This is very important, since, if you wrote it yourself you can probably fix it too, and mostly it doesn’t require that much basic knowledge to do. I’ve tried a number of off-the-shelf solutions for building web sites and at the end of the day each one of them has, at some point, failed for some reason I couldn’t fathom.
I host the family’s pictures at Smugmug.com; they have a bunch of plans, up to pro photo studios, with different roles (admin, assistant), web-shop, printing etc. I just use the account type that allows me to use my own domain name. Support is good, the site is configurable (from menus + custom CSS), storage is unlimited (no raws, that’s extra). I have a referral code that gives both you and me a discount. Since this now involves money, ask me in private if you want to have it. Otherwise, I won’t mention it again.
Let me know if you think I should take this comment down.
If you have questions (of general interest) regarding their site, you can ask them here in public and, as long as no money is involved, I’ll try to answer them here.
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For quite some years I use Flickr to share my photos with friends and family only. I have a PRO account. Now validating if piwigo.org offers a better solution for that purpose in respect of functionality and easy of implementation versus costs. Piwigo is open source and you can setup your own photo web-server. But I don’t want the technical hassle so now I have created 30 days test account on piwigo.com which offers piwigo hosting.
Main issue now is that my photo keywords (tags) don’t show up after uploading (directly of via Digikam). Hope to find out if that is an error on my side or an issue in the hosting setup. 2b continued.
You’re much too kind… I just put code from different sources together, hit index.html, and was surprised many, many times. But, as the code never was difficult, I got the chance to understand.
For family and friends I use my self-hosted Nextcloud. As I have my own webserver (for business-reasons), I would never give those pictures to others. They trust me, I don’t want to disappoint them.
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Normally the problem is in front of the computer. But I faced kind of same problem. I have one Portfolio on my Wordpress-Homepage (here, Portfolio Berlin Wall) with explanations / captions. But it was not easy to get them there: There are different fields for captions, then there is EXIF, also IPTC, does piwigo understand it, and so on. Many possibilities… I also used digikam at that time, but unfortunately I don’t remember the solution. Good luck!
You can stay with older Wordpress versions that work and stay 100% safe!
- Get whatever Wordpress version that works best
- Set it up locally (on localhost with xampp, wamp etc) the way you want
- Get the Simply Static plugin
- Generate Wordpress into a static site
- Host it somewhere cheap
With a static site you have no database, no security risk, you don’t need server cache and a low $10/year host is fine. (Note that Simply Static requires >WP5.4, but there are other WP static site generators or maybe Simply Static has older versions)
One drawback: Wordpress comments will not work. There are alternatives though, Disquss, Graphcomments and more.
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Is it a good idea to revive this topic or better create a new one?
How is the situation today like almost two years later? Any recommendations for an Open Source CMS if I want to start a portfolio website in 2023? Ghost and Craft CMS for example seem to be on the rise but I’m not sure whether they are suitable for a portfolio website.
Whatever you’d like!
I don’t think it’s too much different than it was 2 years ago, except for fediverse software like pixelfed or plume.
Decide how much of it you want to program yourself and find something that fits.
I have used various frameworks, including Wordpress, Drupal, Jekyll, Hugo, and minor various specialized minor projects, for personal websites, including blogs and galleries.
Sooner or later, one of the following happens:
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the underlying software has bugs, which remain unfixed or get fixed with a long lag. This happened a lot with eg Wordpress. I have to dig in, identify the bug, see if it is reported, then work around it, or find a new theme.
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the frameworks get more and more complex. This has been a constant pain point for me in eg Hugo, which has users with huge static websites (understandable, since Hugo is so fast). You have to keep up with advances because existing features are deprecated.
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Various mini-projects which just claim to do one thing and one thing only are abandonned and/or get feature creep (the latter, and then the former, usually).
I found that I was spending a lot of time keeping stuff working, not adding content.
So I would advise the following:
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if you already know a computer language you are familiar with, try to find a simple static website generator in that language. It should be nothing more than converting Markdown to HTML, adding a header, footer, and some simple substitutions, and run snippets coded in the programming language when you want them. These snippets will help you automate a lot of stuff. At the end of the day, you are just generating text (HTML).
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if you don’t find such a framework, just code up some HTML, CSS and Javascript (if applicable). In the long run it will be less work than debugging someone else’s buggy code, and much, much easier to customize.
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If you are not into either of these, just pay for a service.
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@Tamas_Papp completely agree with everything you’ve said. In fact I’ve been having great fun converting my website to use React/TypeScript doing much as you suggest - a combination of a simple markdown renderer for wiki pages, and a gallery site much as I was previously achieving with python/jquery.
The great thing is I know it will be what I need, no more, no less, and it will stay maintained and never suffer from feature creep. Oh and as a side-effect I’ll get better at coding in the programming languages that currently pay my bills.
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You may try Flask and jinja2 in your implementation too. Its based on python. I do not know though how well you could implement a portfolio website with these frameworks/servers though.
@markman8 not sure who you’re replying to there, but my original implementation did use Flask/jinja2. My new one doesn’t though, because I’m implementing an API using NodeJS/Express now, and retiring my jquery (which is a bit outdated now).
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My recommendation is not trying to think too hard about these things. There are a lot of developer types here and I know it’s hard. 
Let me just leave this here:
I know it’s about blogging, but it can easily be applied to over thinking the technicalities of a portfolio website.
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Mine is as much about learning the development process / love of coding as it is about putting content out there. I mostly don’t share the URL and just use it for documenting my own technical investigations and being able to access my photos when I’m away from home
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Hm, I might go this way actually, not sure yet. Being a full stack software developer for go backends and Angular frontends helps I’m sure 
But I thought I’d maybe leave the coding for the job. Not that I don’t have fun doing it … Great inspiration here anyway. I got hugo recommended from my colleague as well.
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We have used Hugo all over the place for stuff. The templating language is a little weird but its better than any other static site generator I’ve used
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As long as it’s a conscious decision to prioritize exploring web development. It was meant as a word of warning for those who are getting into a search for the best solution™️ when they just want publish their photography on the web.
I’ve been a Hugo user for many years and have not noticed this. What did they deprecate?
I’ve been looking at Hugo since forever but never transitioned due to metadata support. The support for image metadata is still weak right? You can only access plain exif no xmp or iptc. This can become quite annoying for a photo portfolio.
Correct.
But I’d just write a shell script to dump the wanted metadata into the metadata of the markdown file that references the image, then you can tap into the tagging template that hugo has.