Piwigo

What Piwigo does

Piwigo is one of the oldest open source photo gallery projects still in active development, and its developers now present it as a photo library and digital asset management tool as well as a personal gallery. It stores photos, videos and many document formats, organized in albums and sub-albums with tags and metadata. Search covers tags, metadata and file properties, and you can browse by date or location.

The same installation can be a public website showing galleries to the world or a completely private library. Users, groups and roles control who sees and changes what, down to individual albums, and others can be invited to contribute photos. Piwigo also tracks activity, usage and storage over time.

Plugins and apps

Much of Piwigo’s flexibility comes from its plugin and theme ecosystem on piwigo.org, which adds features and lets organizations rebrand the gallery. Video support for mobile uploads, for example, relies on the VideoJS plugin, and two-factor authentication and private album sharing for people without accounts are also plugins.

The official Piwigo Mobile app for iPhone and iPad (version 12 or newer of the server) lets you browse, create and rename albums, edit, download and delete photos, and upload pictures with chosen size, tags and with or without GPS data. An Android app is maintained in a separate repository. The iOS app’s README does not describe automatic camera-roll backup, so Piwigo is not listed here as a full Google Photos replacement.

Self-hosting Piwigo

Piwigo needs a web server (Apache or nginx recommended), PHP 7.4 or newer, MySQL 5 or later or MariaDB, and ImageMagick (recommended) or PHP GD. The classic install is to unzip the release, upload it to web space by FTP and run the web installer, so it runs on ordinary shared hosting. An official Docker Compose guide is also available, with advice to put the container behind a reverse proxy.

Hosted version

Piwigo Cloud is run by the Piwigo team on its own infrastructure in France, with a free trial. Updates, backups and support are included. The project states that the hosted and self-hosted versions share the same core features, that photos, videos and metadata can be exported free of charge at any time, and that moving between Cloud and a self-hosted install is always possible.

Limitations

The core has no face recognition or AI search, so finding photos depends on the tags and metadata you add. Some features most users expect, such as video playback from the mobile app, depend on plugins. It is built for curated libraries rather than automatic backup of every photo a phone takes.

Who it suits

Piwigo suits organizations, clubs, tourism offices, photographers and families who want a structured, permission-controlled media library or public gallery, either on their own PHP hosting or on an EU-hosted service. For automatic phone backup with AI search, look at Immich or Ente Photos instead.