If you wish to have web-based custom photo gallery for your website, the Piwigo is best option to help you. Piwigo is an open source software dedicated for a photo gallery and can be installed on your website. It can be easily customized a a number of extensions are available for same and that too at free of cost. It is written in PHP, highly extensible and needs MySQL Database. Earlier Piwigo was known by the name of PhpWebgallery.

Main Features of Piwigo

For any kind of photo gallery, Piwigo offers various kinds of features, as given;

  • Uploading of photos – Photos can be uploaded through a web form with mobile applications or FTP client software.
  • Various sizes available – Photos are available in 9 different sizes with different screen resolutions; ranges from XXS to XXL for the devices like smartphones and others.
  • Safety and privacy – To prevent the photos being copied by others, a watermark on all photos is added automatically.
  • Photos description with Tag – Tags is also allowed which helps administrators to describe photos and visitors to browse photos either with one tag or multiple tags.
  • Creation of album – Albums can be created by you as photos clicked on one occasion bound to one album and other occasion pics bound to another album. So, each photo can be bound to one, two or more album as per your choice. They are hierarchical and in depth.
  • Browsing of photos by Dates – Piwigo also allows you to display each photo with date, month, a year as a date is known on which photo was clicked.
  • Themes – Various plugins and themes are available to make your photo gallery looks good or in the manner you want.
  • Plugins – Plugins assist you in extending the capabilities of Piwigo. For instance, Dailymotion, Youtube, Google Maps, Vimeo and many more.
  • Video handling – Piwigo handle your Videos in a user-friendly way as very useful extensions are available for this.
  • Notification System – If any change occurs or any update takes place then it notifies for same through e-mail, RSS feeds, and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin etc. to the users.
  • Restricted accessibility to photos – Piwigo restricts the accessibility to albums and photos by everyone.
  • Photos description in 54 languages- Piwigo is available in 54 different languages thus it can describe your photos also in 54 languages in a single gallery.

Various methods how Piwigo can be deployed

There are various methods by which Piwigo can be deployed in a web hosting environment.

First of all, the latest version of piwigo from its website Piwigo.org is required to be downloaded and for this there are two options; first download complete archive and then source code uploaded to their web hosting environment and second download the Netinstall and then upload same to their hosting environment, results in downloading entire archive automatically.

Through APT Packages system, Piwigo can be installed on Linux/ GNU distributions. Various shared web hosting services through their control panel may install Piwigo automatically. Even without installing Pwigio on the web server, a Piwigo gallery can be deployed online through web hosting services such as Piwigo