PiGallery2

What PiGallery2 does

PiGallery2 is a photo gallery website with a narrow, clear goal: show a directory of photos quickly, even on a Raspberry Pi. You point it at a folder and it presents the folder tree as it is. It is read-only, so it never changes, moves or deletes anything in your photo directory, which makes it safe to run on top of an archive that other tools or backups depend on.

On top of that simple model it adds more than its size suggests. Photos with location data appear on a map, using OpenStreetMap or Mapbox by default or another tile provider, and GPX files in a folder are drawn as tracks with icons for the type of activity. A Markdown file placed in a folder is shown alongside the photos as a short blog post, which suits travel albums.

Search and albums

Search uses a small query language with boolean logic, negation, exact and wildcard matches and autocomplete. You can filter by person, keyword, caption, directory, file name, rating, resolution, orientation, distance from a place (“5 km from New York”) and relative dates such as the same week in every past year. Any search can be saved as a logical album, so albums exist without copying files.

Faces are not detected by machine learning: PiGallery2 reads face regions that other software (for example a photo editor) wrote into XMP metadata and shows them over the images. Folders can be shared with a link and an optional password, per-user filters can hide parts of the gallery, and a photo frame link loops through a folder or search result on a spare screen.

Self-hosting PiGallery2

Docker Compose is the official and recommended install. Images exist for amd64 and arm64 (arm32v7 is deprecated), and the example Compose file puts nginx in front for HTTPS. A native Node.js install is possible but not officially supported. Configuration and the database live in separate volumes; the app can use SQLite or MySQL. Thumbnails are generated with sharp and videos handled with FFmpeg. The docs warn that some upgrades of the edge builds may require resetting the database or config, which happens less often on stable tags.

Hosted version

There is no hosted service. A live demo runs on a free hosting tier and may take up to a minute to start.

Limitations

PiGallery2 is a viewer. It cannot upload, edit or back up photos from a phone, and it does not detect faces or objects itself. If you need a full library with backup, it is not a substitute for Google Photos or iCloud Photos.

Who it suits

PiGallery2 suits anyone who wants to share a well-organized folder archive with family on modest hardware, without letting the gallery touch the files. Run it next to a backup tool, or choose Photoview if you want face detection and RAW conversion, or Immich for a full Google Photos-style library.