Overview
I collect lapel pins from museums, events, friends, and random vending machines, and the box of them was getting unwieldy. So I started photographing each one, running the photos through rembg to drop the background, and putting them on this page with notes on the provenance, materials, and where I picked them up.
It’s a digital version of the felt-board displays you see at pin-trading conventions, with the bonus that I can search and filter without touching the physical pile.
Map View
The collection also has a map view for pins with known coordinates. It turns the collection into a loose travel diary: brewery pins, museum pins, gifts, national parks, and roadside finds all land back where I picked them up.
Zooming in keeps the pin artwork front and center while labels appear only where they can fit. The result feels more like browsing a physical display case than scanning a spreadsheet of places.
Features
- Felt-style backdrop with each pin floating on a soft drop shadow
- Click for a detail modal with full metadata and prev/next nav
- Map view for pins with known coordinates
- Cluster-aware map labels and thumbnail markers
- Background-removal pipeline using Python’s
rembgwith the BiRefNet model - Filter by category, material, tag, or favorite
- Sort by acquisition date, name, or category
- Horizontal timeline of when each pin entered the collection
- Stats (top categories, year-over-year additions, top tags)
- Keyboard navigation; deep links via hash routing
Technology Stack
- YAML files for pin metadata
- Python
rembg(BiRefNet model) for background removal - Astro for static generation
- Leaflet for the interactive map view
- Tailwind CSS, TypeScript