Piwigo.org

Emk · 2019-12-21 04:01:34

categories/albums configuration local synchronization workflow

Greetings,

I'm new to Piwigo and I'm just now setting up my gallery. Before I get too far I wanted to put what I'm doing out there to see what others think and what problems/issues/concerns I may need to be aware off.

I want to use Piwigo to both manage and display my main photo collection of a few thousand pictures. I will be the only admin and the only one adding photos. All photos will be added via the file system, no web upload.

1. All my photos are organized in folder hierarchy by Year/Date/year-date-time.jpg. This is the photo collection and I will add photos into this folder.
2. I have symlinked the Piwigo 'galleries' folder to this photo collection folder.
3. I've brought the photos into Piwigo by doing a local synchronization.
4. I have created folders in 'galleries' in the file system (i.e. the photo collection folder) to act as my Albums. So I have folders like 'Abstracts', 'Animals', 'Family', 'Landscape', 'Plants' etc. Once synchronized these folders become albums in Piwigo.
5. I'am organizing my photos into these albums/categories by tagging and moving them in Piwigo itself. Using the batch editor a photo of a butterfly is tagged 'animals,Insects,Butterflies,butterfly name' and moved to the Album; Animals, sub-album Butterflies.

The great thing about this system, to me, is that my photos on the hard drive are never touched. I will keep my collection organized by date and once all my photos are tagged I can put them in albums and move them about in Piwigo without changing anything in the file system. I can even delete them from Piwigo all without touching the actual files on disk.
It does mean that I have an album in Piwigo that is all my original photos by date. But I have just made that administrator only.

My concerns at this point are about the local synchronization feature which I have seen being referred to as legacy here on the forums. Is this feature going to remain in Piwigo?. I'm going to keep needing it.
Another thing is whether having my albums as directories in the file system is an issue. I could make purely virtual albums from within Piwigo but it is much easier to create them on the command line and then synch Piwigo.
Are there any gotchas or issues that may trip up my workflow down the line?

emk
Massive thanks to the Piwigo team for creating this software. I think I've found a permanent home for my picture!

Piwigo version: 2.10.1-1
PHP version: 7.3.11-1
MySQL version: 10.4.10-1 (MariaDB)
Piwigo URL:

executive · 2019-12-21 19:58:50

Emk wrote:
the local synchronization feature which I have seen being referred to as legacy here on the forums

That doesn't sound right. Where did you see it?

I recommend trying virtual albums + the [extension by mistic100] SmartAlbums
Your tagged images will the be automatically added to appropriate albums. It's probably easier and more flexible than what you're doing.

Piwigo4Me · 2019-12-26 02:48:42

Your setup sounds interesting, Emk! I'm new to Piwigo, too... I'm adding it to a website that already has a really old setup with a lot of photos organized in a hierarchy of folders and subfolders with HTML files that display the photos. So, for instance, I have http://jerrypeek.com/tours/, http://jerrypeek.com/tours/micronesia_2002/, http://jerrypeek.com/tours/micronesia_2 … _tour.html , and photo files like http://jerrypeek.com/images/0032/0032963_01_small.jpg . I'd like to show the photo files both from the old "tour" pages as well as the Piwigo gallery (which is at http://jerrypeek.com/gallery/ ; I may change it to http://gallery.jerrypeek.com/ -- well, https: soon).

I'd be interested to know how you make your symbolic links: from where to where? Do you symlink directories (folders), or do you symlink individual photo files? Did you have to set your web server to follow symlinks? I guess you make your links before you synchronize Piwigo?

Thanks for any info, or pointers to other info, to help me understand what you did and how Piwigo interacts with the Linux filesystem.

Emk · 2019-12-26 04:04:04

executive wrote:
Emk wrote:
the local synchronization feature which I have seen being referred to as legacy here on the forums
That doesn't sound right. Where did you see it?

I recommend trying virtual albums + the [extension by mistic100] SmartAlbums
Your tagged images will the be automatically added to appropriate albums. It's probably easier and more flexible than what you're doing.

I read that someplace right here on the forums. Glad it doesn't sound right:)

Thats for the smart albums plugin tip. I will use it to move photos I tag for deletion to a smart album.

Emk · 2019-12-26 05:29:03

Piwigo4me
I have only symlinked the 'galleries' directory in the Piwigo document root to the directory where I keep my photos. The photo directory is on a separate hard drive on the same server. Within the photos directory I have created subdirectories which show up as albums in Piwigo. These 'physical' albums form the backbone/top level organization for my pictures. I create sub albums within these top level directories/albums from within the Piwigo web interface and then populate them with photos from my collection from within the web interface.

All my photos remain within a single directory hierarchy, lets call it Date, in the galleries folder organized this way: galleries/Date/YEAR/year-month-day/year-month-day-time.jpg

There are no symlinks to any directories, albums or photos except the initial symlink for the galleries folder. The physical albums that I create under galleries remain empty as I only populate them with photos from within the web interface. They exist on disk only as a top level organization backbone/skeleton/system for my pictures.

So I have the folder Animals which I created in the file system as 'mkdir galleries/Animals' this shows up as the album Animals in Piwigo. Then in the web interface I create the subfolder 'Butterflies' within Animals. Then in Piwigo batch manager I tag a bunch of butterfly pics, in my Date Album,with the tag butterfly, select them all and move them to the album Animals/Butterflies. This operation is solely within Piwigo and exists only in the database and web interface. Nothing changes on disk the photos remain in the same physical 'Date' directory.

I have my own domain name at https://photos.amuntu.xyz its a work in progress as I have just over 7000 images in there so far and I'm tagging them as I go. I may end up with between 10 and 12000 when I'm done. Its very much a work in progress.

hope that helps

some resources I've been using (I run linux so these may only be linux friendly)
exiftool:
https://ninedegreesbelow.com/photograph … mands.html
https://exiftool.org/examples.html

rmlint to get rid of duplicates:
https://rmlint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

rysync (use with care)
https://www.createdbypete.com/a-practic … ing-rsync/

Letsencrypt for ssl:
https://letsencrypt.org/

Piwigo4Me · 2019-12-26 13:39:44

Thanks a lot, Emk! That could turn out to be exactly what I need.

Piwigo.org

Announcement

#1 2019-12-21 04:01:34

Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

#2 2019-12-21 19:58:50

Re: Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

Emk wrote:

#3 2019-12-26 02:48:42

Re: Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

#4 2019-12-26 04:04:04

Re: Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

executive wrote:

Emk wrote:

#5 2019-12-26 05:29:03

Re: Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

#6 2019-12-26 13:39:44

Re: Piwigo to manage my photo collection: What could go wrong?

Board footer