{"id":2230,"date":"2026-08-06T22:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T19:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/vendor\/piwigo\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T22:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T19:12:10","slug":"piwigo","status":"publish","type":"vendor","link":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/platforms\/piwigo\/","title":{"rendered":"Piwigo"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","seo_title":"Piwigo review: self-hosted photo catalog, plugins and admin load","seo_description":"","noindex":false,"one_liner":"A self-hosted, permission-based photo\/video catalog with album hierarchies, tagging and a large plugin ecosystem, for archives and small orgs willing to maintain their own server as the library grows.","strengths":[{"point":"Album hierarchy with per-album permissions plus a 200+ plugin and theme ecosystem for extending the catalog","source":"Vendor plugin directory; third-party comparisons"},{"point":"Self-hosted core is free and open source, with EU-hosted cloud starting at \u20ac29\/month excl. VAT billed annually","source":"Vendor pricing page"},{"point":"Cloud plans do not meter viewers: the \u20ac99\/month Team plan allows unlimited users and unlimited contributors","source":"Vendor pricing page"},{"point":"Support for self-hosters is sold separately with stated response times of 48, 24 or 8 hours by tier","source":"Vendor pricing page"},{"point":"iOS app holds a 4.6 average from 181 ratings, with developers replying to reviews in the store","source":"Apple App Store, 181 ratings"}],"weaknesses":[{"point":"Performance degrades sharply past tens of thousands of photos: admin pages reported taking minutes, thumbnail rebuilds backing up","source":"forum.piwigo.org threads"},{"point":"The fixes for that load \u2014 adding a database index, tuning v11 tag\/related-album search \u2014 came from users, not the vendor","source":"forum.piwigo.org threads"},{"point":"654 open issues sit on the tracker while the team describes core, tools and extensions as largely a hobby project","source":"GitHub Piwigo\/Piwigo issue tracker"},{"point":"The original Android app was deprecated on Google Play, and iOS reviewers report full-resolution originals failing to download","source":"Google Play listing; App Store reviews"},{"point":"Cloud storage is small for the money \u2014 \u20ac199\/month excl. VAT buys 250 GB, with a 10% price rise announced for 1 Sep 2026","source":"Vendor pricing page"}],"verdict_line":"Buy it for the album structure, not for phone backup","buy_if":"You need a self-hosted, permission-based photo\/video catalog with deep album hierarchy, tagging, and a large plugin\/theme ecosystem, and you're comfortable doing your own server\/DB maintenance as the library scales, or you'll pay for Piwigo's own EU-hosted cloud tier to avoid that.","dont_buy_if":"You want an out-of-the-box, AI-tagged, automatic smartphone-backup experience with modern polish, or you need vendor-grade support SLAs and a broad, verifiable third-party review track record to justify the purchase internally.","quote_against":"A long-time contributor called Piwigo's \"bug density... very disappointing\" for software of its maturity, and said it doesn't really escape the common complaint that free software treats its users as beta-testers.","price_reality":"","review_summary":"","review_corpus":"No meaningful B2B review pool exists (G2 ~12 reviews, Capterra effectively 1, SourceForge 0); real signal comes from the self-hosted forum.piwigo.org, GitHub is","review_themes":null,"statement_label":"Net read","statement":"Piwigo is a genuinely mature, feature-rich, self-hostable photo\/video cataloguing engine well suited to structured, permission-gated libraries (teams, photographers, institutions), but it has almost no footprint on B2B review platforms, shows a recurring pattern of performance problems at large scale that require manual tuning, and is run by a small team whose bug backlog and release pace draw some criticism from its own long-time users. It is increasingly discussed as the 'older, sturdier' option rather than the default pick, with Immich (and PhotoPrism) now the tools people compare it against for modern smartphone-photo workflows.","statement_note":"This is an inference built from forum threads, GitHub activity, app-store ratings and comparison articles, not from a large structured review sample \u2014 Piwigo simply does not have one.","product_types":["dam","photo"],"verticals":["government","education","museum","nonprofit","photographer"],"features":["gis","api","video","raw","rights","portal","sso","ai-tagging","watermark","offline"],"vendor_category":"open","vendor_url":"https:\/\/piwigo.org\/","pricing_page_url":"https:\/\/piwigo.com\/pricing","published_price":true,"median_contract_usd":0,"median_sample_size":0,"entry_estimate":"","billed_units":"Flat price per account by storage; users are unlimited","packaging_style":"Cloud at \u20ac29, \u20ac99, \u20ac199 and \u20ac399 a month (10 GB to 1 TB); self-hosting is free with support sold separately at \u20ac39\u2013\u20ac150","deployment":["on-prem","cloud"],"free_plan":true,"free_trial":true,"ai_tagging":false,"storage_limits":"","integrations":"350+ community extensions (plugins and themes) listed on the official Extensions directory, described on the features page as '350 extensions available, and growing!'. Named desktop\/camera-side integrations: Adobe Lightroom (photo publish plugin), digiKam, Shotwell, plus any FTP client for bulk upload, and official Piwigo mobile apps for iOS and Android (the iOS app also auto-converts .MOV uploads). Embedding integrations mentioned on the features\/API pages include displaying Piwigo thumbnails inside a WordPress blog post and synchronizing a local folder via a Perl script using the WebAPI. Notable plugins: Fotorama (full-screen slideshow), VideoJS (enables video\/audio upload on self-hosted installs), LocalFiles Editor (change default upload format restrictions), Google Maps and OpenStreetMap plugins (geolocation).","formats_supported":"Standard image formats accepted for thumbnails\/display: JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, HEIC. Multimedia (video\/audio) formats: MP4, M4V, WEBM, WEBMV, OGG, OGV, MP3 \u2014 .MOV files from iPhones\/QuickTime need conversion to MP4 or upload via the Piwigo iOS app, which auto-converts. On self-hosted installs, video\/audio upload requires installing and activating the VideoJS plugin; by default a self-hosted gallery only accepts jpg\/jpeg\/gif until the upload config is changed (e.g. via the LocalFiles Editor plugin). 'Premium' document\/design formats with generated previews: PDF, SVG, EPS, TIF\/TIFF, PSD (Photoshop), AI (Illustrator) \u2014 these are active by default on self-hosted installs but require a Team\/Enterprise\/VIP plan on piwigo.com cloud hosting. Office formats (Excel, Word, OpenOffice) can be uploaded on self-hosted installs (or requested on piwigo.com) but are not previewable in-browser, only downloadable. Community forum threads note user-requested but not officially guaranteed RAW support (CR2, NEF, DNG mentioned) \u2014 RAW handling is inconsistent\/plugin-dependent rather than a documented core feature.","common_complaint":"A ten per cent price rise is announced for 1 September 2026","best_fit":"Archives and small organisations that want an open licence and a predictable invoice","changelog_url":"https:\/\/github.com\/Piwigo\/Piwigo\/releases","last_release_note":"16.4.0, released May 3, 2026 \u2014 a bug-fix and security release. Fixes: generic users unable to generate password-reset links, an oversized\/mistranslated add-user modal, a plugin-update bug, a DivisionByZeroError, mail 'from' vs 'reply-to' header handling, disappearing standard-pages configuration; API now auto-sets pwg_token for api_key requests and returns correct URLs when original-URL protection is enabled; API key creation dates made visible. Seven security patches: cookie display prevention, input validation in batch operations and album sorting, SVG file handling, and SQL injection fixes. Translations updated for 26 languages. Prior releases show an active, roughly monthly-to-quarterly cadence: 16.3.0 (Feb 24, 2026), 16.2.0 (Dec 30, 2025), 16.1.0 (Dec 2, 2025), 16.0.0 (Nov 24, 2025).","api_docs_url":"https:\/\/github.com\/Piwigo\/Piwigo\/wiki\/Piwigo-Web-API","api_depth":"Broad but only partially documented REST-style WebAPI (pwg.*) covering images (pwg.images.upload\/add\/addSimple\/addChunk), categories\/albums (pwg.categories.getList and more), users, tags, groups, comments, and sessions\/authentication (pwg.session.getStatus, pwg_token). The GitHub wiki page itself states 'This documentation is under construction: not all methods are described here' and points developers to a built-in interactive API browser shipped with every install at \/tools\/ws.htm to discover the full method list firsthand. Some methods are explicitly blockable for API-key-based auth via configuration, so the effective surface for automation depends on how an admin has restricted it. Net effect: a genuinely full API for assets, metadata, and users exists, but the public docs are incomplete \u2014 closer to 'complete but self-discover via the tool' than a polished versioned developer portal.","wayback_note":"Wayback Machine unreachable via WebFetch in this environment","review_tier_summary":"Verified tier: no evidence found of a Piwigo listing on Gartner Peer Insights or PeerSpot; a direct fetch of a TrustRadius Piwigo reviews URL returned 403 and no search result surfaced a live TrustRadius product page for Piwigo \u2014 verified-tier coverage appears effectively absent for this vendor. Incentivized tier: G2 shows roughly 4.1\/5 from about 12 reviews (per search-indexed summary of g2.com\/products\/piwigo\/reviews; direct fetch blocked with 403); Capterra shows 4.0\/5 from just 1 review (capterra.com\/p\/10007746\/Piwigo\/) \u2014 both samples are too small to be meaningful, and post-Feb-2026 Capterra\/G2 share ownership so these are not independent. Long tail: the Piwigo\/Piwigo GitHub repo shows 654 open issues, indicating a sizeable and active self-hosted user base filing bugs\/feature requests directly rather than posting star reviews; the vendor also runs its own active community forum (piwigo.org\/forum) used for support and format\/plugin questions."},"silo":[],"class_list":["post-2230","vendor","type-vendor","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vendor\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vendor"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/vendor"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vendor\/2230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"silo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/silo?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}