Comment by Klonoar

This is tangential but maybe some of the crowd here has wisdom: are there any apps (iOS or Android) that are built for RSS but have a good experience for just photos? What I mean by this is an app that is more or less Instagram-esque in browsing behavior, but just backed by RSS feeds with no comments/likes/etc.

I've been meaning to write about this but I recently found that I missed having one central place to share photos with people when I travel/build things/etc. When I thought about it further, I realized that I don't want the social media bits there - I just wanted the photos, self hosted, in something I could brand myself. This also solved for another problem I had, which is that I wanted to share my stuff across n platforms and got very tired of having to constantly provide any text context when doing so. Open graph tags work really well for "write once, share anywhere".

I have a working prototype up at https://photos.rymc.io/ and so far it's been great. I'll probably open source the stuff this year. It's not necessarily groundbreaking but I do think it's a decent approach; uploading auto-scrubs specific metadata, handles generating various previews, etc. Very easy to customize and just tries to do one thing well.

Notably, any page on it can be "followed" via RSS by just requesting it in the right format, e.g:

JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=rss

It can be tag-specific too, so if someone's only interested in my travel photos, e.g:

JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/tag/travel/?format=json

Back to the original point of the comment though: I'd like to find an app that I could give to e.g my dad and just let him browse things and see what I'm up to. None of the RSS apps I've tried fit well here though, with ReadKit on iOS coming somewhat close but it's a clunky experience.

If need be I'll just build my own at some point, it's not exactly rocket science... but it is time I could be doing other things. Anyone got any recs?