A link page for a photographer

The page is a doorway, not the portfolio

A bio link is not where your work gets judged. It is the moment between someone seeing a photograph and deciding where to go next. The portfolio, the print shop and the enquiry form already exist somewhere else. The page has one job: hand the visitor the right door quickly. Photographers routinely give it a much harder job than that.

The usual mistake is trying to be the portfolio. Twenty images in a grid, no labels, nothing to press. A visitor scrolls, admires and leaves without doing anything, because there was nothing to do. A gallery with no destination is a screensaver.

Three or four ways in

Most photographers need fewer entry points than they think. Portfolio, prints, booking, and perhaps presets or a course. Four rows, each pointing somewhere that already works. If a fifth appears, ask who taps it. When the honest answer is "somebody, eventually", it belongs below the fold.

Order them by what you want more of, not by what you are proudest of. If the year is booked and print sales are quiet, prints go first. The top row gets read; the fourth gets scanned. That ordering is the cheapest thing on the page to change and one of the most consequential.

Card images that show the work

A photographer’s page is one of the few where card images obviously earn their place. Put a frame from the actual work behind each link: a portrait on the portrait link, an interior on the interior one. A logo on a card tells the visitor nothing they cannot already see in your profile photo.

What matters more than resolution is consistency. Four cards cropped the same way, exposed roughly alike, read as one body of work. Four cards in different proportions read as four unrelated files.

• A logo or a watermark where a photograph should be — the card is expensive space, spent on a name the visitor already has.
• Four different crops in one grid, so the page looks assembled rather than shot.
• A busy frame with a small subject: at card size that reads as texture, not as a picture.
• A dark image under pale text, so the label vanishes exactly where it should be read.
• Your best frame on the link nobody is meant to tap first.

On a phone a card is small — a hundred pixels tall at most. Choose frames that survive it: one subject, strong contrast, an obvious centre. A composition you love at full width can be unreadable in a card, and that is a fact about card size, not about the photograph.

A price, or at least where it starts

The first message a photographer gets is almost always about money, and answering it one at a time costs hours a month. A starting price on the booking row — "weddings from…" — filters before the conversation begins. People with a different budget quietly do not write; those who do are already past the first question.

A note line under the link is enough. You are not publishing a price list and not promising one number for every job. "Portraits from X, an hour, ten edited frames" tells someone what they are getting into. Vagueness does not protect the price; it moves the same conversation later, after both of you have spent time.

Several genres, a page each

Weddings and commercial interiors are different businesses with different buyers. On one page each looks like a sideline, and a bride who has just read about warehouse lighting has drawn a conclusion you did not intend. There are two honest options: pick the genre you want more of, or run a second page.

A second address costs nothing here — an account holds up to ten pages, each with its own name — so yourname.tapmy.link can be the wedding page and a second address the commercial one. Give each link to the audience it belongs to; neither page has to apologise for the other.

Keeping the page fast when everything on it is a photograph

Every card is a photograph, and photographs are heavy. Uploaded images are re-encoded to AVIF within a byte budget and stripped of EXIF, so four cards stay light without any manual export. Your part is restraint: four cards load faster than twelve at any compression.