Along with the recent re-design of my blog, I’ve been trying to find a solution to own where my photos are stored and shared. I’ll use Flickr indefinitely and while I enjoyed using 500px, I don’t really want to manage two online properties that are commercial entities that both cost money per year to renew. I found Koken which is a free online gallery that’s self-hosted on a server that supports PHP and MySQL and it seems like it’s heavily dependent on RAM which I have tons of on my VPS.
I installed it in about 5 minutes and uploaded 650 photos so far and divided those into albums.
Koken is highly configurable and there are some paid plugins which I picked up. One is a watermark feature that you can control placement and opacity but the photos don’t have the watermark, only the ones that are displayed so I don’t have to Watermark and permanently stamp my photos in Adobe Lightroom. I can upload them without tarnish to my web server and Koken watermarks them. If I choose to sell photos at some point, the purchaser will get an image without the watermark which is nice. I’m using a free Koken theme that is color matched and font-matched to my blog. The design is really nice and there’s a lot more I can do with custom CSS code.
Recently, on the same entry linked above, I abolished all javascript cookies / trackers from my site with a focus on quick load times. I’ve gone back on that promise at least for Koken. There’s a lot on here that requires javascript so if you visit the photos site, you’re going to see trackers for Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. If you have Ghostery installed, you can block these and I highly recommend thatI may slowly pull the trackers out of the photo gallery. It’s a new platform for me so I’m still learning how to customize things.
In the future, I’ll post travel photo blogs to Koken and ask my readers to visit there to check them out and I’ll link you to them from this blog. I’ll still be posting photos to Flickr but aside from occasionally embedding them here, I won’t be promoting Flickr anymore. The Koken installation is a work in progress but I’d like to get some initial feedback from readers before I get to invested in one direction.