How do I organize my online picture galleries as a landscape photographer

As a photographer who presents his pictures in online galleries, sooner or later the question arises as to how the pictures should be put together and presented in a meaningful way.

There are many ways to do this; by photographic topics such as forests or mountains, by calendar years, by photo trips, personal favorites and many more.

So, what is the right approach? And is there even a right or a wrong?

The question also arises, how many pictures do you want to show at all? Do I show all the pictures I like, or do I only show my absolute best pictures?

On my website I have now tried different approaches and my taste, what I think is right, has changed several times over the years. In the beginning, I sorted pictures by trip on my website and after each trip, the idea was, to add a new gallery. This approach worked very well for the first few years. This was mainly due to the fact that I didn't have that many pictures to show yet. Relatively quickly it became clear, that this approach would be too much and visitors to the website would be overloaded and possibly overwhelmed with the number of images shown. A new approach was needed for me.

Next, I categorized images by photographic subjects in nature and landscape photography. Mountains, forests, seascape, etc. At the same time, regional galleries were added, such as The Alps. At the time, each image should have its own landing page on the website. I liked that very much at first. However, it soon became apparent that this approach is extremely maintenance intensive. Adding new pictures became so time-consuming that I shied away from uploading new pictures to the website.

As a result, I removed the own landing pages for each image. From that moment on, my galleries were divided into 2 main groups. On the one hand, the classic themes of nature photography galleries and on the other hand, I introduced collections. An area in which I grouped pictures into groups that were a bit more regionally narrow. Here there were galleries such as: Gorges of the Alps or German Sandstone. I was satisfied with this organization for a few years. However, it turned out more and more that many pictures could not be added to a gallery or collection. Especially, my personal favorites did not find the right place.

For many months I thought back and forth, how the "optimal" gallery setup for me as a landscape and nature photographer should look like?

After some back and forth, I decided on a structured approach, which I would like to describe in more detail below?

Term Definition: gallery, collection, collection, archive or what?

A question I always asked myself: Which terms do I want to use? Are my images in portfolios or galleries? And, do I show pictures or photos in it?

There are several synonyms, which in the end basically all say the same thing. I don't have a strong opinion on this (for once).

In my opinion, the only thing that needs differentiation is the following.

Image: An image is a broader term and also includes, for example, painted images or artificially generated images by AI.

Photograph: A photo or photograph is an image that is permanently taken or stored with the help of an imaging method (to put it simply).

To take a photograph, you need a light-sensitive medium and always record a "real" moment. The word photography or photography is derived from the Greek and means "to draw with light".

Thus, a photo is always a picture. But a picture is not necessarily a photo. Since all my pictures are taken with a camera and nothing is artificially added, all my pictures are photographs.

So far, this distinction is not particularly important to me. It is obvious that my photos were taken with the camera. In the future, with the further development of artificially generated images, this distinction will become more important. Because AI-generated images can never be a photograph.

What are photographs called that are put together? Is there a right or wrong expression here?

Gallery, collection, archive, portfolio, are the terms you can choose from.

At this point, I do not want to go into more detail about the definitions of the individual terms. In my view, all of these terms can be used to group photographs together for an online display.

I have determined the following for myself.

My portfolio refers to the entirety of my photographs. It is my photographic work.

Even if I don't like to use the term photographic work, it fits quite well to explain the difference at this point.

Excluded from the portfolio are images that are used in the blog, for example.

Within my portfolio, different galleries are shown. In what way these galleries are sorted or structured, I will explain in the following.

What potential possibilities are there as a landscape photographer to structure image galleries?

In the next step, I thought about the different ways to group images in a meaningful way. There are almost endless possibilities here, because pictures can always have a context that not everyone can recognize.

As a result, I identified 6 ways to group images into galleries as a landscape photographer.

• By location, continent, country or region. Images are grouped according to where they were taken and shown in a corresponding gallery.
• By recording time. In this variant, images are shown chronologically according to the time they were taken. For example, by calendar year.
• By emotion and feeling. Here, images are summarized according to which emotions or feelings the images evoke in the viewer or which the photographer wants to convey.
• By theme or image content. In this version of the distinction, galleries are differentiated according to the image content, i.e. the subject. In landscape and nature photography, for example: mountains, rivers, waterfalls, forests, and much more.
• By season. Another possibility in nature photography is to differentiate between the seasons.
• By other topics. There are a few more possibilities, which I summarize here under others. Personal favorites, by trips, lates pictures or even according to technical aspects such as HDR's or panoramas.

Up to this point, I have not made an evaluation of the individual possibilities, but only collected all the ideas and possibilities.

A visual representation follows in the next picture.

What factors need to be considered? What is important to me personally?

Now that all the possibilities I have come up with are on the table, it’s time move on to the next step. In order to decide in which way, I wanted to structure my picture galleries, I asked myself a few questions:

Who is the viewer of the pictures? A photographer or no photographer?

How many pictures would I like to share? Do I even have enough pictures for a corresponding gallery?

Are fewer pictures possibly more?

Do I want to show diversity and everything I think is good enough?

Do I want to show only my absolute best photos?

What are my personal preferences and what does my gut feeling say?

What is the focus of my landscape photography?

Which images or places have the greatest meaning for me?

What is the goal of my gallery? Do I just want to show pictures, or do I want to persuade people to buy a picture?

How easy is it to expand this structure in the future? With entire galleries and with individual pictures.

Which sorting reflects my personal relationship?

• With nature
• With my photos
• With the places I visit. Regularly or only rarely.

How do other landscape photographers do it?

And, should I even care?

Some of these questions are very profound and certainly not easy to answer. At least I felt that in the course of this consideration, I thought about things that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual pictures. Some of these questions cannot be answered concretely, but it helped me a lot to think about them.

Development of my personal gallery setup

At this point I would like to emphasize again that the whole topic is a highly personal matter and there will rarely be 2 photographers who agree on this. Every person is individual and so is his or her photography and the way it is portrayed. Here I describe my thought processes and how I got to my setup of the image galleries on my website.

I see the advantages and disadvantages in many variants. To get a little closer to the galleries for my website, I decided to first eliminate the approaches that don't fit me and my photography.

First, I said goodbye to the variant of sorting my picture galleries by season. I find this variant very interesting, but it does not fit my photography as things stand today. This requires an even number of images from different seasons. I just don't have that. I think this approach makes most sense for photographers who focusses on 1-2 locations that are visited regularly and evenly in all seasons.

That leaves 5 variants.

Next, I discarded sorting by calendar years. Personally, I think this variant has its place. It showcases the personal development of a photographer over the years. As a visitor and viewer of a website, I don't think this variant is good. It just doesn't fit my way of thinking as a visitor to a page and therefore I don't want to have this sorting on my website. In a couple of years, I made a blog post about "my best pictures from calendar year X" ( links to these articles: The year 2023, The year 2024). I always find these articles very interesting and will continue to do them. Another reason why I don't want to have galleries by calendar years.

That leaves 4 variants.

Sorting out variants that I don't like didn't get me any further at this point. Now it was time for me to find out which variant was most important to me. I really wanted to have a gallery with my personal favorites. My personal favorites describe me as a person and also my individual preferences. When looking through my pictures that were fitting for this gallery, I realized relatively quickly that these pictures were all taken in a small number of regions. It is mainly the regions and countries that I have traveled to a lot. I have often traveled to them because I feel particularly comfortable in these places, or because I particularly like these landscapes for various reasons. They are my "happy places", so to speak. Due to the geographical restriction of these places, the photographic subjects are also somewhat limited. So, there should be galleries of my "happy places" and I gave them the headline - Where I belong.

From now on, there are three different galleries as an introduction to my portfolio - Where I belong.

What makes these places so special for me can be read in the respective gallery.