About

One picture at a time

Every photograph has its own page, with its date, topics and places, and sometimes a story. Start with the selected work, wander through the collections, or see the latest photo.

Thank you for visiting.

Codex

This site grew out of the Galleries Deluxe theme, built with Hugo. I reworked it so that each gallery holds a single photograph, which lets every picture carry its own topics and places.

How it works today

  • Browsing. Collections and Selected Work gather favorites. Topics, places and All Photos hold the complete archive, and the Journal keeps the everyday entries.
  • Images. Every image is watermarked with the site address when the site is built, and only the watermarked versions are published.
  • Using the photos. Every photo is © Benjamin Strawbridge. Personal use, such as a desktop background, is welcome; commercial use needs a license. See the terms of use and licensing.
  • Behind the scenes. The site is served by Cloudflare and rebuilt each time a photo is added. I use PostHog to see which pages are visited and how people move between photos.

Speed and loading

  • It looks good while it loads. The grids use Pig.js justified rows, but Hugo works out each row’s geometry at build time and ships it as CSS, so the layout never jumps (CLS 0). Each tile shows a gradient of its photo’s dominant colors until the image arrives. On a photo page and in the slideshow, the photo waits for decode() and then fades in over 180 ms; the fade is off under prefers-reduced-motion, and cached photos appear at once.
  • It works without JavaScript. Every photo is a real link with a <picture> element (watermarked WebP and JPEG, srcset and sizes per tile) in the HTML. The first photo gets fetchpriority="high"; later rows activate within 200px of the viewport, with <noscript> fallbacks.
  • It’s measured. Three-run Lighthouse medians score 96 or higher on every page type, mobile and desktop, across performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.

The site history records what has changed.

This site is built by my studio, arts-link. We make websites for artists, musicians and makers. If you’d like one of your own, get in touch.