I've never heard of Hugo until I saw subpixel's comment. I was curious and asked Claude if I could have built my site using it. Claude's response:
Short answer: technically yes, but it would be a worse fit and require real workarounds.
Here's why your project strains Hugo's model:
The core mismatch — client-side JSON fetching. Your architecture has photogen generate static JSON index files, and then the SvelteKit frontend fetches those at runtime in the browser. This is intentional — it means the HTML shell is pre-built and tiny, and photo data loads dynamically. Hugo assumes it will have all content at build time and bake it into HTML. Your approach of loading JSON client-side is fundamentally at odds with Hugo's philosophy.
PhotoSwipe lightbox + swipe gestures. This is a JavaScript-heavy component for the full-screen photo viewer with swipe, keyboard navigation, and captions. Hugo doesn't prevent you from using JS, but you'd be bolting it on rather than having it as a first-class part of your component model. Managing that in Svelte components vs. Hugo templates is a real quality-of-life difference.
Shareable photo permalinks (e.g. /albums/patagonia/5) that resolve client-side — this kind of dynamic routing within a static shell is SvelteKit's bread and butter. In Hugo you'd have to either pre-generate a page per photo (slow builds, lots of files) or do ugly JS hacks.
Dark/light theme toggle, justified grid layout, OpenGraph tags — these are all doable in Hugo, but you'd essentially be writing a SvelteKit app inside Hugo's templating language, which is less ergonomic.
The bottom line: Hugo shines when your content is known at build time and the interactivity needs are minimal. Your site has a static shell but runtime-dynamic data loading and a rich JS-driven UI. That's exactly the gap SvelteKit fills. Hugo looks applicable at a glance — but once you look at what the site actually does, SvelteKit is the right call.