Award-winning landscape and nature photographer Greg Boratyn is best known for his photography skills, but he’s also now putting his background in software development to work with a new digital photography platform, grid.photo, designed to provide passionate photographers an alternative to Instagram that celebrates photos above all else.
Boratyn has been working on grid.photo for the past year alongside his actual photography work, trying to build a great resource for passionate photographers.
The core of grid.photo is its namesake, the grid, an area where users can share and view photos. Boratyn utilizes minimal compression, and the user interface prioritizes the photos themselves. There are likes and comments, but Boratyn is using a custom gravity-ranking engine to surface high-quality work rather than any sort of algorithm.
Boratyn explains that the initial motivation for building grid.photo came from his own website.
“I’ve had a personal photography website for years, fast, clean, built on Next.js with server-side rendering, and over time I started receiving a surprising number of messages from other photographers asking if they could buy my ‘theme,” Boratyn tells PetaPixel. “It wasn’t a theme in the WordPress sense; it was a standalone custom-built site. But those questions planted a seed: what if I took what I built for myself and opened it up for every photographer?”
He quickly began to think “bigger” than just sharing his website design with other photographers, though.
“I wanted to create a platform, one with a real database, user accounts, image sharing, community features, and a philosophy I actually believed in. The result is grid.photo.”
That said, Boratyn says he also grew tired of Instagram over the years, and wanted to make an alternative for his fellow photographers.
“Over the years it stopped feeling like a place for photographers and started feeling like a place for advertisers. A carefully composed landscape photo competes with short videos, sponsored posts, and content the algorithm decides you should see whether you wanted to or not. The feed became something photographers tolerated rather than enjoyed. I wanted to build something different — a clean, honest gallery where the best image rises to the top because people genuinely responded to it, not because of ad spend or posting time.”
Boratyn wants grid.photo to be much more than that, though. Even though it has only just launched, the broader ambitions are clear. The website includes an area for photographers to view workshops and a set of tools like aurora forecasts, foliage tracking, depth-of-field visualizers, timelapse planners, and more.
“I want grid.photo to be the last photography website a photographer ever needs to build,” he tells PetaPixel.
As for using grid.photo, it is pretty straightforward. Photographers can sign up and immediately start sharing photos. Boratyn says there are no particularly notable technical requirements for uploading photos — users can upload one high-resolution JPEG per day.
This one-photo-a-day limit is intentional, as grid.photo is not a place for people to share their entire Lightroom catalog.
“It’s a ‘showcase your best shot’ philosophy: one image, chosen carefully, competing on its own merits. There are no premium tiers. Every photographer gets the same experience, free,” Boratyn explains.
This relates to Boratyn’s immediate, short-term goals for grid.photo. He wants it to be a community for photographers who care deeply about their craft. Even a few hundred active, passionate photographers using grid.photo would make it a lively community.
Over the long-term, Boratyn is more ambitious. He wants it to eventually become a place photographers can use without needing their own separate, personal website.
“The platform already covers a lot of ground — you can publish and sell workshops directly to the community, send newsletters to your followers on the platform and to your own external mailing list, and build named galleries that play as full-screen slideshows with a beautiful Ken Burns effect… ” Boratyn says. “The goal is that everything a working photographer needs – to share, teach, connect, and grow an audience — is already there.”
Boratyn hopes to keep grid.photo free for as long as possible, and will consider a small subscription only if infrastructure costs rise enough to require it.
As for what’s in the works right now, Boratyn says he has already submitted iOS and Android versions of grid.photo and is now awaiting approval from Apple and Google. He’s also working on new features like Image of the Week and badges for users who consistently share great work.
“grid.photo is the place where your best photo finally gets the audience it deserves,” Boratyn concludes. “No algorithm, no ads, just photographers.”
grid.photo is available online now and is free to use. Many features don’t require an account, although you need one to share work and comment on other people’s photos.
Image creditsgrid.photo (Greg Boratyn)
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