Custom fields vs. Custom post types for a Portfolio Website

Coincident that you both have 1 in rep? 😉

You want to go to Approach 2 for sure. It’s very simple to query posts by post type and custom data field. In addition you can use different categories.

Creating 3 different post types will create a lot of redundancy since your posts will basically have the same content.

I feel that this isn’t a WordPress question per se, so this question might be considered off topic.