TALITA & DMITRI

After our wedding, my wife and I wanted one place where guests could go to relive everything — not just photos, but the music we played, some words from us, all of it. The site has a highlight carousel on the landing page, two full photo galleries (one from our photographer, one from a friend shooting candids on an old digicam), an embedded Spotify player with our wedding playlist, and a section with notes we wrote thanking everyone for coming. Guests can click any photo to expand it and download the full-resolution version.

The main technical challenge was storing and serving ~500 high-resolution photos without hitting free tier limits. Google Drive would have hit my storage limit. Dumping them into the GitHub repo was a non-starter.

The galleries also had a layout problem: photos from two different cameras in two different aspect ratios meant a standard uniform grid looked terrible. They needed to flow naturally regardless of dimensions.

I initially went with Cloudinary ↗ for storage and optimization, but hit their bandwidth limits before the site even launched. With multiple people downloading full-resolution photos at the same time, it was never going to hold up.

I moved storage to Cloudflare R2 ↗, which has no egress fees when serving through Cloudflare's network — a natural fit since the site was already deployed to Cloudflare Pages.

For image delivery, I used Astro's built-in Image component ↗, which pulls the R2 URLs at build time, optimizes them, and generates srcsets automatically. Lazy loading handles the rest — photos only download as guests scroll into them, which matters a lot at this volume.

For the layout, I went with a masonry grid so photos of any aspect ratio sit naturally next to each other without cropping or empty space.