Gallery Software -- Piwigo -- Review

[Kym]

For those wanting to build your own PhotoGallery you may want to consider the free product http://piwigo.org
It is GNU Open Source

To host it you will need to do the following (est costs in AUS$)

1. Register your own domain ($10/year)
2. Get some low cost Linux hosting (< $10/month)
3. Load the software
4. Configure the software, including the theme and maybe a landing page
5. Add photos

You can have public and private areas so you can limit sharing with friends/family as desired.
There is a very active community and lots of add-ons, themes etc.
These include bulk loaders, Social buttons (FB, G+, Twitter etc.), Flickr importers and the like

Skills required: Low-medium level technical

My rating 8.5/10 -- the 1.5 off is because the documentation is not quite up to spec; the software is very good

My Gallery is http://image.farnik.com/gallery/

[ranvens]

looks pretty good, how customisable is it? And do you know if it has an ordering section at all? Or is it only for display?

[Kym]

looks pretty good, how customisable is it? And do you know if it has an ordering section at all? Or is it only for display?

It can do Paypal shopping cart. Two options
http://piwigo.org/ext/extension_view.php?eid=733
http://piwigo.org/ext/extension_view.php?eid=499

The customisations get down two two main methods.
Themes/skins and plugins.

The plugin architecture is very easy and clean; you don't need to know about php/mysql/css/html.
There are 250+ plugins for the current version. I've used these:

• Add < head > element
• Additional Pages
• Advanced Menu Manager
• AStat.2
• Crypto Captcha
• Flickr2Piwigo
• Grum Plugin Classes
• LocalFiles Editor
• PiwiShack
• Sitemap
• Social Buttons

I've used the mobile and stripped themes.
Themes/skins - if you stick to out of the box it is easy, you can get funky if you know css well.

[ranvens]

Awesome. Might have a play when I get my site up and running again.

[raysul]

I've never considered having a photo gallery and seeing how I have hosting for another website, and Piwigo is free I have nothing to lose. Also found out there is a plug-in for Lightroom which would be great for resizing photos. Thanks for the heads up Kym.

Ray

- - - Updated - - -

I've never considered having a photo gallery and seeing how I have hosting for another website, and Piwigo is free I have nothing to lose. Also found out there is a plug-in for Lightroom which would be great for resizing photos. Thanks for the heads up Kym.

Ray

[John King]

Gidday Kym

I have been running Gallery 2 on my web site since about 2007. Have become tired of its limitations, and all support for Gallery 3 was wound up about 2 years ago.

Now, my questions are manifold!

Basically, my choice is down to either Piwigo or Zenphoto. Both of these are natively provided by my host. It appears to me from what I can glean that Piwigo has a 2MB upload limit. Is this the case? If not, what are the upload limits for it? Gallery2 spits the dummy if pixel dimensions exceed about 3600x3600.

I want to be able to upload RAW files as well as full size JPEGs, along with other file types.

Possibly CMS functions will be desirable.

My current web site allows me up to 5 add-on domains, and I need to reserve one of these for my wife's web site. Have 15 GB available on an SSD drive. Currently using about 4 GB.

I have some 6,000+ images currently in Gallery2. I can zip these up on a per album basis. What can you tell me about import facilities?

I do have many other questions, but these are the important ones that I can't (relatively easily) find any answers for.

TIA.

[John King]

I successfully installed Zenphoto today, and once I figured it out (one step missing in the "instructions", as usual ... ), imported all my images into it. It seems that one has to manually create at least one album under the ALBUM folder and upload at least one image from the local PC into that album before Zenphoto will allow copy and paste functions of other images or albums into that head folder! Weird ...

It is a little limited in some ways unless one is a dab script kiddy - I'm not! Many personal customisations are possible if one is. I went down that path originally around 2007 with my current gallery s/w. It took me around three months to set up my web site and configure the gallery s/w. Had no desire to repeat that!

New gallery is populated (actually around 1,500 images - the new s/w allows one to accurately tally them), and currently running as a test bed. I may delete it and start again after some further testing. Now I know that I don't have to download 4.9 GB of zip files then re-upload them, it takes almost all of the pain out of experimentation.

I might also give Coppermine a try. I originally used it, but it's security was so bad in 2007 that I changed to Gallery 2 very quickly.

[landyvlad]

Again, worth bumping.

piwigo is still alive and well as far as gallery software / hosting is concerned.
I set mien up following the whole photbucket debacle. This is how http://landyvlad.net/wp/

What I LOVE about piwigo is that the photos are referenced by absolute url's that don't change, whereas the 'albums' are all virtual. So you can move photos between 'albums' have the same photo in multiple albums etc and where you've linked it on websites won't change.
And because it is all based back to your own domain name (in my case that's landyvlad.net) the changing hosts doesn't break the links either.

I highly recommend it.