France Ola
An editorial wildlife photography journal built for the field — species observations, expedition notes, atlas, and licensable photographs in one platform.
The gaze
France Ola is a wildlife photographer based in Switzerland. franceola.com is her editorial journal — not a portfolio. Each expedition is a Field Note. Each species an Observation. Each photograph a small object with metadata, EXIF data, and a place on the atlas.
The platform is a complete editorial and commerce experience built on Next.js 16 with Sanity CMS, Stripe licensing checkout, and Cloudflare R2 for signed photo delivery. Field notes, species studies, a 3D world atlas, a licensable photograph store, and an AI-powered archive are all managed through a single CMS.
An Ask the Archive feature lets visitors query the full photographic archive via Claude — returning relevant photographs, species, and expeditions from a single question. Newsletter signup is handled via Supabase. Analytics are cookie-less via Umami.
The site is intentionally slow and text-forward — generous typography, photographs sized to the page, minimal chrome.
Screenshots
The process
The challenge was to build something that felt like an editorial journal, not a photography portfolio.
Every element was directed — the field note structure, the species observation format, the atlas as the primary navigation metaphor, the licensing flow as a natural extension of the editorial experience rather than a separate store.
Key technical decisions:
Next.js 16 + Sanity CMS for full editorial control and fast ISR revalidation
Cloudflare R2 for original photo storage — signed URLs with 7-day expiry on purchase
Stripe Checkout for photograph licensing — Personal, Editorial, Commercial tiers
Resend for transactional email — license delivery with download link
Mapbox GL for the interactive world atlas with country drill-down
Anthropic Claude API for Ask the Archive — streaming Q&A over the full collection
Supabase for newsletter subscribers with RLS enforced
Umami Cloud for cookie-less, EU-hosted analytics
robots.txt opt-out from all major AI training crawlers
The resonance
Licensable photograph store — Personal, Editorial, Commercial tiers. Signed original delivery via Cloudflare R2 — 7-day download link on purchase. Ask the Archive — AI-powered Q&A over the full collection via Claude. Interactive world atlas — Mapbox GL with country and expedition drill-down. Field journal — expedition pages with photography and field observations. Species studies — naturalist observation pages per species. Sanity CMS — full editorial control, content updates in seconds. Cookie-less analytics via Umami Cloud.