I’d like to have my aunt’s wedding photos on a website, for easy and convenient viewing for the attendees. They’re about 1.1k images in total, spread across 6 categories (each category would have its own page). Some category examples are church photos, group photos, and photos of the newlyweds.

I’ve messed around a bit with this project: https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/image-gallery-starter

It seems like a very solid foundation, however Cloudinary’s free plan seems very limiting due to the amount of images I have (even though traffic is expected to be very low). I can’t afford a paid plan. I’ll also be using Vercel’s free plan.

Another thing is, it seems like they used the Next.js Image component to optimize and resize the images (load smaller thumbnails), which feels like doing double the work since the images are requested already transformed and resized from the Cloudinary API via a width parameter in the URL?

Does anyone have any advice, tips or suggestions for how I can pull this off?