Photography Archive System

A note on turning scattered albums, cloud image links, and local photo folders into a durable public photography archive.
## Current direction

The public photography page should stay simple for visitors: albums, covers, image grids, and full-size viewing. The authoring side can be more complex, but the public route should not expose management noise.

## Archive goals

- Keep stable album URLs.
- Store enough metadata to rebuild pages.
- Avoid relying on one local machine path forever.
- Preserve high-quality originals separately from web-optimized images.

[[cloudflare-r2-d1-pages]] is the obvious infrastructure direction if the archive moves further into cloud-backed storage.

The archive also belongs inside [[personal-website-as-operating-system]] because the public gallery, admin workflow, and long-term storage should feel like one coherent system.

## Upload Path As Product Surface

The photography system is not only the public gallery. Upload defaults, watermark settings, file-size limits, and Worker throughput are also product decisions.

Recent upload work points to a practical rule: defaults should match the intended public brand, while limits and concurrency should match real image sizes. A 40 MB per-file ceiling, explicit watermark defaults, and bounded concurrent upload behavior are not implementation details to hide; they shape whether the archive can be maintained without constant manual repair.

This connects to [[codex-product-production-loop]] because the useful deliverable is the whole flow: prepare images, upload reliably, preserve metadata, publish albums, and keep recovery paths understandable.

## Recent Update - 2026-W26

[[weekly-review-2026-w26]] connects the archive note to [[future-edge-cache-playbook]]. The next useful refinement is to separate immutable image caching from shorter-lived album metadata instead of treating all photography output as one cache surface.

## Open decisions

- Should albums be manually curated or generated from folders?
- Should EXIF metadata be public, private, or selectively shown?
- What is the simplest way to sync PicX, R2, and local files without duplicate state?
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