Link to the website: www.photonmuseum.com.

I've been fascinated about photography for a long time dating back to my kindergarten stage when I found a film camera in the wardrobe in my parents' bedroom. Though I did not pick it up formally as a hobby until my undergraduate stage, I love capturing loving moments in life with my smartphone and a pocket-size CCD camera from my parents.

I did not find anything wrong with storing my photography works before I became focused on film photography since I can archive my "digital" photos with dates and exact locations thanks to the GPS functions implanted in phones and modern digital cameras. However, when I became more and more fascinated about film photography, archiving my films turned out to be some chaotic to me.

I can save the scan of each roll of film in a folder and name it with the date, location, and film type in some format. I can also use applications like Lightroom which can even allow me to do some modifications for each photo. However, these do not meet my needs. I want a fancy way to archive them and share some of good photos with others.

Finally, I made my decision to build a web application upon my graduation in 2023 when I just finished a school project and my very first web application "ParkingMaster," a parking reservation system.

It was difficult to start until the needs are cleared. Even though the only user is myself, it was difficult to clear out the fundamental needs at the beginning. I need to understand the basic functions to have and leave space for the implementation of more advanced needs in the future.

The framework of this function is like folders containing films/photos inside a big folder. Each folder is a representation of a roll of film. It should have tags like "film type," "location," "date," and be identified by a unique key.

User can locate a specific roll of films with each of these tags. At the same time, the user can keep track of some data like film type preference and photography log. For the user interfaces, it might be a good idea to mimic the film roll design. Basic info like date and location info can be overlay onto that.

Popular social media and photograph platforms like Instagram, Xiao Hong Shu, 500px have different logic of displaying photography works for photographers. Instagram focuses on simply sharing photos with friends while Xiao Hong Shu gives more attention to the combination of photos and words and dilivering to a wider audience. Platforms like 500px are more like a misleading database to me.

I want a place dedicated to my works while I can have the freedom to house works of other artists. One idea pops up! I am building a digital duplicate of some art museums or galleries. I can have different "rooms" to display photos of different genres. I can also change themes of each "room" following the seasons.

Other than the two basic functions above, optomizing user's workflow is my consideration for sure. I do not want to go to some "dirty" backend often to change the photos displayed. I am looking for an beautiful interactive dashboard to handle user's works without too much effort.

The UI design theme has some variation on different pages since the development time of each page are different. The themes become uniformed as a matured theme before several stages. Unfortunately, I have not updated them.

Administrator can have a basic understanding about the contents on the pages where the general audience browse at. There are couple of "cards" displaying different info and data. The administrator can change the collection of photos in each gallery. Some basic infomation of the stocked films are displayed here as well. Shortcut buttons to functions like archiving film rolls and accessing all rolls of films can also be found here.

The photo can be updated automatically each week as long as photos are designated in advance in the backend system. If you click on it, you can have the description of each featured photo.

The archiving function is still not fully functional. At the moment, administrator still need to go to server side to upload photos manually. A future upgrade would handle that problem so that admin can directly upload photos in the content management system.

With the upgrade of upload experience, a more user-friendly photo grouping workflow would be deployed.

Detecting the major color of each featured photo and automatically assigning that color to the photo "week" tag is expected to get realized.

The functions like film archiving along with displaying/sharing may have some value for commercializing. I am considering to turn it into a more matured system/platform for more general users and audiences.