It started as a travel diary
World Through Frames wasn't originally intended to become a photography website, let alone a publishing platform.
The idea started with a trip around South America in February 2026. I wanted a simple photo diary where I could upload a few photographs each evening and share what we'd been doing with friends and family back home.
The first version used WordPress. Photographs were taken during the day, selected and edited on the move, and then uploaded from my phone in the evening. For a travel diary it worked remarkably well.
The problem came when I returned home and decided I didn't want the diary to disappear.
I began thinking about turning it into something more permanent: somewhere I could properly organise the photographs from the trip, add more detailed destination pages and, eventually, start bringing in photographs from much older journeys.
From WordPress to something of my own
Initially, I tried to build the site I wanted within WordPress. There was a plugin for almost everything I wanted to do, but getting all those different pieces to work together quickly became more complicated than I expected.
More importantly, I was still adapting what I wanted to fit the tools available rather than building around the photographs themselves.
So I decided to try something different.
My professional background is in software development and data engineering, and I'd been experimenting with agentic coding tools for a month or so. It occurred to me that, with those tools and my existing development experience, building a small publishing system of my own might no longer be quite as ridiculous an idea as it sounded.
I started experimenting.
A few weeks later I had a rudimentary content management system running. It could manage photographs, create pages and publish the beginnings of the site I had imagined.
That was the point at which the project changed.
What had started as a quick solution for publishing some travel photographs began to look like something potentially much more interesting.
Building World Through Frames
From there, World Through Frames developed remarkably quickly. I spent a few hours most evenings adding features, changing things that didn't work and gradually shaping the platform around the way I wanted to present photography.
Within about three months, the first version was running in Azure.
By then the original South American travel diary had become only one part of a much larger idea. The platform could organise photographs around destinations, journeys, wildlife and collections, while allowing the photographs themselves to remain the focus of the site.
Development hasn't stopped, but the emphasis has started to change.
I'm now spending more time doing what the platform was built for in the first place: adding photographs, revisiting old journeys and building the content of World Through Frames.
There are still plenty of ideas for where the software might go next, and the platform will continue to evolve alongside the photographic archive.
It's quite a long way from uploading a few photographs from a phone in South America each evening.