Hashtags
A #tag in a caption is a link. Tap it and the feed you’re already in — Home, Featured, or Discover — narrows to just the frames tagged with it. It filters the feed you’re viewing rather than taking you somewhere else.
RSS Feeds
fewer.photos publishes three kinds of RSS feed:
- The Featured feed is public — a running feed of the frames that make the Featured wall, cycle by cycle.
- Per-profile feeds are public — one per person, following just their posted frames.
- Your personal Home feed is private. It’s the same chronological, follow-only feed you see in the app, delivered as RSS. The feed’s URL contains a private token rather than a login, so treat that link the way you would a password: don’t share it, since anyone with the URL can read your Home feed.
Each feed’s link lives in the footer of the page it belongs to — Featured, a profile, or Home. Tucked into the same panel is an Ambient display link, which is the same content as a plain image for a photo frame or screensaver rather than as XML. See Contact Sheets and Ambient Displays.
Notifications in the App
Tap the bell in the top bar and you get everything addressed to you, newest first: likes, comments, new followers, follow requests, anyone who joined from an invite of yours, and any frame of yours that made the Featured wall. Each row says who and what, and opens the frame — or, for a follow request, the queue where you can approve it.
One kind of row isn’t about a frame of yours at all. Once you’ve commented on someone’s frame, you hear about the comments that come after yours, so a conversation you joined doesn’t carry on without you. It says whose frame it was, since that’s how you’ll recognise which thread it belongs to. You won’t be told about your own comments, and the frame’s owner hears about every comment on their frame anyway, so nobody gets the same news twice.
A small dot sits on the bell when something has arrived since you last looked. Opening the page clears it. There is no number beside it on purpose: how many things are waiting isn’t something you’d act on differently at three than at thirty, and a running count is the kind of pressure this app is built to avoid.
This is a separate promise from email. Likes and follows are deliberately quiet in your inbox — they arrive as one summary — but every one of them is listed here individually. If you turn off an email type, or a comment email gets held back by the hourly limit below, the notification still shows up here. Nothing is lost by muting your inbox.
If you delete a frame, the notifications about it go too, rather than leaving you links to something that isn’t there.
Email Notifications
fewer.photos sends email sparingly, and each one shows you the frame it’s about.
Three arrive right away:
- Someone commented on your frame — the frame, with the comment quoted underneath, so you can tell from your inbox whether it needs you now or later.
- Someone else commented on a frame you commented on — the same email, from the other side of the conversation. The subject names whose frame it is, so you know which thread it is before opening it.
- Your frame made Featured — which frame it was, and which cycle it came from.
Everything else waits. Likes and new followers collect into a single summary — at most one a day, however many cycles have closed since the last one. Seven people liking your frames is one email, not seven, and so is one person liking seven of them. It shows the frames that got the attention, who followed you, and whether anyone is waiting on a follow request.
Likes are the smallest and most frequent thing that happens here, and an app that emails about every one of them gets muted, taking the emails you wanted with it. A comment is someone talking to you, so it doesn’t wait.
If you’ve been away a while, you might get one more. When you haven’t visited in over a week, fewer.photos may send a single note about what you’ve missed — how many frames the people you follow have posted, and a few that made the Featured wall. At most one a week, never more.
It only sends when there’s actually something to show. If nobody you follow has posted and the wall is empty, no email goes out. And if you’ve turned off every notification type above, this one stops too. It says nothing about streaks, how long it’s been, or what you haven’t posted.
A frame only appears in an email when it’s public. Email has no way to prove who’s reading it, and messages get forwarded, so a followers-only frame is never attached to one. You still get the email, and it still links to the frame; there’s just no picture in it. The same rule applies to the frames in the summary, and to anything shown alongside a new follower.
An invite you sent has its own email, and no switch. When somebody joins from one, you hear about it straight away, with a link to their new profile. It’s the only email here that reports something you set in motion yourself, and you can only get as many as you sent invites — so there’s no toggle for it. Turn off every other notification type and this one stops too. See Inviting Friends.
All five kinds are switched on by default and can be turned off individually in Settings — turn off one, all five, or any mix. Comments on your own frames and comments on threads you joined have separate switches, so you can keep one and drop the other. Turning off likes but keeping follows leaves you the follower half of the summary and nothing else; turn both off and the summary stops entirely.
Comment emails also quiet down on their own. A single person commenting many times in quick succession stops generating emails after the first few each hour. A busy thread is bounded the same way, counted across everyone in it rather than one person at a time — five people talking at once still reaches your inbox a few times an hour at most. Everything you missed is still on the frame, and still in your notifications; the limit only applies to email.
A thread stops reaching you if the frame does. If the frame — or the account that posted it — goes followers-only after you commented, you stop hearing about that conversation unless you’re one of the people who can still see it.