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Sharing images and photos on the internet has been around for quite some time. Many people share photos and pictures using Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, and other similar sites. However, the ideal way to share your photos seems to be a photoblog. Further more, graphic/web designers, photographers and other artists need an online portfolio to display their works.
It is at this junction a photo blogging or gallery management CMS comes in handy. Of course, with some effort, even WordPress can be made to handle image galleries, but in order to properly run an image gallery, at times we need a specialized CMS. Piwigo is one such CMS for dealing with photo galleries. In this article, we take a look at Piwigo and evaluate its pros and cons.
To begin with, Piwigo is a free and open source CMS that lets you easily manage your photos. Features? Here they are:
The admin backend in Piwigo primarily consists of six menus: Photos, Albums, Users, Plugins, Tools and Configuration. While the first four are self-explanatory, the interesting stuff lies in Tools and Configuration.
Under Tools, you have the Site Manager, History, Thumbnails, Maintenance, Updates and other similar sub-options. For instance, the Maintenance sub-menu lets you perform actions such as deletion of orphan tags or performance of integrity checks.
Maintenance Menu in Piwigo
Under Configuration, you can edit sitewide settings, menus, themes and language packs.
Configuration Menu in Piwigo
Overall, the admin interface is quite usable and nifty, with links to Help and Documentation handy. It does take some ‘getting used to’, but all in all, it’s a breeze to use.
Verdict:
Piwigo comes with its own repository of themes and extensions. As far as extensions are concerned, there are plugins available for almost every major task, such as the addition of HTML pages.
Piwigo offers many extensions and plugins in its repository
When it comes to themes, however, the story is different. While the repository does sport a decent number of themes (and is growing at a steady pace), Piwigo can definitely use some Premium Themes. Many Piwigo users, probably, tweak and build their own themes – this fact shows the level of involvement in the Piwigo community. Yet, at the end of the day, if the CMS intends to attract end users, it will need themes. An ideal solution can be porting of WordPress photoblogging themes to Piwigo, much the same way as Drupalizing has been doing it for Drupal.
Verdict:
When it comes to support, Piwigo has its own documentation wiki – both for end users and developers. It also has an active forum, powered by FluxBB.
Piwigo also has a forum where you can look for support and answers
The forum, broadly speaking, has been divided into two major parts: Support and Project Building. Support deals with topics such as Troubleshooting, Feature Requests, etc. Project Building, on the other hand, is about Translations, Beta Testing, etc.
Verdict:
Perhaps the most striking feature about Piwigo is its update frequency. A major version is released (almost) every six months with new features and improvements.
Another interesting part is Piwigo.com – Piwigo’s commercial photo gallery hosting solution. You can compare it with WordPress.com – just that it offers photo gallery hosting. Sadly, there are no free plans, but you can try it for free for 30 days. Plus, Piwigo.com offers you features such as unlimited storage space and custom domain mapping – definitely worth a try if you’re looking for a hassle-free solution for hosting your photo gallery!
Verdict:
Okay, let’s be honest: it seems unfair to expect a CMS to offer integration with another, simply because we use the other one more.
But the fact remains, WordPress is used by numerous users for different types of websites, including photo blogs, and Piwigo is aware of the same. It provides a plugin named PiwigoPress that places randomized images from your Piwigo gallery to your WP blog’s sidebar though sadly, this plugin hasn’t been updated for quite some time now. However, we also have PiwigoMedia that can insert media from a Piwigo site into WordPress.
So, is Piwigo worth the effort?
If you are running a regular blog, and post photos or images occasionally – no, you need not bother with it.
However, if you are a photographer or artist and wish to create an online portfolio of your work, or someone who is planning to set up a simple photo gallery, Piwigo is surely worth a try. You’ll really appreciate its localization and other useful features, though as we said earlier, the themes can be better.
Have you, or are you currently, using Piwigo? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments!
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Sufyan bin Uzayr is a freelance writer and artist based in India. He writes for several print magazines as well as technology blogs, and has also authored a book named Sufism: A Brief History. His primary areas of interest include open source, mobile development, web CMS and vector art. He is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of an e-journal named Brave New World. You can visit his website, follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook and Google+.
Saturday, March 10th, 2012 00:49
Thanks Sufyan. I’d not come across Piwigo before but it sounds very useful and versatile. Something definitely to consider for our new website.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:10
I’m Piwigo founder and I’m glad to read such an article. I would like to react to:
> Piwigo.com should have a free plan
This is an important decision we took when we launched Piwigo.com. The problem with free accounts is that you have to “monetize” them another way (than subscription). The commonly accepted “other way” is advertisement and honestly we didn’t want to display advertisements on Piwigo.com pages (only the gallery owner can decide if he wants to display ads on his website).
The other problem is that free plan would mean strong limits on disk usage. Let’s say 50MB, and that’s a bit small for photos.
Another problem is that we want “best possible support” (by email) on Piwigo.com and this is not compatible with the concept of free plans. So you could say : let’s have free plan on one side and a “premium” plan on the other side with email support. The problem is that if we add a free plan, we have to remove the 30 day trial period, and then how would it be possible to give email support for people on the free plan but willing to switch on the premium plan.
As you can read, the question of the free plan is a difficult question.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:06
I can honestly say I’ve never heard of PWIGO until I read this blog, I’m currently in the process of planning a project which involves a Photo Gallery and I think I’ll give it a go. It looks great. Thank You
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 21:17
I used Jalbum for this, but didn´t like the last update where now all your albums have ads unless you pay to get them, so I’m gonna try this one!
Monday, March 5th, 2012 21:14
Is it worth the effort? Yes in my opinion. I am not a commercial photographer but Photography is my hobby. So yes, I would like to present my portfolio (with 600 + pictures) and piwigo does just that in a simple and brilliant way. Congratulations to the developers out there!
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:11
Reto Savoca wrote:
> Congratulations to the developers out there!
Thank you Reto :-)
Monday, March 5th, 2012 13:18
It is good to note integration of Piwigo with wordpress. Soon i would like to create a photo gallery with Piwigo.
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Tessa
Monday, March 5th, 2012 13:18
It is good to note integration of Piwigo with wordpress. Soon i would like to create a photo gallery with Piwigo.
Rodrigo Santander
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 21:17
I used Jalbum for this, but didn´t like the last update where now all your albums have ads unless you pay to get them, so I’m gonna try this one!
Reto Savoca
Monday, March 5th, 2012 21:14
Is it worth the effort? Yes in my opinion. I am not a commercial photographer but Photography is my hobby. So yes, I would like to present my portfolio (with 600 + pictures) and piwigo does just that in a simple and brilliant way. Congratulations to the developers out there!
Pierrick Le Gall
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:11
Reto Savoca wrote:
> Congratulations to the developers out there!
Thank you Reto :-)
adam
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:06
I can honestly say I’ve never heard of PWIGO until I read this blog, I’m currently in the process of planning a project which involves a Photo Gallery and I think I’ll give it a go. It looks great. Thank You
Pierrick Le Gall
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 01:10
I’m Piwigo founder and I’m glad to read such an article. I would like to react to:
> Piwigo.com should have a free plan
This is an important decision we took when we launched Piwigo.com. The problem with free accounts is that you have to “monetize” them another way (than subscription). The commonly accepted “other way” is advertisement and honestly we didn’t want to display advertisements on Piwigo.com pages (only the gallery owner can decide if he wants to display ads on his website).
The other problem is that free plan would mean strong limits on disk usage. Let’s say 50MB, and that’s a bit small for photos.
Another problem is that we want “best possible support” (by email) on Piwigo.com and this is not compatible with the concept of free plans. So you could say : let’s have free plan on one side and a “premium” plan on the other side with email support. The problem is that if we add a free plan, we have to remove the 30 day trial period, and then how would it be possible to give email support for people on the free plan but willing to switch on the premium plan.
As you can read, the question of the free plan is a difficult question.
Elin
Saturday, March 10th, 2012 00:49
Thanks Sufyan. I’d not come across Piwigo before but it sounds very useful and versatile. Something definitely to consider for our new website.