Why Two Sites?

I decided to switch to Hugo for my web sites a couple of years ago after almost 10 years of using a Wordpress site. I got fed up with the maintenance overhead of Wordpress, its security problems (my site was hacked a couple of times), its slowness and its appalling image management system.

The key advantage of using a static site generator is that everything is on your own computer and you don’t depend on an external provider who hosts the system. You can rebuild sites quickly in the event of a problem and preview changes locally before committing them to a server. I resolved never again to trust an external provider.

However, two years later I have changed my mind. I have decided to host my photography pages (only) on an Adobe site, built with Adobe Portfolio.

The main reason for doing this is to reduce the amount of work involved in creating a page with photographs. Using Hugo, this involves exporting these from Lightroom, adding links to the exported files and then adding captions, that are separate from the images. If a photo is changed, the process has to be repeated. A less important reason is that support for photo galleries in Hugo is limited and I haven’t had the time to get to grips with it.

The key advantage of Portfolio is that it is tightly integrated with Lightroom, the Adobe program that I use for photo management and editing. I can create a collection using Lightroom, add captions to the images then import images and captions into a web page. If I change things in Lightroom, the changes can easily be reflected in the Portfolio page.

As I discuss in this post, Portfolio is simple and limited but I quite like this and it mostly does what I want to do.

The downside is that Adobe doesn’t seem to allow user control of backups so things could go wrong. This isn’t a problem for images but it means that any text that I add to pages isn’t backed up. There isn’t a lot of text but I’m still trying to work out the best way to keep copies of this.