@ Katryne

ACK!

plg wrote:

Funny how obvious it is you didn't read the blog post.

Hi, I was looking for open source photo manager options today and I came across piwigo, as well as the blog post, while looking for a match to the features I need as well as possible red flags like unnecessary AI integration and privacy issues.

I've read through all the comments and your replies here and on the blog post and I want to point out some reasons that are making me hesitate to try out piwigo.

You've made it clear that you have good intentions and want to keep everything privacy focused, and I believe you. But there's the saying about the road to hell, and countless examples of decent features that were introduced to software only to cause problems years later so I think the caution everyone is expressing is very reasonable.

In the last reply you criticized the comment for clearly not reading the blog post, but as a potential user, I saw a headline just touting "AI", an image showing a prompt and an AI generated image, and a description of how you've been working on "automated content generation". Very reasonable to not read further, the only reason I did is because I'm killing time on my day off and had an hour to read forum threads. This is an issue with how you presented the feature, not reading comprehension.

Similarly, with the default enabled checkbox you say it's because you're worried people will miss the feature. If that's true, then people are just as likely to miss the option to turn *off* the feature, but you'll have stats showing how few people turn it off and can then use that to justify more AI features (or similar misuse of data, maybe in a month, maybe in a year). Likewise, you say that these features are necessary because people are looking for them in a product like this. If that's true, and it's a separate plugin that requires payment, then those users will be seeing those features during payment and other steps anyway, so making it opt-in is just as logical but much more in line with privacy goals.

Finally, on the AI concept itself, I do respect what you're trying to do implementing this without sending data to third parties, it seems like a decent compromise. There was a good comment on the blog asking about several technical issues, not all of which had good answers. One of the best is hallucination rate. Putting aside all the (many many) issues with AI, I simply don't want any features that *kinda* work. If you have something that can identify cats with no false positives, by all means add a cat-recognizer plugin! But I have no need for software that can do something 80% of the time and creates problems 20% of the time, so I have to double check it 100% of the time.

I'm looking at this service both for myself and less technical family and friends, and I don't want to have to explain all the excuses and caveats from this thread when they ask about privacy, or remind them to uncheck a box every time there's an update or anything like that. So as a potential user, that's my explanation of why this is making me hesitate to use or recommend piwigo right now.

Oh goody, another image host pandering to the prompt jockeys and feeding human-created artwork to the plagiarism machine without permission, credit, or compensation. Bye.

Will it be possible to delete the plugin completely (not only deactivate) without harm?

drmaemo wrote:

Thanks for the quick reply and clarification. My current understanding is that the plugin simply unlocks the AI code that will be embedded in Piwigo 16. Maybe I understand incorrectly.

The AI engine can't be in Piwigo. Technical requirements (GPU + a lot of memory) are too high to be embedded in Piwigo which has very low requirements. Piwigo AI will run on Piwigo.com servers. The Piwigo AI plugin will make the link between your Piwigo and Piwigo AI servers.

Technically, even if you activate the Piwigo AI plugin in your Piwigo, there is no AI engine that will run on your server. Not with the technology we have tested so far.

plg wrote:

drmaemo wrote:

We will stick with version 15 (no AI) for the foreseeable future.

No need. Update to new versions of Piwigo and don't activate the Piwigo AI plugin.

Thanks for the quick reply and clarification. My current understanding is that the plugin simply unlocks the AI code that will be embedded in Piwigo 16. Maybe I understand incorrectly.

Cheers!

DrMaemo

My photo gallery is private for personal use with a small member base (family and friends) who do not wish for photos be completely open to the public. The possibility of photos uploaded (or information abstracted from photos) onto any 3rd party server is objectionable. Thus, we are not interested in any integration of AI into Piwigo. We are perfectly happy to manually manage photos, including assigning tags. We will stick with version 15 (no AI) for the foreseeable future.

We appreciate the Piwigo developers giving its users the choice to keep AI out of their Piwigo installation by integrating AI in Piwigo 16.

We understand that Piwigo developers wish to move Piwigo in a direction that does not align with the interests of some users, like us, who may eventually need to move to another photo gallery content management system.

We hope Piwigo developers will continue strong transparency with the code changes in Piwigo 15 and beyond.

Sincerely,

DrMaemo

Am all for it. I work with and use AI and you can use it for many relevant things in a huge album.

A typical example for me, and if I understand the functionality right, is tagging. Hardly any of my images in any album are tagged. But they should be. There AI will be a great help.

Now if I could figure out how to do it in Windows tagging my offline terabytes of images... :P