November 1, 2026
Keeping your place
Opening a photo link from Selected Work, a collection or a place now highlights that section in the top navigation and phone menu, alongside the photo’s browsing context and count.
November 2026
A privacy page
A short privacy page now says what the site collects: visit statistics through PostHog, nothing sold and no ads. It’s linked in the footer next to the terms of use.
October 2026
One picture at a time
The site has a new front door. The homepage starts with the latest photograph, then a few favorites, collections to explore and a glimpse of the Journal. The tagline has changed from “a picture a day” to “One picture at a time” on purpose: the experiment continues, without a promise to post every day.
Selected Work gathers the lead photographs. Collections group photos by subject, such as Land & Light, Small Discoveries and a Sketchbook of drawings. The Journal keeps the everyday entries, and Topics, Places and All Photos still hold the complete archive. Nothing has been removed.
Open a photograph from any of these pages and it appears in a slideshow over the page. The arrows stay within the selection you came from, with its name and a count, and Close, Escape or Back returns you to where you were. Every photograph still has its own page for shared links, now with a few related photos below it.
The main links are now Selected Work, Collections, Places and About, on desktop and in the phone menu. All Photos, Topics and Journal are in the footer, beside the RSS feed and a new Journal feed.
Pages also load faster. The photo grids keep their familiar rows, but the first photographs arrive with the page, in lighter versions, and the rest load as you scroll. An opened photograph fades in gently once it’s ready, over a quiet background; cached photos appear at once, and the fade is off if you prefer reduced motion. On a wide screen the homepage gives photographs more room. Links and the current section are highlighted in a light mint green instead of coral pink, and place names under a photograph have a fine underline so you can tell they’re links. Shared links now show the photograph with its title and the site name.
October 2026
Fewer, fuller topics
The topics have been reworked. There were 182, and two-thirds of them held a single photo. Now the topics page lists 44, each with at least three photos: subjects such as mountains, cityscape, hiking, signs, coast, water, wildlife and drawings gathered the photos that belonged to them, near-duplicates merged (flower and flowers, woods and forest), and nature and animals gave way to what is actually in the picture. Narrower tags such as a car’s model stay on their photo and will appear on their own once three photos share them. Old topic addresses that were merged lead to the new page.
October 2026
Terms of use and licensing
Two new pages say what you can do with the photos. Terms of use: every photo is © Benjamin Strawbridge; personal use, such as a desktop background, is welcome, and so is reposting with credit and a link, but commercial use needs a license and the photos may not be used to train AI. Licensing: how to ask for a license. Both are linked from the bottom of every page.
October 2026
A bar across the top
The browsing pages (All Photos, topics, places, About and History) now have a bar across the top with BENSTRAW.COM and the main links, so the way around the site is always in view. The section you are in is marked in coral. On a phone the bar shows the name next to the menu button. At this stage, photo pages kept the whole screen for the photo; the shared header now appears there too.
October 2026
Topic and place chips on phones
On a phone the topics and places pages now show compact chips in three sizes, by how many photos each has, instead of pills that grew with their count and cut long names short (“l…” for landscape). Every name shows in full, no chip is wider than the screen, and they no longer float.
October 2026
One switch, simpler topics page
The About | History and Topics | Places switches are now the same pill bar, right under the page title. The topics and places pages lost their “Hide single-item topics” button, and sorting is a line of text under the switch: “182 topics · Sort Most photos / A–Z”.
October 2026
A new photo page, and places
Every photo has always had its own page; that’s the point of the site. This update gave that page a new design and retired the separate JavaScript slideshow, so there is now one photo template for everything.
- The new photo page: the photo fills the screen, with its title and where it was taken in a strip along the bottom. The description and topics sit just below.
- Places, a new way to browse: where each photo was taken, from the spot to the city to the state (“Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, California”), each with its own page. Topics that were really places moved there, so topics now describe what is in the photo.
- All Photos shows every photo in one grid, newest first.
- Old links still work.
Each photo page also tells search engines what the photo is, where it was taken and who made it.
October 2026
One style for every heading
Every heading on the site now uses the same wide capitals as the BENSTRAW.COM wordmark, at one set of sizes. Before, the About page, the topic titles and the gallery titles each had their own size and weight.
October 2026
Topics listed once on photo pages
Each photo page showed its topics twice, once under the photo and again in the footer. They were consolidated into a single set beneath the photo, alongside its other details.
October 2026
The footer no longer jumps
On the topic pages the footer used to flash at the top and then drop down when the photo grid appeared. It now stays hidden until the grid is in place, so nothing moves.
October 2026
Simpler menu
The menu no longer has a Home button, since the BENSTRAW.COM wordmark above it already goes home. “All Media” is now “All Images” and opens the every-photo gallery.
The wordmark now sits in the same row as the MENU button, filling the width beside it, so the links start higher up. The MENU button also sits a little closer to the top-left corner, and on phones it is now the same rounded square as on desktop instead of a circle.
October 2026
A new wordmark and watermark
The menu title and the mark on every photo are now the same wordmark, BENSTRAW.COM, in a wide, bold face.
- In the menu: it now sits below the MENU button instead of underneath it, spans the full width of the buttons, and links home. It is live text in a tiny self-hosted font subset (about 1.7 KB, only the letters it needs), so there is no request to a font service.
- On photos: the old “© BENSTRAW.COM” mark is replaced. It now sits in the photo’s bottom border, lined up with the photo’s right edge, and is scaled for each image size so it stays sharp from the smallest thumbnail to the largest image. The colored border itself is now proportional to the photo’s height, so tall photos no longer end up with a thinner border than landscape ones.
- Menu details: the icon in the MENU button is now centered (it sat left of center), the menu’s side padding is exactly equal on both sides, and the page behind the menu stays visible, softened, instead of going black.
October 2026
Titles, descriptions, and locations
Each photo gained its own title, description and places. These appear with the photograph and in sharing information. Alt text is a separate field for describing what the image shows to someone who cannot see it; older photographs use a title or metadata fallback until authored alt text is added.
September 2026
A new home on Cloudflare, with sharper images
The site moved from Amazon’s hosting to Cloudflare, which serves it from servers close to each visitor.
- Sharper photos: images are now prepared in sizes up to 3200 pixels wide at higher quality, and your browser picks the right one for your screen. Full-screen viewing uses screen-sized images.
- Every photo in one place: all of the photos in a single gallery.
- Safer originals: only the watermarked versions are published, never the untouched originals.
March – April 2026
Topic badges and a new way to count visitors
- Topic badges now show a small thumbnail and the number of photos in the topic.
- Visitor statistics moved from Plausible to PostHog, to see which photos people open and how they move between galleries.
February 2026
2026 Redesign: Immersive Viewing Experience
A complete UX overhaul focused on letting the photos shine.
Navigation
- Floating navigation buttons: transparent circular previous/next buttons over the image, out of the way until needed
- Keyboard navigation: arrow keys for quick browsing on desktop
- Touch gestures: swipe left or right to move between galleries on mobile
- Streamlined menu: a cleaner overlay with no distracting icons, which closes when you click outside it
Visual design
- Modern Warm Dark palette: coral (#ff9e9e), berry (#d84a6f), and peach (#ffc799) accents on warm near-black backgrounds
- Redesigned gallery cards: subtle elevation with a border glow on hover
- Better pagination: more contrast, sized for mobile
- Topic pill badges: rounded badges that transform on hover
Galleries
- Single gallery pages: a full-viewport image with the details below
- Topic views: higher-resolution thumbnails and consistent layouts
- Styled headers: bordered section headers on topic pages
- Filtered listings: concert photography is kept out of the daily-photo listings
Mobile
- Floating buttons placed in visible areas, touch-friendly sizes, and layouts that adapt to every screen size
December 2024
A floating main menu
The main menu now floats over the images, which gives the photos more room on the main display pages.
2024 – 2025
Related topics on every topic page
On a topic page, a menu links to every other topic that appears on the photos in that topic.
2024 – 2025
A new homepage
The homepage now features the main image of the day and the top topics.
2024 – 2025
Custom images for sharing
When a page is shared, the preview image is generated at build time from the page title (which is the date) and the site title.
2024 – 2025
Watermarked images
The large images carry a watermark with the site address. I used the gallery deluxe configuration: a transparent PNG and a few lines in hugo.toml. (The mark was replaced in October 2026; see above.)
[params.gallerydeluxe.watermark]
image = "images/benstraw.png" # relative to /assets
posx = "right" # one of "left", "center", "right"
posy = "bottom" # one of "top", "center", "bottom"
2024 – 2025
Paging arrows in gallery views
The single-image galleries always had paging arrows, but the gallery from the gallery deluxe plugin only paged by swiping, which suits mobile. The topic and category galleries open larger images and let you step through every image in a gallery. Subtle left and right carets over the image make that easier with a mouse.
August 19, 2024
Initial launch
On launch, the home page was the list of all the galleries in the /galleries directory. I had not yet made many changes to the galleries deluxe theme, apart from adding topics and the navigation and footer changes that support them.
