I decided to enable and test out the 'portfolio' feature on Pixelfed today. It's cool but it has some quirks and stuff you need to keep in mind while posting, if you want it to present a certain way. Just to recap, Pixelfed is the fediverse verion of instagram, I started one for my virtual photography stuff a while ago and made a post about my first impressions.
Setup
The portfolio was easy to set up, just needs to be enabled from your profile page. It then immediately opens the settings, you can choose the sources of images; either recent feed posts chronologically, or a curated pool of your feed posts, that you create. You can pick any of your posts to add to the curated pool, and then customize the layout and look with a series of options. Layout options are like a standard grid layout or 'masonry' grid layout vs one larger image at a time in an 'album' style.
Quirks & issues
I came across a few little things that could be issues for some people, but would be alleviated knowing about them prior to posting.
Formatting: when you open a portfolio image, it adds the text from your standard feed post without any way to edit it, and does not include any of the space/empty line formatting. To demonstrate, I typically format posts like this;
(Name of image, maybe a little blurb about it)
*empty line*
(Game Name) - (Location where the photo was taken)
*empty line*
(relevant hastags)
Whereas the text in a portfolio post will just look like this:
(Name of image, maybe a little blurb about it) (Game Name) - (Location where the photo was taken) (relevant hastags)
I can imagine to some people, this would be frustrating, and it is a little bit to me but not enough to do anything about it. I lay out the feed posts that way for clear reability, and so people can just ignore the hashtags. I also can imagine having hashtags in your serious art/photography portfolio might not be the look most people are going for. However, if you are aware of this before posting, you can make feed posts with this in mind, or duplicate posts for the sake of your portfolio. This leads me to the next quirk...
Image Sources: You can ONLY pull images from your feed posts, you can not post images directly to your portfolio. Again, this isn't an issue when you are aware of it, because you can post accordingly. I think that making feed posts specifically for inclusion in your portfolio is a simple solution, as is dupilcate posting/re-posting your image in feed to have the text formatting you desire.
Along with this, if you choose 'recent posts' to be your portfolio source, it will ONLY include feed posts with one image, despite the feed allowing up to 20 photos in one post. You can add any of your feed posts to the 'curated' images pool, even posts with multiple images, BUT it will only show the first image in that post, with no way to individually include the 2nd, 3rd etc. on your portfolio. The only solution for this would be not grouping mulitple images when you post, or individually reposting the specific images you want, for use in the portfolio.
When you click on a portoflio image to enlarge it, and see the associated feed post text, it does include a link to the feed post, so people could see the other images that way. But click through rates can be a lot lower than you may imagine, and you would probably just want to present your best work front and centre when using this portfolio as an artist or photographer. And as mentioned before, if you are aware of these things, you can accomodate for them and post accordingly.
These issues were minor for me, and I found workarounds for them. I was just testing this out on a hobby virtual photography account though, and I am very much in the camp of tolerating inconvenience in exchange for freedom from the corporate datamining, and gleeful AI image scraping, of instagram or flickr. This may not be suitable for everyone, but after it's set up it won't be locked behind a paywall nor require an account to view for other people. This is still a decent option for me and I will be sticking with pixelfed, I doubt I will do much more with the portfolio though as it is just a hobby account.
You can see my pixelfed portfolio here, if only as a demonstration of how it looks with little effort :)