Creating a "best of" collection

For a long while, I've wanted to have some kind of "best of" collection available online, of the photos I've created since turning professional well over a decade ago.

You'd be surprised just how difficult it is to curate, when I have literally thousands of fully edited photos littered across hundreds of folders scattered over several hard drives.

I came across a folder where I'd attempted this once before - back in 2014. Nothing had been added since, and many of those in there I no longer consider worthy of display.

Then there's the issue of where to put them?

I remember having a debate with my web designer when I'd enthusiastically told him I wanted to have galleries - lots of galleries! He very firmly told me that actually, on my website, I only needed enough images to demonstrate to potential clients that I was worth contacting for a business enquiry, and that I shouldn't overwhelm and confuse them with hundreds of photos.

He eventually won the argument.

But it's never stopped me having a nagging feeling that my photos are too spread out. If someone wanted to really look at more than a handful, they would have to keep hunting and scrolling across multiple platforms.

Even Instagram, where I've uploaded many over the years, just displays everything in square format until you click on the image. 

And very few of my photos are square, so they never look quite right on that 3x3 grid.

Then I remembered Flickr - it was one of the original photo sharing sites, and back in the early days I did use it quite frequently to display my images. But as Facebook and Instagram became so dominant it slipped away into fuzzy memory territory.

However, it's still actually going, and my login details still give me access, and I'm allowed up to 1,000 photos on a free account.

And it has the added advantage of allowing you to sort your images into albums.

So for the past few days I have been finally creating the online gallery I've always wanted.

I don't expect anyone to stumble across it accidentally, but I now do have a place I can point people to if they'd like to see over 350 of my favourite creations, or wish to explore albums such as "Narrative Photography", "Portraits", "Black and white" or various collaborations.

It contains a few photo shoots I've never quite got round to blogging about, so you may well find something new - especially as I've put all the images in reverse order, with the most recent first and the oldest ones at the end.

These are purely my favourites. Others may well have chosen differently, but for whatever reason each of the photos here are ones where I can look on them with a certain level of internal satisfaction.

Click on this link to explore - https://www.flickr.com/photos/kimayres/

It doesn't include any of my not-people photography - flowers, insects, macro, landscape etc. At some point I might have to create a separate account for them...