The funny thing is… I miscalculated something, and after the latest photoshoot I did in the city, the number was 99,912. To make sure it was correct, I went on the Photoshelter site (the cloud service I use to archive all these photos) and started adding up photos per gallery (one gallery = one year), and the result was – a bit shocking – 101,038. The last time I added up photos within the galleries was sometime in March 2024, so in between, I messed up and deducted a couple of hundred photos. Well, at least there weren’t fewer photos.
To sum up everything, the photo service Fotografije Zagreba (fotografijezagreba.hr) reached the magical number of 100,000 photos! I was hoping to reach that number by the end of summer 2024, but I did it sometime in July already.
Let me explain what the photo service Fotografije Zagreba (translated Photos of Zagreb) is. It all started in May 2018 when I decided to build an online archive of photos of Zagreb. At the start, it was a sort of addon for the website Lice Grada (licegrada.hr), which I started in 2016, and it was called Lice Grada Media (licegrada.media – doesn’t exist anymore). That summer, I collected all the photos I had already, around 30,000 of them, and uploaded as the first photos of the archive.
In the spring of 2021, I decided to separate that archive from the website Lice Grada and create a separate photo service called Fotografije Zagreba. Three years after creating Fotografije Zagreba and six years after deciding to build that archive – the number reached 100,000 photos of Zagreb.
There are all kinds of photos there, from sports, various events in the city, street life, architecture, and – the most important and my favorite – photo projects.
The oldest project is Cultural Heritage of Zagreb (Cro. Kulturna dobra grada Zagreba: houses, palaces, and buildings that are cultural heritage of Zagreb), Zagreb Above (Cro. Zagreb iz zraka: photos taken from an airplane I flew with back in 2021 and plan to repeat very soon), See Zagreb (Cro. Vidi Zagreb: Small details on the buildings, houses, and palaces all around the city), and the project that helped reach 100,000 the most – Mapping Zagreb (Cro. Mapiranje Zagreba: The idea is to take photos of every street, park, and square in Zagreb; the photo below shows the current state of that project. Red shows photographed parts of the city, black and yellow color means that those places are next in line).
In July 2024 I started a new project, something like Mapping Zagreb, but I’ll talk about it in the following months.
That’s only a small part of the entire project that started six years ago, but whenever there’s a milestone (like this one), I feel like it’s only the start of a bigger story.
I guess the next magical number will be 150,000. I just need to be careful when calculating… 😬
