📷 Photo management Open source Privacy ★★★★
Piwigo
The established web photo gallery
Overview
Piwigo since 2002 offers web albums, user permissions, watermarks, and EXIF display for photographers and communities.
Self-host or Piwigo.com hosting; plugins add maps and face recognition.
Better for curated collections than Google Photos-style automatic personal backup.
Scores
Privacy 4/5
Ease of use 3/5
Features 4/5
Value 4/5
Google Photos — comparison
Different design goal—album publishing and permissions over personal ML backup; AI is plugin-driven; sovereignty via self-host.
Pros
- ✓ 20+ years of stability
- ✓ Extensible via plugins
- ✓ Fine-grained visibility and permissions
- ✓ Self-host and managed hosting options
Cons & caveats
- − Weak default AI auto-organization
- − Mobile backup is secondary
- − Not a modern timeline-first UX
Best for
- Public web galleries
- Organizations needing detailed permissions
- Users with existing PHP hosting
Not ideal for
- Google Photos–style automatic phone backup
- Out-of-box AI classification
Specs
- Pricing
- Free + paid — Self-host free. Piwigo.com hosting paid by capacity.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Data location
- Self-hosted server or Piwigo.com hosting environment.
- Platforms
- Self-hosted · Web · Android · iOS
豊富なプラグインアルバム権限管理長期安定運用テーマカスタム
Migration from Google Photos
- 1 Takeout download preserving folder structure
- 2 Create albums and import by folder in Piwigo admin
- 3 Configure user accounts and view permissions
- 4 Add map/face plugins if needed
Setup steps
- 1 Install Piwigo on PHP-capable server
- 2 Configure database and upload directory
- 3 Create admin account and choose base theme
- 4 Upload initial albums via FTP or web UI