Keeping the family
archive alive.

The work behind the memories

Old family websites held wedding photographs, travel albums, personal stories, and genealogy research. Moving them forward meant deciding what belonged on the public website, what should stay private, and how to preserve the originals.

The public pages now use lightweight static galleries. Nextcloud holds the migrated photo originals, while the family tree remains behind sign-in. Tower supports storage, recovery archives, and backups.

From an album to a website

1. Choose the photographsUpload to Nextcloud and add them to an approved public album or section.
2. Refresh the galleryA scheduled publisher checks those public albums and creates sharp local previews for new or changed photographs.
3. Browse on Houghten.comResponsive galleries keep captions and stable photo links. Original downloads come from Nextcloud.

Keep the boundaries clear

The publisher reads an explicit list of public albums. It has no private Nextcloud login and does not discover or change the sharing of other albums. New collections are connected separately after deciding who should be able to see them.

At launch, the workflow covered 2,059 photographs across 26 public sections: Chris and Becky’s wedding, the Caribbean cruise, Joe and Amy’s wedding, Paris, and Keegan.

Preserve links as well as files

The existing photo URLs and captions were carried into the new workflow. Added photographs receive stable links based on their file IDs. Managed previews are kept out of public view when a photograph leaves its connected album, and a restored photograph can recover its earlier link and caption.

Public website copies, private recovery material, and the originals each have a different role. Historical portable archives remain a separate part of the preservation work.

Make failures recoverable

Changes are backed up before publication. A temporary Nextcloud outage leaves the last published gallery available. The publisher updates both the live website and its build source, so rebuilding the site keeps the gallery changes.

Checks cover additions, removals, restored photographs, revoked album access, temporary outages, safe paths, and caption escaping. A real image test verified the three preview sizes, and the generated pages were checked for working routes and local image files.

Building it together

The galleries and publishing workflow were built with ChatGPT. My role was setting the goals, deciding what belonged online, and giving feedback on the results.