Clay.site

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Photo gallery

Your photographs, big enough to look at

A real Clay site — built from a Google listing

Instagram crops your work to a square and buries it under a feed. A page of your own does neither.

A tattooist's portfolio is four hundred squares. So is a florist's, a photographer's and most hotels'. The one picture that would win the job is in there somewhere, cropped at the edges and three months down the feed.

On a Clay site the photographs are a band of their own on the home page — up to eight, in the shape they were taken in — and tapping one opens a full-screen viewer holding every photograph the business has. Swipe on a phone. Arrow keys and a strip of thumbnails on a desk.

8photographs on the band — the rest live in the viewer

1400pxthe width each Google photograph is fetched at

What full width means

A room is not a square

A photograph of a room is mostly the room. Crop it to a square and you keep a corner — half a chair, some tiles, none of the light that made you take it. Here the picture keeps the shape it was shot in.

The phone gets its own drawing rather than the desktop narrowed, and a test enforces that rather than good intentions, so the gallery on a phone is drawn for a phone.

What you do not get is a say in how the band is arranged. Beside, behind, a grid or a row you swipe — the content and the theme decide that, and there is no control for it. That is the sentence most people want to argue with.

When somebody taps one

Eight on the band, all of them behind it

The band on the home page carries at most eight. Tap any of them and the viewer opens over whatever was being read, holding every photograph the business has, and closes back onto the same spot.

There is no photos page, and that is not an oversight waiting to be fixed. A gallery at its own address is somewhere people have to decide to go and then find their way back from. This one opens where they already are.

It needs two photographs to appear at all. With one there is no band, because one picture is not a gallery, it is a picture.

What you get

Ten come down, eight go up

Your Google photographs are fetched at 1400px, scored, de-duplicated and colour-graded as one set, and the best eight go on the site.

Yours before a customer's snapshot

Google records who published each photograph, so the ones the business took rank ahead of the ones a visitor left.

One of them opens the page

Before the design is chosen, a model looks at ten of your shots and picks which one the site opens on.

Questions

Is there a photos page?

No. /photos does not exist and it is not being built. The gallery is a band on the home page and a viewer that opens on top of whatever somebody is reading, wherever on the site they happen to be. A gallery you have to navigate to is a gallery most people never open.

Can I put my Instagram feed on the site?

No — there is no Instagram grid and no embedded posts anywhere in Clay. Your photographs sit at your own address and your profile is a mark in the footer. If the work already lives on Instagram, this is where a copy of it stops being cropped: a link-in-bio that is a whole site.

Can I show video?

No. Video is not a feature you can add and it is never put on a page — the gallery is photographs only. If moving work is the argument in your trade, that is worth knowing now rather than after an afternoon of setting one up.

Where do the photographs come from if I have never uploaded any?

From your Google listing. Up to ten are read off it when the site is generated, which is why a page exists before you have typed a word: a website from your Google listing. After that you swap them for your own and add the ones Google never had.

Do I have to size the photographs first?

No. Every picture is rotated by its own EXIF, resized, re-encoded and given a blur to load behind it, on our side, when it goes up. A six-megabyte photograph straight off a phone does not become a slow page — which is the usual reason a portfolio site ends up with small pictures on it.

Real sites, made with Clay

Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot — so what you see is what it looks like right now.