You may or may not know I have another website and a couple of other blogs. Most of them are also hosted by WordPress, but one was not until recently.

I have a digital photo website at peggyannephotos.com that until recently was hosted by Squarespace. I loved it, I thought it looked very professional. Then a friend wrote to me and asked for a photo to be removed. It was a couples photo and she was no longer in that relationship. So I went onto the Squarespace design page and tried to do that…I couldn’t. I could remove the page I had made, but I could not select the individual photo and remove it completely from the internet. The photo would still be in my domain somewhere, just not accessible to me. The only option I had was to remove the landing page where the photo was visible and left it at that.

But, this issue would rear its head again later. I went on a photography trip with some professional photographers and they said I should rename my photos before handing them to the client, not that I had clients. They said it would make them easier to find later and make them look more professional. I did as they suggested. Then I uploaded them to my Squarespace blog page with a little blurb about the photoshoot. This is where the issue became more serious. I had completely missed the point that, not only would renaming them make the photos easier for me to find, but the whole world could now find them too.

A short while after, another friend googled her name and my photos came up. Quite rightly, she wasn’t too keen on this. I then went into my Squarespace site and tried to get them removed. Nothing had changed and I still could not remove old photos completely. The only way to do it was to delete the whole website and even then it would take a month to remove all the data. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous not to have any control over my own photos on my own photography website. So, I decided to do just that, delete the whole thing and start again on a new host.

This happened during the lockdown so I had nothing to do anyway. My friend was very apologetic and said it didn’t matter, but it did. I thought this was a major flaw with the hosting company.

I decided to opt for the free WordPress package for Peggy Anne Photos as I really haven’t decided what to do with that side of things. Plus, I can’t really afford two websites. I am thinking about combining this blog and that website. If I pay for the upgrade on this one, I could combine them and still be paying less than what I had done for Squarespace. I like this blog as a purely film camera site and that one as my digital site, but I have been taking fewer digital shots lately.

In the meantime, I just added another page to project section on that website. The new page has photos from some cosplay shoots with yet another friend. Now the lockdown is easing, I am hoping to take more photos like this and maybe include other people.