A photographer's portfolio where the images stay the point.

The brief

A working photographer needed a portfolio that made booking enquiries easy and full-resolution work look the way it does on their own monitor — with albums they could reorganise themselves as the body of work grew.

The constraints

• Hundreds of large originals, growing monthly. Serving originals to a grid page is a non-starter; visible quality loss is equally disqualifying.
• Grid stability: images arriving late must not shove the layout around — cumulative layout shift is fatal on an image site.
• The photographer curates, not the developer: album creation, ordering and cover selection had to be self-serve.
• Lightbox accessibility: keyboard navigation, focus containment, escape to close — galleries are where a11y usually gets dropped.

The build

• Derivative pipeline on upload: Flask generates thumbnail, display and full-view sizes the moment an image lands, so the grid serves small files and the lightbox serves exactly what the viewport needs — originals stay archival.
• Layout-stable lazy loading: explicit dimensions and aspect-ratio boxes reserve space before pixels arrive; below-the-fold images load natively lazily; the first grid rows load eagerly so the page never opens empty.
• A lightbox worth using: arrow-key navigation, preloading of adjacent frames, trapped focus, and Esc behaving like it should.
• Enquiry flow with a paper trail: validated Flask forms, honeypot protection, enquiries stored server-side and forwarded by email — a delivery failure never silently eats a booking.

The outcome

Albums load quickly on mobile data, the grid never jumps, and the photographer runs their own catalogue end to end.