Stop Building Your Website Like a Filing Cabinet

Your photography website works against you the second a client needs more than 30 seconds to figure out what you shoot. That's the standard many working professionals now assume, and most portfolios fail it.

After rebuilding his own site top to bottom for the first time in years, Samuel Elkins walks through the thinking behind each decision, drawn from over a decade of working as a full-time freelance photographer. His main argument is that a portfolio is a pitch, not a filing cabinet. Elkins found his old site buried the work under too many folders and clickable galleries, so he stripped it down to about 15 projects spread across food, hospitality, travel, and personal portraits. The point he keeps returning to is digestibility, treating the first five to ten images a visitor sees as a trailer for everything you do.

"Less is always more" is the rule Elkins credits as some of the best advice he ever received. Every time he adds a new image or project, he takes one down. That forces a level of selectivity most photographers avoid, and it keeps the whole site pointed at the kind of work you actually want to book. He also makes a claim that stings a little: his favorite projects are almost never the ones that paid the most. Clients can't tell the difference between a huge ad campaign and a personal series shot for free, so the deciding factor becomes creative vision and personal weight. His strongest piece on the redesigned site is the Washington project that became his zine, "Homeward."

There's a broader shift hiding inside one of his categories. Elkins splits his site into six clean buckets, and one of them is motion. He frames video as a requirement now rather than a bonus, and that tracks with where commercial work has gone over the past few years. Clients who once hired a stills shooter and a video crew separately increasingly expect one person to hand back both. If you shoot with a hybrid body like the Sony a7 V, the gear side of that overlap is already solved, so the gap is usually the portfolio. Building a directing section, even from personal projects, signals you can be trusted on set for motion before anyone asks. Elkins spent six months revamping his own directing reel, including a documentary still in the edit, which is the kind of runway this takes.

Organization is where he gets most technical. Your homepage, the page that loads when someone types your domain, might be the single most important thing to get right, and he stresses optimizing it for both desktop and mobile since most people will see it on a phone. He also groups work by what a client would hire him for, mapping categories to genres rather than to individual shoots. His long-running relationship with AllTrails is the example: four years, multiple locations across Washington and California, all pulled under one umbrella so a single click shows the best of that body of work without spawning a separate gallery for every session. Watch the full breakdown above to see how he structured each project page and which images he cut.