SuperSnimki.Ru — Redesign 2026

The SuperSnimki home page after the redesign

SuperSnimki.ru is one of the longest-running Russian-language photo communities: online since 2013, with more than 200,000 photos and over 4,700 photographers. We built the platform from scratch back then — and 13 years on, the interface was showing its age: heavy scripts, icon fonts, no dark mode and no real mobile experience.

In 2026 we delivered a complete redesign. We kept the platform (Perl/Mojolicious, MongoDB, MySQL) and every byte of accumulated data, rebuilt the front end from the ground up — and added the features that keep people coming back.

The brief

bring the entire site into one coherent, modern visual language while keeping the brand instantly recognizable;
make the site genuinely comfortable to use on a phone;
speed up loading and clear years of accumulated technical debt;
close security gaps and fix SEO;
give the community fresh reasons to write, shoot and return.

Before → after

Forum: 2025 vs 2026

Magazine: 2025 vs 2026

Camera gear catalog: 2025 vs 2026

Design system

Scattered styles gave way to a single token system: a type scale, 4 px spacing steps, corner radii, animation durations and easing curves. The typeface is Inter Variable, and 130 Lucide icons replace three separate icon fonts. We kept the signature gold accent — it ties the new interface to the familiar logo.

Light and dark themes. The site follows the system setting, and the Day / Night toggle remembers each user’s choice. Photo pages always present the image on a dark “stage”, so nothing competes with the shot.

Dark mode

Photo page

Mobile experience

An app-style bottom navigation bar: Home, Photos, Upload, Messages, Profile. A slide-out menu and a new full-screen viewer with pinch-to-zoom, swipes and double-tap. The site now ships with a PWA manifest, so it can be added to the home screen.

Mobile version

Everything redrawn

The redesign covered 183 templates: the home page, the photo feed, photo pages and comments, uploads, profiles, the People section and chat, the forum, the magazine, the shop, contests, account settings and the admin panel. Even the 12 email templates got a new look, with dark mode and responsive layouts.

Photo feed with genres and tabs

New features

A moderated magazine. Photographers publish articles that go through editorial review; authors get a dashboard with statistics, readers get a table of contents, a reading progress bar and Latest / Editor’s Picks / Popular / Following feeds.
A camera gear catalog tied to real photos. EXIF data reveals what the community actually shoots with: a “Shot with this camera” block, rankings of the most popular cameras and lenses, and filters by camera type and sensor size.
AI-powered gear import. An AI with web search finds new cameras and lenses and fills in their specs in two languages — editors just review and approve.
AI photo analysis. Critiques of composition, lighting and technique now run in the background and cost users 2.5× less.
AI article translation and auto-filled product cards in the photo shop.
Year in Review. A shareable public page for each photographer, with statistics, their camera of the year and best shots.
A Following feed, a podium on the People page and a grouped activity stream.
A photo shop: seller dashboard, moderation, orders and payouts.
Unified search across articles, photos, people and the forum.
Infinite scroll, clean in-page notifications instead of browser pop-ups, and free MapLibre maps instead of paid Mapbox.

Magazine article with a table of contents

The People section

Performance

the main JS bundle is 68% lighter — down from 674 KB to 213 KB; the editor, uploader, charts and maps load only when needed;
51 legacy JS libraries removed — Backbone, Handlebars, Bootstrap JS, moment.js with all its locales and more;
medium-size images via srcset for phones, plus a color placeholder while each photo loads;
heavy MongoDB queries replaced with an indexed flag, and article search — which used to take up to 30 seconds on common words — now runs as a single query.

The codebase shrank by 27,000 lines — even as the feature set grew substantially.

Security and SEO

XSS vulnerabilities closed in search, names, EXIF, the forum and comments; deletions protected with CSRF tokens;
proper 404s instead of redirects, canonical and hreflang tags, richer JSON-LD markup, high-resolution og:image;
RSS restored, the sitemap extended with images, and Yandex Metrica now tracks in-app navigation without page reloads.

The result

A community with a 13-year history now has an interface on par with today’s best products — fast, responsive, with dark mode — and a set of features that bring photographers back: the magazine, the gear catalog, Year in Review and AI tools. The platform, the data and hard-won search rankings are fully preserved.

Photo shop

Photographer profile

See the redesigned site live:
https://supersnimki.ru

Scope of work: design system, redesign of 183 templates and 12 emails, mobile experience, new sections, performance optimization and a security audit
Completed: September 2026