Piwigo — Self-Hosted Photo Gallery and Management Platform

Introduction

Piwigo is a self-hosted photo management application that has been actively developed since 2002. It is designed for organizations, photographers, and families who need to manage thousands to millions of photos with fine-grained access control, making it a mature alternative to cloud photo services.

What Piwigo Does

• Organizes photos into albums and sub-albums with drag-and-drop management
• Supports batch uploads via browser, desktop sync clients, and API
• Manages user groups and per-album permissions for private sharing
• Generates multiple thumbnail sizes automatically on upload
• Provides tagging, rating, and metadata-driven smart albums

Architecture Overview

Piwigo is a PHP application backed by MySQL or MariaDB. Photos are stored on the filesystem while metadata, album structure, and user data live in the database. The template engine (Smarty) separates presentation from logic, and themes can fully customize the gallery appearance. Plugins register hooks into the event system for extending core functionality.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Requires PHP 7.4+, MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+, and a web server
• Docker images (official and LinuxServer.io) simplify deployment
• Run the web-based installer to configure database and admin account
• Point the photos directory to a fast storage volume for large collections
• Configure reverse proxy and CDN for serving thumbnails at scale

Key Features

• Handles collections of over one million photos with tested performance
• Piwigo2Sync desktop client for bulk importing from local directories
• Over 350 plugins for watermarking, EXIF display, maps, and LDAP auth
• Responsive themes for mobile and tablet browsing
• Privacy controls with guest access, password-protected albums, and hidden albums

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Immich — AI-focused with mobile backup; Piwigo targets structured album management
• PhotoPrism — AI tagging and browsing; Piwigo offers deeper permission and plugin systems
• Lychee — modern single-user gallery; Piwigo supports multi-user with group permissions
• Google Photos — cloud SaaS; Piwigo keeps photos entirely on your infrastructure

FAQ

Q: Can Piwigo handle very large libraries? A: Yes. Piwigo is tested with collections exceeding one million photos when properly configured.

Q: Does it read EXIF and IPTC metadata? A: Yes. Metadata is extracted on upload and used for date sorting, GPS mapping, and search.

Q: Is there a mobile app? A: Official apps for iOS and Android support browsing and uploading photos.

Q: Can I migrate from another gallery? A: Importers exist for Coppermine, Gallery2, and Zenphoto. FTP uploads are also supported.

Sources

• https://github.com/Piwigo/Piwigo
• https://piwigo.org/