Obscura

Obscura is a purpose-built static site generator for photography portfolio websites. It takes a directory of pictures organised into galleries, parses blog posts and simple pages formatted in Markdown, and produces a fully static website with responsive images, a lightbox viewer, extracted EXIF data, and cross-referenced content.

Obscura isn't trying to be everything. It's made for photographers putting their work on the web. Every decision made and every feature included serves that one single purpose. The CLI tool to support your image metadata workflow? Same deal — no fluff, just function. Bottom line: Less webpack, more f-stop.

Drop your photos into a folder. Obscura generates multiple sizes and WebP conversions for every image — sharp on a phone, sharp on a 5K display, no markup to write. Yes, that means compression — but you choose the quality setting, and your originals stay untouched. Your camera's EXIF data — camera, lens, aperture, date — is extracted automatically and surfaced alongside each image. No forms, no copy-pasting.

The things your camera doesn't know — a title, a location name, the story behind the shot — live in small YAML sidecar files that Obscura generates for you, pre-filled with what the EXIF already provides. You fill in the rest, by hand or with the built-in interactive editor. Write about a shoot in Markdown, drop in a photo shortcode, and your words and your images are cross-referenced — linked together in a system that understands both.

The result is a static site — plain HTML, no backend, no database — that you can host anywhere. It ships with a polished theme built for portfolios: dark mode, a lightbox, masonry and grid layouts.

Now go and see the full feature list!

There are many good ways to put photography on the web. Hosted platforms are polished and convenient. General-purpose static site generators are flexible and powerful. Obscura is a more opinionated alternative — built for one workflow and nothing else. If that fits how you work, you might enjoy it. If not, no hard feelings.

Setting up takes about five minutes. Read the quickstart guide and see if it clicks.

Want to learn more? Head over to the blog — there's a post on why Obscura exists, a walkthrough of the sidecar metadata workflow, a guide to deploying your site in minutes, and a look at the first portfolio built with Obscura.