Host Piwigo without installing anything
The French photo gallery, built for collections that keep growing: nested albums, tags and metadata read as the files arrive.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
Piwigo installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Piwigo builds several thumbnail sizes for every photo you upload, reads its EXIF and IPTC metadata, and keeps the index of albums, tags and permissions in MySQL. Browsing the gallery is light work; bulk importing is what weighs — a few hundred 24-megapixel files resized one after another — and that is the moment the headroom is there for.
Piwigo replaces Google Photos or Flickr without inheriting their habits: no quota filling up, no account to create for the person you send a link to. You upload through the browser, through FTP followed by a synchronisation when there are ten thousand files, or straight from Lightroom and digiKam using their publishing plug-ins. And the originals stay ordinary files, filed by date in a readable folder tree: leaving means copying a directory, not negotiating an export.
What managed hosting changes
Nested albums, tags and ratings
One album per year, sub-albums per event, tags that cut across the whole collection, ratings and comments. Search combines the date the shot was taken, the author and the tag, and the calendar view goes straight to a given day.
EXIF and IPTC read on import
Date taken, camera body, lens and exposure, but also the captions, credits and IPTC keywords set in Lightroom or digiKam: Piwigo picks them up instead of making you type them again.
Permissions per album, not just per gallery
A private album for the family, another visible to one client only, a third reserved for the committee. Permissions are granted per user or per group, album by album.
Upload from the browser, over FTP or from Lightroom
The browser form for a few photos, an FTP drop followed by a synchronisation for ten thousand, and the Lightroom or digiKam publishing plug-ins to send straight from your editing software.
Why hand it over rather than install it
A photographer delivering shoots
One private album per client, a link and a password, originals available for download. Nothing is still sitting on a consumer sharing service three years later.
A club archiving twenty years of outings
Tags and the calendar view find a photo from 2009 without scrolling through fifteen thousand thumbnails, and each volunteer sees only the albums that concern them.
A local authority press office
A photo library with permissions per department, photo credits in the IPTC fields, and public albums kept ready for the local press.
A family leaving a consumer service
Shared albums stay reachable for the grandparents through a plain link, with no account to create elsewhere and no quota filling up on a Tuesday evening.
A tradesperson showing finished work
One album per job, tags per type of work, and a link to send the prospect who would rather see the real thing than a brochure.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. Your photos do not leave the country, and the person on the phone speaks your language.
Frequently asked questions
The browser form is fine up to a few hundred files. Beyond that, you drop the folder tree over FTP into the galleries directory and start a synchronisation: Piwigo walks the folders, creates the matching albums and reads the metadata on the way. Thumbnails are then generated in batches, without blocking visitors.
Yes, with one caveat. Google Takeout and the Flickr export hand you the originals, filed by date, alongside JSON files. Piwigo does not read that JSON, but it does read the EXIF inside the images: dates, cameras and keywords written into the files are preserved. Anything that only existed in the original service's JSON — some descriptions, some albums — has to be recreated.
It can display video through an extension, but it does not transcode: the file is served as-is and will play if the browser supports the format. For a few clips sitting alongside the photos of an event, that is enough. For a genuine video library, Jellyfin is the tool made for it.
Nothing. You choose the application, fill in the fields it asks for — often an email address and a name — and it goes online. Access arrives by email with the address and the credentials.
Yes, they are part of the service, extensions included. A gallery is by nature exposed on the internet and serves files uploaded by users: exactly the kind of application that should not be left to age.