May 27, 2026
Say cheese, start the workflow war
Phloto for My Photo Flow
One photographer built a tiny photo helper, and the comments turned into a workflow war
TLDR: A photographer built a personal tool to make posting photos easier after getting annoyed by slow, awkward editing and upload steps. In the comments, readers split between “just use the pro tools” and “I built my own weird photo machine too,” turning the story into a hilariously relatable hobbyist showdown.
A photographer got fed up with the messy ritual of sorting, editing, shrinking, tagging, and posting giant image files to a personal site, so he built his own little tool, phloto, to keep the whole process under control. On paper, it’s a classic nerdy side project: fix the pain, save the photos, protect private location data, and stop waiting forever for uploads. But in the comments, the real show kicked off: readers instantly turned this into a full-blown “your photo process is wrong” showdown.
One camp swooped in with the practical grown-up energy. User imagetic basically said: why reinvent the wheel when serious photographers already use Photo Mechanic to speed through imports, picks, and bulk info editing? The vibe was very "friend, there is a tool for this." That gave the thread a delicious undertone of bespoke passion project vs. boring professional efficiency.
Then came the houseplant coders. Another commenter, dllu, didn’t just sympathize — they escalated. They casually revealed they’d also built their own photo pipeline, plus an image viewer, plus an AI script to dream up captions and categories. That turned the whole thing into a mini support group for people who cannot simply use normal software and go outside.
The funniest running joke? The author called it a "houseplant program," and the comments practically watered it into a meme. The mood wasn’t angry so much as delightfully self-aware: everyone knows this is overkill, and that’s exactly why they love it.
Key Points
- •The author built a personal tool called phloto to improve a photo workflow for tagging, metadata handling, web transcoding, and site deployment.
- •The described workflow starts with RAW image capture, followed by development in software such as Darktable or RAWPower and export to large lossless 16-bit PNG files.
- •For web publishing, the author converts images to WebP, creates smaller scaled versions, and filters metadata to avoid exposing private data such as GPS coordinates.
- •The previous workflow had portability problems because the author used an iPad for editing but could not run Darktable on it.
- •Metadata loss and slow Hugo-based transcoding were major issues, including incomplete metadata preservation and rebuild times of about four minutes for two galleries.