Creating my very own instagram feed - Scribblings of a Seeker

So here’s the thing, I deleted my Instagram about two years ago. Best decision I ever made, honestly. No more endless scrolling, no more comparing my Tuesday afternoon to someone else’s highlight reel. But I’ll admit it: I really missed sharing photos. There’s something genuinely satisfying about capturing a moment and putting it out there for people who actually care to see.

For a while I just… didn’t. My camera roll kept filling up with snapshots I’d never do anything with. Food I cooked, weird shadows on buildings, my dog (The I am sitting) looking particularly philosophical. All just sitting there, dead weight in the cloud.

Then I built this scribblings-of-a-seeker, and I thought… why not just make my own little photo feed? Something that feels like Instagram used to feel before it became… whatever it is now. No algorithm, no ads, no pressure to perform. Just my photos, presented simply, shared with friends who visit.

It took some tinkering, and honestly it’s still not as polished as I’d like (I’m dreaming of that buttery mobile-native feel one day), but I’ve got a workflow now that actually works. And since I tend to forget how my own systems work after a few weeks of not touching them, I figured I’d write it down. This is less “here’s how you should do it” and more “here’s how I actually do it, in all its slightly-janky glory.”

How the Photos Actually Get Online#

The whole thing starts when I’ve taken a batch of photos I actually want to share, usually after a trip or when I’ve accumulated a week’s worth of random decent shots on my phone. I pull them onto my laptop (usually AirDrop because I’m lazy and it just works), then run them through a script I cobbled together.

The script does the boring stuff: resizes everything to reasonable web dimensions, strips out unnecessary metadata I don’t want floating around, renames files to something consistent. I’m not a “spend hours in Lightroom” person, I just want them looking decent without much fuss.

From there they get uploaded to Cloudflare R2, which is basically my cheap cloud storage bucket. I like R2 because it doesn’t charge for bandwidth egress, which is a fancy way of saying “when people look at your photos, you don’t get a surprise bill.” Learned that lesson the hard way with other services.

Then comes the part that’s still a bit manual: I create a markdown file for each photo with the metadata: title, description, location if I remember it, date taken. I keep telling myself I’ll automate this more, but there’s something kind of nice about the curation step. It forces me to actually look at what I’m sharing instead of just dumping everything.

Finally I commit the changes, the site rebuilds, and boom. new photos are live.

Here’s what the whole flow looks like:

flowchart TD
    A[Take photos on phone/camera] --> B[AirDrop to laptop]
    B --> C[Run processing script<br/>resize, optimize, rename]
    C --> D[Upload to Cloudflare R2]
    D --> E[Create markdown with metadata]
    E --> F[Commit & push to repo]
    F --> G[Site rebuilds automatically]
    G --> H[Photos live on website]

The Reality Check#

Look, is this as seamless as tapping “Share” on Instagram? Absolutely not. It takes actual effort, and some days that effort feels like too much. But the flip side is that every photo I post has passed through my actual brain at multiple points. I’m choosing what to share and how to present it, not just throwing it into an algorithmic void.

Plus, I own the whole thing. My photos live in my storage, on my domain, in a format I control. If I want to change how they look tomorrow, I can. Try doing that with a platform you don’t control.

There’s still plenty I want to improve — better mobile experience, maybe some automation around the metadata step, possibly even a way to post directly from my phone without the laptop dance. But for now? It works. And more importantly, I’m actually sharing photos again, which was the whole point.

Take a looksie : https://scribblingsofaseeker.com/photography/