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For many photographers, the RAW file is sacred — the digital equivalent of a negative. It is the closest one can get to what the camera actually saw: unprocessed, high-bit-depth data that preserves every subtle gradient of tone and color. It’s the file you rely on when re-editing a favorite shot years later, or when you need absolute fidelity for print.

With this release, Exposera brings that same respect for the master file to the cloud. Pro users can now upload RAW and DNG files directly, up to 500 MB each, while Exposera automatically handles the conversion to a high-quality JPEG for viewing on the site. Your originals remain stored exactly as you uploaded them, and your audience sees a web-optimized rendering that reflects your work with clarity and accuracy.

Sharing is personal. Some photos are for everyone. Some are for no one but you. And many sit somewhere in between — meant for a handful of people who deserve more than a link but less than a public post.

Today, we’re introducing Circles: a lightweight, human-first way to share photos with named groups of people you trust.

The Idea Behind Circles

Every photographer, from hobbyists to professionals, develops their own circles of trust. There are the friends who see works in progress, the clients who receive polished galleries, the peers whose feedback helps refine a project before it goes public. Until now, sharing within these small, recurring groups meant awkward workarounds — private messages, unlisted links, or duplicating uploads.

Organizing photos takes time. Choosing the right words to describe a moment, a subject, or a mood can be both delightful and tedious. Metadata is the scaffolding that gives structure to your archive, but building it is rarely the part photographers enjoy most. Today we’re launching a feature designed to remove that friction — one that helps you move faster without giving up control.

AI Suggested Tags are available immediately as part of Exposera Pro. They provide quick, contextually relevant keyword suggestions for individual photos so you can tag, search, and share your work with less effort.

Keeping your portfolio, website, or internal tools in sync with your latest photography should be simple. For that reason, Exposera provides RSS and Atom feeds for every user and album. These feeds offer an open, predictable way to consume photo metadata and media links for public content (no API keys required). Note: private or restricted items are not exposed in public feeds, and media may be served via a proxy or short-lived signed URLs depending on visibility and access controls. Feeds can be used by reader apps, static site generators, serverless automation, or custom integrations — any environment that understands XML and HTTP.

Photography has always been a negotiation between abundance and constraint. The act of creating images is boundless; the systems that store and share them rarely are. Limits shape behavior — which images we keep, which we edit, and which we never upload because there’s simply no space left.

Today, we’re removing one of those limits.

We’re introducing Exposera Pro, our new paid plan for photographers who want to focus entirely on the creative process, not the logistics of file management. Pro members now get unlimited image storage, available immediately.

Photography has always been shaped by technology. Every generation of photographers has faced new tools, from faster film to digital sensors to computational imaging. Each advance changes what it means to make a picture — and how we understand the relationship between the tool, the maker, and the final image.

Today, generative AI sits at the frontier of that conversation. Its influence is expanding quickly, and with it comes a simple but important question: what does it mean for a community built around photography?

People come to Exposera to share and discover photography that moves them. Our Popular feed exists to highlight the photos our community is enjoying right now, but it’s built around a principle that runs counter to most large-scale social platforms: surface great work without playing attention-economy games.

This sounds simple, but it isn’t. Ranking systems are always value systems. The design of a feed determines which voices are elevated and which are buried. It defines what “success” looks like, and, in subtle ways, it shapes how people create. We designed our Popular feed with that awareness in mind: not as a mechanism to maximize engagement, but as a reflection of what a healthy photography community should look like when discovery is guided by appreciation instead of addiction.

At Exposera, we believe access control should be obvious, flexible, and never get in the way of sharing your work. Every photo has a story, and every photographer has their own sense of what “sharing” means. For some, it’s about public recognition; for others, it’s about quiet collaboration or private documentation. We wanted to support all of those patterns without turning privacy settings into an obstacle course.

So we designed a model that’s intentionally small and focused. Every photo or post can be set to one of three clear levels — Public, Unlisted, or Private — and each one behaves exactly as you’d expect.

Photography has always been about capturing a moment — light, color, emotion, the feeling of a place. But modern cameras do more than capture images. They quietly record where you were when the shutter clicked, embedding precise latitude and longitude coordinates inside the photo’s metadata. That data can be useful, sometimes even essential, for cataloging and memory. But it can also reveal more than you intend: where you live, where you work, or where someone vulnerable might be.

Photography has always existed in dialogue with its systems of distribution. The darkroom, the magazine spread, the gallery wall — each framed what was visible, what was valued, and what was remembered. Today that system is no longer physical but algorithmic: a lattice of opaque calculations and engagement models that mediate nearly everything we see. Photographers, consciously or not, now compose within this system’s logic. The question is not only what we choose to photograph, but what the network chooses to show.