``` Gold Panda - In My Car ``` via [[DEFCON]] ```yaml title: Add More Photos to Your Blog link: lets-add-more-photos published_date: 2026-03-31 22:32 ``` # Add More Photos to Your Blog Back in the day when I would blog I would scour sites like Unsplash, Pexels and the like for an image that would perfectly fit whatever it was I was talking about in a particular post. Eventually that would add this layer of stress to the act of blogging itself, an unnecessary layer of course, but a layer nonetheless. Eventually I gave up on the idea of having an image attached atop every post, but WordPress had this "Featured Image" field on the sidebar and it was staring at me every time I hit *Publish*. Then a couple of years ago generative AI started to fill that gap for me in ways I couldn't possibly imagine. I could feed the entire body of text to one of my blog posts and then ask the model to artistically represent the post in whatever way it deemed fit. Now contrary to what every single person on the internet would say, some of the images generated were some of the greatest articulations of ideas I had ever seen. I would never in a bazillion years come up with some of the ideas that I seen generate before my eyes. And being that these were based off my blog posts, you can see flickers of where the inspiration may have come from. That's fine and dandy and all, but guess what, the entire world thinks the text of those posts are generated by AI, too. Now you might think that we post to these "small web" sites with the understanding that the community is much smaller and the chances of engagement slim, and not really the point. But the reality is each and every one of us hitting Publish on whatever blog they use enjoys the validation of knowing that the words they are sharing are being read. I stopped blogging for a while entirely as a result of that. Probably for the better part of a year if I had to guess. I'm not exactly sure, I would have to dig into Daily Notes to pinpoint the precise timestamp, but I remember faithfully using DayOne during that time. This is how I knew that engagement was important to me. I didn't get tons of emails from people, but once I slapped that "Reply by Email" links on the bottom of my posts, I would get a handful of emails a month from random people about random shit, that I had said. And I really did enjoy that, and I still do. So I said fuck it and I started blogging again. I've long since dealt with the fact that I am never going to have a blog that can be summarized on a landing page or even a dedicated About page. That's life. It will be what it is. During my recent hackathon getting microblog and BearBlog to appear as one, I realized that mostly I was only doing this because it was going to be a clever way to share images that I have taken and slip them into my blog. Then it hits me. I have [179,663 stock images](https://files.catbox.moe/7icys7.webp) that I can use for header images on my blog posts. And the older and lower resolution they are the better. It proves the authenticity of the words behind these words. So in the future when people stumble upon these words, they will know there were real human beings out there who took time out of their day to give a shit. So when you see images added to my posts, please know they came from my camera (or my phone). They get run thru XnConvert, shrunk down, converted to WebP format and have a "retro" filter applied to them. Modern photos from my phone come out of Hipstamatic 99% of the time, so all the fancy editing to those is done with that. They still get shrunk down and converted as well, because, frankly images are expensive to host and we should all be mindful of that. Having said that, please take it all into consideration and add more images to your posts. We all enjoy a good photograph. ■