StarStuff Photos
Photography portfolio and fine art print store
The Story
Photographer Adam Balbi needed more than a gallery site. He needed a platform where visitors could browse his landscape, astrophotography, and nature work, then seamlessly order fine art prints in various sizes and finishes. And he needed to manage it all himself without touching code.
StarStuff Photos delivers both sides: a polished public storefront with gallery browsing, lightbox viewing, and Stripe-powered print ordering, plus a full admin CMS where Adam manages galleries, products, orders, and site content. The image pipeline automatically generates optimized variants (JPEG, WebP, AVIF) via a Lambda function and serves them through CloudFront CDN.
Built with Next.js App Router, Prisma on PostgreSQL (Supabase), and deployed on AWS Amplify. Authentication is handled by Cognito with admin group-based access control.
Features
Gallery and Lightbox
Visitors browse photos organized by gallery with a responsive masonry-style layout. Clicking a photo opens a full-screen lightbox with high-resolution viewing, navigation between images, and direct links to order prints.
Print Ordering with Stripe
Customers select print size, finish, and framing options, add to cart (persisted via cookies), and check out through Stripe. Order confirmation emails go out automatically, and order status is tracked through the admin dashboard.
Admin CMS
The admin dashboard gives the photographer full control over his storefront. Upload a photo, assign it to a gallery, and it's automatically processed into optimized variants and served through the CDN. Orders, products, pricing, and site content are all managed from one place.