Piwigo Hosting

How Piwigo works

Piwigo imports photographs into a gallery where administrators organise them into albums, add tags, edit metadata, and define who can see each collection. One image can belong to several albums, and the album tree can represent events, clients, departments, locations, or other structures without duplicating every file.

The first visit runs an installer that connects the application to the included MariaDB service and creates the administrator account. Web uploads and supported external tools can add media. Themes change presentation, while plugins add optional functions that should be reviewed individually for compatibility and maintenance.

Key Piwigo features

Batch management lets an administrator select many photographs and apply tags, album assignments, authors, locations, or other changes together. Permissions can be set for groups or individual users, which supports private client albums and public collections in the same installation.

Date browsing, metadata import, search, ratings, comments, API access, themes, and extensions broaden the gallery experience. Application email is disabled on AvaHost, so notification messages and email-driven user workflows shown in upstream documentation are not available in this hosted service.

Piwigo vs Google Photos

Piwigo is a self-hosted gallery platform with configurable albums, permissions, metadata, themes, plugins, and user administration. Google Photos is a managed consumer photo service tied to Google Accounts, automatic mobile backup, shared account storage, and provider-maintained applications.

Google Photos may suit people who want phone uploads and cloud infrastructure handled by a vendor. Piwigo is more appropriate for curated galleries, institutional archives, client access, and custom presentation, although the operator must manage storage, uploads, extensions, and user permissions.

Who uses Piwigo

Photographers deliver protected albums, museums and clubs publish visual archives, and organisations maintain categorized image libraries with several administrators. Families can create private collections while exposing selected albums to relatives or the public.

It is less suitable for people expecting computational photo search or a fully managed phone-backup pipeline. Plugin selection also introduces update and compatibility work, so the core gallery should be tested before extensions are added.

Self-hosting Piwigo: requirements and cost

Photograph volume is the main capacity limit, while uploads, thumbnail generation, metadata processing, searches, plugins, and concurrent visitors affect processor and memory use. MariaDB stores albums, users, tags, permissions, comments, and configuration. The database is provisioned with Piwigo but remains unmanaged, and its memory is outside the application minimum.

The database-adjusted recommendation is Plan 2 at €5 with 25 GB, but storage is the real limit for this gallery. Plan 3 provides 50 GB and Plan 4 provides 100 GB for larger libraries. AvaHost includes one-click setup, a custom domain, automated HTTPS, automatic application updates, and scheduled backups; application email notifications remain disabled.