Edit: thank you for all information, it is really helpful 💖 I will check out pixelfed (.art) and go from there, maybe later setting up something “at home” ! Thanks again !!!
Hello !
I just got asked for a link to my paintings, and well I don’t have an art portfolio online and after trying some free ones out, I haven’t found anything nice (ease if useno nag-ware) so I thought of Devianart where lits of good pixel artists hanged around some ten years ago …
But I have heard Devianart is no longer recommended or the goto place for your portfolio, is that so (or not ofc!) and if, do you have any recommendations for a free online portfolio? Say 30-40 paintings tops.
I’m thinking about setting up something myself so self hosting (FOSS) recommendations are greatly appreciated too!
Cheers!
DeviantArt has been declining over the past few years due to controversial design changes and, more recently, a push for genAI garbage.
A lot of artists I’ve seen have recently been going to https://cara.app/ , although it’s relatively new and it’s unclear if it will last.
If you want something ActivityPub, you can also consider finding/hosting a PixelFed instance.
Cara has it in their terms of service that they gain the shared copyright of anything posted on their website. Nothing in their terms of service says they can’t open a store and sell prints or even sell the data to an AI company.
Cara is literally one of the worse places for artists.
Tos: https://blog.cara.app/terms
The closest thing I can find is the following:
The Cara Site and all works of art (“Art”) and/or other user generated content (including without limitation commentary, images, third-party links, and similar content and/or works) (collectively the “Art And Other User Generated Content”), text, data, and other materials contained in the Cara Site are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created any individual piece of Art And Other User Generated Content (the “Artist”). No such materials may be copied, reproduced, republished, modified or used in any way except as provided in these Terms and Conditions.
Which doesn’t actually grant any copyright; it just explicitly states that the artist remains the copyright holder.
There seems to be a weird hateboner on Instagram for Cara, for unsurprising reasons.
are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist
The hateboner is justified. For all it’s faults, instagram explicitly says it doesn’t own any of the pictures and only has a license to display which the user can revoke at anytime.
Deviant art has this in it’s TOS:
DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in your works or other materials posted by you to DeviantArt (Your Content).
It might be due to plain incompetence and not malice but their TOS lets them do a lot more than most platforms.
The terms of service explicitly say that art remains copyright of the artist. Where are you reading that suggests that they’ve granted themselves extra rights?
I guess you could interpret “are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist” to mean “are the property of either Cara and/or the individual artist at Cara’s discretion”, but that’s such a stretch that I can’t see a judge accepting it.
I misspoke in my first comment. It’s vague on if copyrights are shared but it does explicitly say it gains ownership.
In any case, this issue has been brought up and they haven’t fixed it. Every other platforms makes it very clear who has ownership of what. There’s too much room for abuse and its either a grift or incompetence and with all the other problems with the platform, it’s not a good look.
Federated platforms are popping up for this kind of thing, better to wait imo.
It also has rapidly-ballooning expenses with basically no income model other than a donation link.
I want a decent new art platform as much as everyone else but I’m not moving my entire portfolio over to a new service that, honestly, looks like it’ll be dead in 6-12 months.
I want a decent new art platform as much as everyone else but I’m not moving my entire portfolio over to a new service that, honestly, looks like it’ll be dead in 6-12 months.
It might be worth self-hosting your own website.
This is really the best option. It’s incredibly easy these days and let’s them incorporate an e-shop later.
Although a lot of these platforms are about getting exposure as well.
What are the terms that say that? I just want to be sure because every few years I see uproar over misinterpretations of some social site’s terms of service saying “we have the right to modify and redistribute your work”, when all it means is that they can host and make slight modifications to the files you post.
Their TOS isnt very long, a user linked it above.
Here’s the abridged part that is of interest:
(Everything on the website including user generated content) are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist
Yep, after 18 years on dA, I closed my account there yesterday.
I had about 2000 photos or so, but a year ago I got too pissed off at how slow and annoying it was to navigate, so I set up an index page on a webhost and use digiKam to create albums.
I update the index page in HTML/CSS and link to the albums.
The albums does have some javascript, that is to enable arrowkey navigation, else it is just pure HTML and CSS, and it is blazingly fast.
Try Photoview simple selfhosted gallery. Needs only reading permissions on a folder. It creates a gallery based on your folder structure ☺️
Might be worth checking out Pixelfed. It’s more a replacement for Instagram than DeviantArt, and isn’t really structured like a gallery, so may not suit your needs. But I’m going to mention it anyways, simply because I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for and it is an open source, federated, reasonable way to show your work.
and isn’t really structured like a gallery
I think that might depend on which instance you create an account on. I just had a quick look at pixelfed.social and profiles come up with a gallery view.
Edit: I also use it exclusively for looking at and posting art, as opposed to social stuff, and find it great for this.
So what I mean is that, to me, a real gallery type site would allow you to do things like filter down by tags and explore specific types of posts by an artist that catches your attention, with combinations of filters, etc. (This would obviously depend on how they used tagging as well.) pixelfed is also built around adding pictures as posts.
There are third party clients that can present information different ways, but the actual website is how you’d generally expose people to your content (especially because it’s not something massively popular like instagram). It also, while good at what it is, just doesn’t provide the kind of control over structure and organization that I personally would prefer to share my pictures with, which is why I haven’t managed to bring myself to add my pictures in bulk there.
But like I said, it’s good at what it is and may fit his needs better than mine, so it’s worth a good look.
OK, those are good points. It would be great if that kind of functionality can get incorporated into it at some point.
Pixelfed supports tags, so even if the official team didn’t want to do that, it should be possible to make an alternate front end with different tools to allow you to categorize pictures in other ways without having to interfere with the actual mechanisms/structures storing pictures.
It would also be perfectly possible to branch further from Pixelfed, but still keep compatibility federation-wise to leverage the social stuff. This would, in theory, allow you to focus more on the portfolio aspect on your own site, while still also having the social feed portions for people to follow your work in real time. It might be easier to implement something like requiring moderator review before a comment on a picture displays with a harder fork.
That’s all way past the scope of what I’d have time for, though. I’m more likely to make something simpler from scratch that fits my own criteria.
Hopefully Pixelfed will continue to grow and various clients can be developed which cater to different types of users. For now I believe @[email protected] is the man to address our suggestions to. I’d imagine he’s also quite busy though…
To be fair, I absolutely respect keeping the development focused. Feature creep keeps projects from getting core shit done properly.
I highly recommend using Pixelfed. It looks really nice, is easy to use, is FOSS, decentralised and federated, and is a really positive space. It’s designed as a sort of Instagram replacement but whereas Instagram is used as a ‘social media’ advertising platform, Pixelfed is all art and photography. I actually find it to be one of the only genuinely enjoyable and uplifting parts of the internet at the moment and have discovered loads of art through it that I love and am inspired by. Have a look at some user profiles on a few instances to find one that looks like how you want to present your portfolio before signing up to one, as there may some variety between instances.
If you don’t mind doing a bit more work, it’s also not too difficult to set up a wordpress website on a cheap VPS using YUNOhost.
For ease and goodness I think Pixelfed is unbeatable though :)
PixelFed is also part of the FediVerse and uses ActivityPub, meaning people using Mastodon clients can follow PixelFed accounts.
You can run it yourself, but if you’re not able to for whatever reason, there are a ton of established servers.
Yes. It’s worth noting though that as a Pixelfed user you will only see posts with images. In fact a lot of my favourite art that I see is coming from mastodon.art, which is (as the name suggests) a Mastodon instance!
Do you recommend a particular instance?
I only have experience with pixelfed.social which is my home instance. I think you’ll be fine with any general purpose instance though. They should all federate well, so your home feed will be made up of accounts and hashtags that you follow which can come from anywhere on the fediverse, not just your own instance. It’s well worth exploring and getting a nice feed for yourself based on people and styles/mediums/subjects that you like. It’s also good to comment on others work and keep the encouraging/supportive vibe happening :)
Pretty sure you shouldn’t use WordPress - it’s an aging platform with serious security vulnerabilities. 😬
It’s not open source, but Tumblr is a decent option if you want something fairly easy to setup. Additionally, it can look very professional with a good theme..
As others have already mentioned, Pixelfed is probably your best option for a FOSS solution to your problem.
If you want to self host with FOSS, you could try something with good ol’ Wordpress. It also carries the bonus of apparently being able to federate (I never got this working ☹️)
These images are troubling
What about them is troubling?
They depict children, and lots of people online think that automatically has to mean something nefarious.
There’s sheezy.art and inkblot.art which are the ones I use, and Cara.app which I’m not familiar with but seems more professional (like artstation) than the former two. None of these are FOSS though.
Inkblot Art is a buggy, authoritarian mess that prevents people from seeing anything if not logged in. That’s the last thing I’d recommend.
