Edit: thank you for all information, it is really helpful 💖 I will check out pixelfed (.art) and go from there, maybe later setting up something “at home” ! Thanks again !!!
Hello !
I just got asked for a link to my paintings, and well I don’t have an art portfolio online and after trying some free ones out, I haven’t found anything nice (ease if useno nag-ware) so I thought of Devianart where lits of good pixel artists hanged around some ten years ago …
But I have heard Devianart is no longer recommended or the goto place for your portfolio, is that so (or not ofc!) and if, do you have any recommendations for a free online portfolio? Say 30-40 paintings tops.
I’m thinking about setting up something myself so self hosting (FOSS) recommendations are greatly appreciated too!
Cheers!
Might be worth checking out Pixelfed. It’s more a replacement for Instagram than DeviantArt, and isn’t really structured like a gallery, so may not suit your needs. But I’m going to mention it anyways, simply because I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for and it is an open source, federated, reasonable way to show your work.
and isn’t really structured like a gallery
I think that might depend on which instance you create an account on. I just had a quick look at pixelfed.social and profiles come up with a gallery view.
Edit: I also use it exclusively for looking at and posting art, as opposed to social stuff, and find it great for this.
So what I mean is that, to me, a real gallery type site would allow you to do things like filter down by tags and explore specific types of posts by an artist that catches your attention, with combinations of filters, etc. (This would obviously depend on how they used tagging as well.) pixelfed is also built around adding pictures as posts.
There are third party clients that can present information different ways, but the actual website is how you’d generally expose people to your content (especially because it’s not something massively popular like instagram). It also, while good at what it is, just doesn’t provide the kind of control over structure and organization that I personally would prefer to share my pictures with, which is why I haven’t managed to bring myself to add my pictures in bulk there.
But like I said, it’s good at what it is and may fit his needs better than mine, so it’s worth a good look.
OK, those are good points. It would be great if that kind of functionality can get incorporated into it at some point.
Pixelfed supports tags, so even if the official team didn’t want to do that, it should be possible to make an alternate front end with different tools to allow you to categorize pictures in other ways without having to interfere with the actual mechanisms/structures storing pictures.
It would also be perfectly possible to branch further from Pixelfed, but still keep compatibility federation-wise to leverage the social stuff. This would, in theory, allow you to focus more on the portfolio aspect on your own site, while still also having the social feed portions for people to follow your work in real time. It might be easier to implement something like requiring moderator review before a comment on a picture displays with a harder fork.
That’s all way past the scope of what I’d have time for, though. I’m more likely to make something simpler from scratch that fits my own criteria.
Hopefully Pixelfed will continue to grow and various clients can be developed which cater to different types of users. For now I believe @[email protected] is the man to address our suggestions to. I’d imagine he’s also quite busy though…
To be fair, I absolutely respect keeping the development focused. Feature creep keeps projects from getting core shit done properly.
It’s not open source, but Tumblr is a decent option if you want something fairly easy to setup. Additionally, it can look very professional with a good theme..
As others have already mentioned, Pixelfed is probably your best option for a FOSS solution to your problem.
There’s sheezy.art and inkblot.art which are the ones I use, and Cara.app which I’m not familiar with but seems more professional (like artstation) than the former two. None of these are FOSS though.
Inkblot Art is a buggy, authoritarian mess that prevents people from seeing anything if not logged in. That’s the last thing I’d recommend.
I highly recommend using Pixelfed. It looks really nice, is easy to use, is FOSS, decentralised and federated, and is a really positive space. It’s designed as a sort of Instagram replacement but whereas Instagram is used as a ‘social media’ advertising platform, Pixelfed is all art and photography. I actually find it to be one of the only genuinely enjoyable and uplifting parts of the internet at the moment and have discovered loads of art through it that I love and am inspired by. Have a look at some user profiles on a few instances to find one that looks like how you want to present your portfolio before signing up to one, as there may some variety between instances.
If you don’t mind doing a bit more work, it’s also not too difficult to set up a wordpress website on a cheap VPS using YUNOhost.
For ease and goodness I think Pixelfed is unbeatable though :)
Do you recommend a particular instance?
I only have experience with pixelfed.social which is my home instance. I think you’ll be fine with any general purpose instance though. They should all federate well, so your home feed will be made up of accounts and hashtags that you follow which can come from anywhere on the fediverse, not just your own instance. It’s well worth exploring and getting a nice feed for yourself based on people and styles/mediums/subjects that you like. It’s also good to comment on others work and keep the encouraging/supportive vibe happening :)
Pretty sure you shouldn’t use WordPress - it’s an aging platform with serious security vulnerabilities. 😬
