{"id":2232,"date":"2026-08-06T22:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T19:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/vendor\/phraseanet\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T22:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T19:12:10","slug":"phraseanet","status":"publish","type":"vendor","link":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/platforms\/phraseanet\/","title":{"rendered":"Phraseanet"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","seo_title":"Phraseanet: free self-hosted GPL DAM being sunset by its vendor","seo_description":"","noindex":false,"one_liner":"A free, self-hosted GPLv3 DAM used by French public-sector, cultural and broadcast institutions with in-house technical staff, now being sunset by its vendor in favor of a paid successor, Phrasea.","strengths":[{"point":"Free under GPLv3 with no per-seat licence cost \u2014 the entire product is self-hosted at zero software spend","source":"Vendor site, GPLv3 licence"},{"point":"Handles IPTC\/XMP\/ID3 metadata, batch indexing, fine-grained rights and thesaurus-based search suggestions","source":"Capterra, 5 reviews; vendor documentation"},{"point":"Institutional deployments are checkable by name: Paris Mus\u00e9es digitized collections, France T\u00e9l\u00e9visions since 2011","source":"Vendor reference list and press coverage"},{"point":"Release cadence stayed near-weekly on the 4.1.2x line during the period checked","source":"GitHub alchemy-fr\/Phraseanet releases"}],"weaknesses":[{"point":"The vendor states Phrasea replaces Phraseanet in 2026 \u2014 a separate MIT-licensed rewrite, with paid migration rather than an upgrade path","source":"Vendor site; GitHub alchemy-fr\/phrasea"},{"point":"No published end-of-life or end-of-security-support date for the version you would deploy today","source":"Vendor site"},{"point":"A researcher's audit reporting 8 authorization vulnerabilities, 4 of them critical, stayed open and unassigned for five months","source":"GitHub issue #4621"},{"point":"The 27 open issues cluster on installation, Docker and Windows setup, and upload\/preview generation","source":"GitHub issue tracker"},{"point":"Admin interface confuses newcomers because the same action can be reached through several different paths","source":"Capterra, 5 reviews"}],"verdict_line":"A trusted French public-sector DAM its own vendor is retiring","buy_if":"You're a French public-sector, cultural, or broadcast institution that needs a free, self-hosted GPL DAM, has in-house technical staff to handle admin-UI complexity and monitor security patches yourself, and is prepared to re-evaluate or migrate to Phrasea within 1-2 years.","dont_buy_if":"You need vendor-guaranteed security response times, a product with a stable multi-year roadmap, or you're outside the French-language\/public-sector niche where community knowledge and peer references exist.","quote_against":"small development team","price_reality":"","review_summary":"","review_corpus":"Near-zero mainstream review presence: G2 blocked us, TrustRadius\/Capterra-family show only 5 syndicated reviews total (same pool reused across Capterra\/GetApp\/S","review_themes":null,"statement_label":"Our synthesis (not a single source's wording)","statement":"Phraseanet is a mature, genuinely feature-rich open-source DAM with real traction in French public and broadcast institutions, but it is a legacy product being actively wound down in favor of Phrasea, a separately-built successor with no clear public sunset date or migration case study yet \u2014 and open-source signals (small team, an unpatched critical-severity security audit since March 2026) suggest thin maintenance bandwidth on the version anyone would actually be buying today.","statement_note":"Synthesized from GitHub repo\/issue data and syndicated review aggregators, not a quote from any single reviewer.","product_types":["dam"],"verticals":["government"],"features":["gis","watermark","rights","approval","portal","api"],"vendor_category":"open","vendor_url":"https:\/\/www.phraseanet.com\/","pricing_page_url":"https:\/\/www.phraseanet.com\/en\/","published_price":true,"median_contract_usd":0,"median_sample_size":0,"entry_estimate":"","billed_units":"No licence fee; implementation and support services may be paid","packaging_style":"Open source under GNU GPL v3, downloadable free; a successor named Phrasea is announced for 2026","deployment":["on-prem"],"free_plan":true,"free_trial":false,"ai_tagging":false,"storage_limits":"","integrations":"Alchemy (Phraseanet's developer) publishes official plugins for WordPress and Drupal that let editors insert Phraseanet media directly into CMS pages\/posts, and an Adobe InDesign plugin that imports files from the DAM, browses via facets\/keywords\/baskets, and saves InDesign documents back into Phraseanet; a companion Adobe Photoshop plugin is sold alongside it. Beyond these named plugins, Phraseanet's own marketing copy claims broader 'interconnection with third-party applications such as e-commerce, PIM, MDM' and social-network sharing, plus a 'catalog of plugins,' but does not name specific e-commerce\/PIM\/MDM platforms on the pages checked. Custom\/automated integrations are otherwise built on the REST API (v1 and v2) and an accompanying PHP SDK rather than pre-built connectors.","formats_supported":"Official docs state there is no input format or codec restriction in Phraseanet: 'Il n'y a pas de restriction de format ou de codec d'entree dans Phraseanet' -- the platform can archive any file type, with limitations only appearing at thumbnail\/preview generation. Video processing for previews is delegated to FFmpeg (thumbnail availability depends on FFmpeg's own codec support). Image sub-definitions (thumbnails\/previews) are generated via ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick, falling back to the GD graphics library; only ImageMagick\/GraphicsMagick handle multi-layer documents such as PSD and unflattened TIFF, and even then thumbnail fidelity for those is described as imperfect. Marketing pages and third-party coverage additionally name specific formats handled in practice: raster images (JPEG, TIFF, PSD, GIF), RAW camera formats, vector files (SVG, Illustrator AI), PDF, video files, audio (MP3), and Microsoft\/OpenOffice documents. Metadata extraction covers IPTC, XMP, Dublin Core, Exif, ID3, PDF\/Office metadata, and geolocation.","common_complaint":"The product is mid-generation: Phrasea is announced to replace Phraseanet in 2026","best_fit":"Public sector and cultural organisations with an open-licence requirement","changelog_url":"https:\/\/github.com\/alchemy-fr\/Phraseanet\/releases","last_release_note":"Latest release is 4.1.22 (2026-08-07), a minor admin-side bug fix: 'PHRAS-4179 Admin - collection Unable to delete suggested values.' The immediately preceding releases show active, frequent maintenance: 4.1.21 (2026-07-29) fixed permalink label sanitization (plus signs treated as separators), added Docker container log rotation, fixed a crash generating sharing links for files without associated subdefinition groups, updated the base Docker image to resolve an ffmpeg build issue, and patched a security vulnerability in the V3 subdef service callback endpoint; 4.1.20 (2026-07-23) was a maintenance-only bump of the base Docker image to 1.2.3. Each release requires running the migration command bin\/setup system:upgrade with PHRASEANET_UPGRADE=1 set.","api_docs_url":"https:\/\/docs.phraseanet.com\/4.1\/en\/Devel\/API\/V2\/Overview.html","api_depth":"Full-scope REST API, offered in two parallel versions per the official docs. API v1: GET\/POST requests, responses in YAML, JSON or JSONP. API v2: GET\/POST\/PUT requests, JSON only, all responses wrapped in a response\/meta envelope, standard HTTP error codes (400\/401\/403\/404\/405\/500) with structured error metadata, and explicitly no rate limits. Both versions authenticate via OAuth2 over HTTPS (access token as an oauth_token query parameter or Authorization header). The v2 overview page points to a separate Routes reference implying coverage beyond a single decorative endpoint (assets, metadata, users, baskets, stories per the documented API structure), but the overview page itself does not enumerate every route. One notable caveat stated directly in the official docs: 'there are no public access to Phraseanet API for the moment' -- i.e. this is the API of a self-hosted open-source install (requires your own server\/credentials), not a public hosted API a buyer could call against a vendor-run SaaS endpoint.","wayback_note":"Wayback Machine unreachable via WebFetch in this environment","review_tier_summary":"Verified tier (Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, PeerSpot): no dedicated Phraseanet listing was found on any of the three platforms in this check -- consistent with Phraseanet being a smaller open-source project rather than an enterprise-tracked vendor. Incentivized tier: Capterra shows an overall rating of 4.2\/5 based on 5 reviews, with reviewer comments (per search-result summaries) praising powerful features, open-source flexibility, intuitive interface, effective search and strong metadata management, while flagging the admin interface as sometimes difficult to handle; G2 hosts a product\/alternatives page for Phraseanet but its review count and star rating could not be retrieved directly in this check (product page returned HTTP 403 to the fetch tool). Long tail: the GitHub repository (alchemy-fr\/Phraseanet) shows an actively used public issue tracker with 27 open issues as of the check date, spanning installation, Docker\/Windows setup, and upload\/preview-generation bugs -- evidence of a small but real self-hosting user base rather than a dormant project (reinforced by the near-weekly 4.1.2x release cadence in the same period)."},"silo":[],"class_list":["post-2232","vendor","type-vendor","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vendor\/2232","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\/2232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"silo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/silo?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}