Piwigo.org

Espionage724 · 2025-05-30 08:35:11

Is there code available now? I'm interested in the config.inc.php for it.

plg · 2025-05-30 10:34:56

Kpatterson wrote:
Is it possible to selectively activate AI processing on a per-album basis, so some are analyzed and others are not?

The processing won't be applied to all your existing photos. Only on newly uploaded photos, if the option is activated. Here is the current mockup.

(the 2 last options are fictional for now)

Then you will be able to ask for AI analysis when you edit a photo, on its edition page and in the batch manager. Analysis are not launched automatically on your existing photos.

Kpatterson wrote:
Also Confirming: Is it free?

Let me quote the blog :-)

the blog wrote:
Pricing model

This service won’t be free, for two good reasons:

* It has real costs (servers, maintenance, development…), and it needs to be sustainable.
* Free services often lead to overuse. Running AI servers consumes energy, so it’s important to encourage thoughtful use.

We’re planning to use a credit system:

You’ll get some free credits to test the feature, and if you like it, you can buy more and use them as needed.

Tell us if it's not clear.

plg · 2025-05-30 11:19:16

alanhjames wrote:
"Checked by default"

That statement shows me your intent and you're no different to every other data grabbing company out there.

"data grabbing company". That's so far from what we actually do.

In Piwigo, we sometimes rely on external software to extract metadata from photos (exiftool), resize photos (ImageMagick) or generate video previews (ffmpeg). You should consider Piwigo AI the same way: it's just an external software that take your photo as input and outputs some tags and a description.

So why don't we simply use the AI engine the same way we use ImageMagick? Because Piwigo AI can't run on your server. It may run on 0.001% of servers hosting Piwigo installations, but we don't want to make this feature exclusive to those who have servers with a GPU. This is why we build a system hosting this AI engine. We want this new feature to be usable by any Piwigo, no matter how powerful its hosting server is.

You're gonna have to trust us about this, but we're not going to store your photo or the generated output. We want to provide external processing, not external backup or a big spying machinery. You don't realize how I value privacy and I don't do to others what I don't want for me. And I take the final decisions regarding the way we implement AI in Piwigo. But sure, you may consider that working on Piwigo for 24 years is not enough to prove I can be trusted :-D

By all means put the checkbox there but to have it checked by default is a slippery slope. If you cared about privacy you would have it disabled by default to prevent people who didn't notice it from automatically sending data.

We want the checkbox checked by default because if we don't, we know that the "first impression" will be deceptive for those expecting AI to be in action. The checkbox in the installation form will be to activate the plugin. Then in the upload form, you will have a reminder that the Piwigo AI analysis is active (and can be disable in a single click), see the screenshot in my previous reply. If we don't have the checkbox in the installation form, the user will have to activate the plugin before uploading photos and this is not a simple task when you discover Piwigo for the first time.

By the way, in the installation form, the "subscribe to Piwigo newsletter" is checked by default. It send your email address to piwigo.org as a newsletter subscription request. Considering I know how it works "behind the curtain", I can tell you you send more personal data by this action than what we intend to do with AI. The thousands of email addresses we have in our database have never been used monetized or sold whatever.

alanhjames wrote:
I'm out and I'll find another photo gallery.

Thanks for all your work over the past few years but I shall move on to something without AI.

Make sure you don't leave the good guys for the "less good" guys, because you think the good guys might become the "bad guys" even if they proved the oppposite for 24 years ;-)

plg · 2025-05-30 11:25:36

Breaker wrote:
1. "Checked by default" is poor practice for situations where users may inadvertently send personal data offsite to be processed. I would personally be livid if I installed software that sent my data offsite by default, and this seems to run counter to a lot of the privacy mantra that is espoused by Piwigo.

Don't worry too much, even if the Piwigo AI is activated by default during install, you will get a reminder on the upload form each time you upload. See my previous replies with screenshot.

Breaker wrote:
2. This feature really breaks the self-hosted paradigm. There are those of us that do have local GPU's in onsite servers, and might be willing to use this feature if *all* data could be kept local. An option to have all AI processing done locally should be included and easily enabled.

I think I already answered that in my reply: servers with GPU are really the exception, we can't have that as a prerequisite. It would be so much easier for us to say "Piwigo AI requires a GPU" and make it run next to your Piwigo. The reality is that certainly less than 0.001% (perfectly invented number, but you understand the idea) have a GPU available next to their Piwigo.

We plan to release the Piwigo AI server infrastructure and you will be able to configure your Piwigo to use your own copy of it instead of the one we're going to host. It's just not the priority right now.

plg · 2025-05-30 11:28:34

CanalNoises wrote:
I'm generally wary of any kind of AI, but this sounds promising. Is there any sense yet of whether it will be capable of facial recognition? Or is it intended more just general object identification?

The first version of Piwigo AI won't do face recognition. We plan to work on it later. Maybe it will be able to recognize public figures (I have no idea). Linty, did you test a photo of Barack Obama, Beyonce or Ghandi?

linkingpin · 2025-05-30 15:19:18

I think it's a positive development, which makes Piwigo even more interesting for current and new users.
So I support your efforts and I understand the "Checked by default" option.

That said, I certainly won't use it myself. If I wanted AI or photo recognition software to scan my photos, I would have used something like Google Photos years ago.
One reason to choose Piwigo is that I can keep my photos to myself and my family.

One question: on your "Upload photos" screenshot you can see the individual credits and the total credits for the upload. I think it would be nice for Piwigo users who use the AI plugin if they could see how many credits they have left.

And one last note: of course I trust you and the development team, and of course you didn't sell the thousands of email addresses you have in your database :)

plg · 2025-05-30 15:49:41

linkingpin wrote:
If I wanted AI or photo recognition software to scan my photos, I would have used something like Google Photos years ago.

I understand. I also understand that you're an invidual/private user who share your photos with your family. It is a perfectly standard use case with Piwigo. I designed it this way back in 2001.

Today in 2025, many organizations (city councils, universities, companies...) are using Piwigo to manage their image library, as a team of administrators. For them, the Google Photos solution is absolutely not an option. Nearly all our "competitors" offer an AI option. If we don't, it's going to become very complicated in the upcoming years.

linkingpin wrote:
One question: on your "Upload photos" screenshot you can see the individual credits and the total credits for the upload. I think it would be nice for Piwigo users who use the AI plugin if they could see how many credits they have left.

I'm going to ask Alice/Willy what is exactly planned for that.

linkingpin wrote:
And one last note: of course I trust you and the development team, and of course you didn't sell the thousands of email addresses you have in your database :)

Thank you for your trust :-D

Linty · 2025-05-30 16:37:49

Espionage724 wrote:
Is there code available now? I'm interested in the config.inc.php for it.

You'll have access to the code very soon, which will be available on github.

plg wrote:
Linty, did you test a photo of Barack Obama, Beyonce or Ghandi?

Yes, I did some tests with celebrity photos — not Obama or Gandhi specifically, but things like Michael Jordan (young/old), Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, etc.

Using JavaScript libraries like Human or face-api, they performed quite well for distinguishing famous faces. But when I tried with non-celebrity faces (which is the real-life use case in Piwigo), the false positive rate was too high. That’s why facial recognition isn’t part of version 1.

More recently, I experimented with MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) like MiniCPM. These models are surprisingly good at recognizing well-known public figures in images just from context. For example, they can tell it’s Obama without comparing embeddings — it’s more about image understanding than facial matching.

But this isn’t true facial recognition in the biometric sense. If we ever want to support that kind of use case (e.g., finding the same person across your photo library), we’d need to use more dedicated tools, which we’re not integrating yet. It’s something we’re watching closely, but it brings additional complexity around privacy and infrastructure.

homdax · 2025-05-31 18:47:32

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

CanalNoises · 2025-05-31 19:22:19

Thanks for the answers to the facial recognition questions. The reasons for not including it in version 1 make sense. I hope that functionality will come in the future though. My Piwigo instance is mainly used for family photos across a few generations, so AI facial recognition would be a huge help.

drmaemo · 2025-06-03 14:18:36

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

Last edited by drmaemo (2025-06-03 14:20:48)

plg · 2025-06-03 14:20:32

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.

drmaemo · 2025-06-03 14:25:00

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

plg · 2025-06-03 14:36:29

We have been discussing with Claire today and we have come to several conclusions :

* the majority of people don't read the explanations and think Piwigo will send all their photos to chatGPT/Gemini. That's unfortunate because this is absolutely not the plan.

* people fear the "activate by default during installation" plan. That's a sensitive point I agree. I know for sure that if we don't check the checkbox to activate the availability of AI features during install, the new users will miss this feature. It will be easy to uncheck during install. Even if it's checked during installation, it does mean there is no "going back" possible. It's just a plugin activated during install. On the upload page, here is what you will see

You will directly see the "robot" next to "Options". By clicking on the "Options" button, you will be able to uncheck this option and no file will be sent for automated analysis.

Of course, Piwigo AI plugin won't perform any analysis on your existing photos. Not without your explicit request in the Batch Manager.

Furthermore, we have decided to add some reassuring explanations : how does it work? when is it used? where do my photos go? how private safe is it? can I deactivate it later? Do I have to use it all the time?

In the installation form, next to the "make automated analysis available (Piwigo AI plugin)" checkbox, we will add a "learn more" link to provide these information. In the administration page of the plugin, we will also add these information in a dedicated page.

plg · 2025-06-03 14:43:40

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.

Piwigo.org

Announcement

#16 2025-05-30 08:35:11

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#17 2025-05-30 10:34:56

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

Kpatterson wrote:

Kpatterson wrote:

the blog wrote:

#18 2025-05-30 11:19:16

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

alanhjames wrote:

alanhjames wrote:

#19 2025-05-30 11:25:36

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

Breaker wrote:

Breaker wrote:

#20 2025-05-30 11:28:34

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

CanalNoises wrote:

#21 2025-05-30 15:19:18

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#22 2025-05-30 15:49:41

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

linkingpin wrote:

linkingpin wrote:

linkingpin wrote:

#23 2025-05-30 16:37:49

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

Espionage724 wrote:

plg wrote:

#24 2025-05-31 18:47:32

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#25 2025-05-31 19:22:19

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#26 2025-06-03 14:18:36

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#27 2025-06-03 14:20:32

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

drmaemo wrote:

#28 2025-06-03 14:25:00

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

plg wrote:

drmaemo wrote:

#29 2025-06-03 14:36:29

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

#30 2025-06-03 14:43:40

Re: Piwigo AI: Artificial Intelligence is coming to Piwigo

drmaemo wrote:

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