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Topic review (newest first)

Arnie97
2020-03-07 15:11:42

Greetings everyone!

The survey allows only 1000 characters for the question

10 . Which of Piwigo's competitors do you know? What made you choose Piwigo over them? Tell us everything!

which is way too limited for me. So I'll share my ideas as a forum post here.



Competitors Group A: Static Site Generator

Many self hosted galleries are designed as static site generators, such as Sigal, Photofloat, Gallery CSS and so on. Piwigo is not a static site generator technically, of course; but the current Piwigo work flow looks pretty like a static gallery generator.

On the home page of a self-hosted Piwigo site, all the photos and albums can only be viewed read-only, just like a generated static site. If I wanna change any images or albums, I'll be asked to go to a separate admin panel to tagged it or changed its description. The showcase and the admin panel are totally separated in Piwigo, as different as chalk & cheese.

IMHO this design is awkward, and is a critical disadvantage to choose Piwigo over its competitors. In all these photo manager competitors below, the photo showcase is the photo manager, and the photo manager is the photo showcase. I'm able to select a bunch of photos when browsing my gallery, and then move, copy, rename, tag, delete them or do whatsoever conveniently, without leaving the current page. There is also an admin panel in these competitors, but it's only for system configurations, user permissions, plugins etc. and not for managing albums, tags, descriptions, ratings etc.



Competitors Group B: Personal Photo Managers

This is what I'm actually looking for, so I've tried many products in this group.

Adobe LightRoom works well out of the box and integrates tightly with the best photo editors -- Adobe CameraRaw and Adobe Photoshop. But it is proprietary -- Which means I cannot customize its code for my needs, and I have to pay $$$ for my subscription monthly, otherwise my photos will be locked into its proprietary catalogues.

Apple Aperture and Google Picasa were discontinued, and were superseded by Apple Photos and Google Photos. The latter two are free as in beer, but not free as in speech, so vendor lock-in is still a problem.

Lychee is a lightweight competitor. Subalbum and multi-user support are still in its development fork Lychee-Laravel and not released yet. Lychee cannot reuse an existing folder structure like Piwigo -- photos will always be copied when being imported. This issue also affects many other projects, such as Chevereto and OwnPhotos. No wonder FileRun lists "No import required" as the most important characteristic on the top of their home page :)

NextCloud (ownCloud), FileRun, Synology Photo Station and other self-hosted general file storage solutions have a more modern UX design than Piwigo. They also have full-featured mobile apps, while Piwigo's mobile apps is still in the early stage of development. As they're not optimized for photos, most EXIF / IPTC metadata are not shown, and different file formats for the same photo (say, JPEG & RAW) could not be grouped together like Piwigo. And I think it's not possible to create nested virtual albums (in NextCloud they're called "collections").

PhotoPrism is a new promising open source product. It's not mature enough now, and cost too much time and CPU cycles to index my photos, since it's trying to recognize all the objects in photos with TensorFlow. The developer community seems to be more active and documented than Piwigo. Photonix is another new project that analyzes the content of photos, but well, it does not support albums and manual tags? :o



Competitors Group C: Content Management Systems

While Piwigo may not aim to be a CMS, many sites use CMS frameworks as photo galleries. And they also provide useful ideas on how permissions, categories and tags should be organized.

WordPress have a bunch of different gallery plugins. Zenphoto really need some updates, and I don't see any advantages over WordPress.

MediaWiki have a powerful category system, which allow users to assign multiple parents for the same category. This is really a killer feature for me -- Piwigo only allow photos to be associated to multiple albums, not albums. I'm planning to introduce album multiple inheritance and Wikipedia integration into Piwigo to get the best of both worlds, but since the changes will break the current database schema for parent albums, they will most likely stay in my own fork.

However MediaWiki was designed as a wiki rather than a photo gallery, and lack some critical photo managing features, such as calendars and timelines -- Wikipedia contributors have created tons of year / month categories as a dirty workaround.  It also has a hosted version at https://commons.wikimedia.org -- not only the source code is free, but also all the images on the site!

homdax
2020-01-31 09:10:11

Great initiative, answered.

plg
2020-01-27 15:54:16

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https://piwigo.org/screenshots/newsletter/20200127-piwigo-survey.gif

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