rid off this logo - I will not explain this, simply modify default layout page.

Now, I don’t like ugly form on hire me page, so I modified it, here is a result:

Aperture form changed

Also, initially the template in not responsive, so I did it like I wanted: mobile-friendly, you can see the final code on my github repo: Responsive pages

Deploy

To deploy a site on Netlify, you have many different options, I will deploy from github repo. So we have to initialize a new git repo and push it to github:

 git init 
 git add .
 git commit -m "init"

Create a new repo on github, connect your local version with remote and push it:

git remote add origin https://github.com/veax/Photography-Portfolio-Website.git
git push -u origin master

Now, go to Netlify and sign up (I do it by github account).
After click on New site from Git choose your git provider and pick up a repo that we pushed right before. In build settings, verify build command, it would be: jekyll build
Choose dist directory after jekyll will generate your pages. I leave it by default: _site/
Click on Deploy Site and it’s done!

The last thing we need is to change a domain name. If you don’t want to have a netlify subdomain name in your url, you can buy it by googling. I will only change subdomain url name: click on Site details and Change site name. For me it is: https://veax-photos.netlify.com

Now, you can modified you local git repo and push it on git - netlify will automatically update the changes.

P.S

To lightweight images I use bash commands that I found on Ubuntu forum (link)
In a folder with your images execute this (you can choose other pixels width and compression rate if you want of course):

for i in *; do convert $i -resize 1024x $i-1024x.jpg; done;
for i in *-1024x.jpg; do convert $i -quality 80% $i-80p.jpg; done;

And you can move now your converted images in ‘uploads’ folder:

for i in *-80p.jpg; do mv $i ~/path_to_site_root/uploads; done;

With this method I compressed my raw images from 388 Mb to 8.6 Mb with quite satisfying quality before upload. That’s all, thank you for reading and happy coding!