Piwigo

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 758 words

Piwigo solves a different problem from the photo apps that get all the attention. Immich and PhotoPrism are about backing up and finding your own camera roll. Piwigo is about publishing: curated albums, permissions per group, themes, and a gallery a client or a club can browse without an account. If the phrase "I want to replace Flickr" describes you, Piwigo has been doing exactly that since 2002 and does it better than the newer tools. If you want to replace Google Photos, it is the wrong pick and I say so below.

The install is genuinely easy

Piwigo is PHP plus MySQL or MariaDB. The maintained container I use is from LinuxServer:

services:
  piwigo:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/piwigo:latest
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./gallery:/gallery
    ports:
      - "8090:80"
    restart: unless-stopped
  db:
    image: mariadb:11
    environment:
      - MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=change-me
      - MARIADB_DATABASE=piwigo
      - MARIADB_USER=piwigo
      - MARIADB_PASSWORD=change-me-too
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: unless-stopped

Open the web installer, point it at the db host, and you are in within 5 minutes. Put your usual reverse proxy in front for HTTPS; Piwigo needs nothing special from it beyond a generous upload size limit, since the default 2 MB PHP limit in some stacks will reject a single RAW file. 512 MB of RAM is plenty; the database is the only thing that grows, and even a 100,000-photo library keeps it under a gigabyte. Thumbnail generation happens on demand or via the batch manager, and that is the one CPU-heavy phase, so run it once after a big import rather than letting the first visitor trigger it.

Two ways in: upload, or drop files in a folder

Web upload, the desktop uploader, the mobile apps and the Lightroom plugin all create what Piwigo calls virtual albums. The second path is what makes it valuable for large archives: copy folders into galleries/ on disk, click Synchronize in the admin panel, and Piwigo creates physical albums that mirror your folder tree. Photographers with a decade of dated directories can be live in an afternoon with no re-organisation, and the originals stay untouched where you put them. Keep the folder names free of spaces and odd characters or the sync will skip them and tell you why.

Access control is the feature people underrate

Every album can be public, private to specific users, or private to groups. A wedding photographer runs one group per client; a school runs one per class; a family archive keeps the 1970s scans open and the recent ones locked. Guests can be limited to viewing without download, and you can publish a single album by direct link. The Flickr alternatives page covers the migration side, but the short version is that Piwigo maps onto Flickr's mental model of sets and permissions far more naturally than the timeline-first tools do.

Plugins carry the feature list

The core stays deliberately plain and the plugin repository, several hundred entries deep, fills in the rest: EXIF and IPTC display, batch metadata editing, video support, OpenStreetMap views, social login, contact forms, and a handful of themes that make it look like a portfolio site rather than a 2008 forum. Install only what you need, since plugins are where upgrade breakage tends to come from. Update the core first, then plugins, and take a database dump before either.

Where it loses honestly

There is no machine-learning search, no face grouping, and no duplicate detection worth the name. The default interface looks its age, and a good theme only partly fixes that. Mobile upload works but is not the automatic camera-roll backup Immich provides. For personal photo management the Immich versus PhotoPrism comparison is the right reading, and either of those is the safer default for most self-hosters in the photos category. Piwigo can sit alongside them: the backup tool holds everything, and Piwigo holds the 2 percent you want to show people.

What I'd do

Run Piwigo if you publish photos to other people: clients, a club, extended family, a public portfolio. Use the folder sync for the archive, virtual albums for anything curated, groups for permissions, and pick a modern theme on day one. Back up the database nightly and the gallery folder with everything else. If you only want your own library searchable and backed up from your phone, skip it and install Immich; you will not miss anything Piwigo offers.