The website phpwebgallery.net, which has been online since 2002 and became piwigo.org in 2009, showcases the Piwigo software. In 2010, the commercial hosting service was launched on piwigo.com. This situation is confusing, not only for people who are new to Piwigo, but even for some regular users.

Some customers of the hosting service contact us via piwigo.org. Some non-customer users contact us via piwigo.com to get help. "Prospective" customers contact us via piwigo.org to inquire about our pricing, even though it is explicitly listed on piwigo.com. You understand it is a confusing situation and we want to make it as simple as possible.

So, for several years now and with a definite acceleration in recent months, we have been working to merge the two websites. For historical reasons, we will keep only piwigo.org. We will continue to showcase the Piwigo software there, and we are now providing information about paid plans. We took this opportunity to redesign the website. We hope future Piwigo users will like it! Thanks to the following people for their work:

  * Claire, who organized the pages and wrote the content
  * Alice, who handled the design by creating mockups
  * Martin and Zahra, who translated all of this into PHP/HTML/CSS code
  * Hannah, who coordinated/monitored/directed/mentored Martin and Zahra's work
  * Lana, who manages the new documentation



The Piwigo Association, founded in 2010 to manage the financial aspects of the technical infrastructure required for Piwigo, will soon be dissolved. Pigolabs is now taking over responsibility for paying the bills. For the past few years, due to a lack of sufficient donations, Pigolabs has been covering most of the budget needed for the servers. The donation campaign in late 2019 went well, but we don't want to have to beg the community every two years when we run out of money.

For those who are concerned, let me clarify: Piwigo is, and will remain, open source and free, just as it has been since 2002. There is no grand scheme to turn all users into paying customers. This new "merged" website has only one goal: to simplify communication around Piwigo.

I anticipate a few questions or comments that are sure to come up:

1) This is a betrayal! Piwigo is turning into a company that only cares about money (bunch of jerks)

No.

2) We understood the difference between piwigo.org and piwigo.com very well. This merge is unnecessary.

That's the "survivor bias": the people who understood the difference are precisely the ones who passed the understanding filter. Their opinion is therefore highly biased. Being on the front lines of initial interactions with future users or customers, I can clearly see how much confusion creates an unnecessary barrier. The goal of this merger is to remove friction in the overall understanding of the project.

3) I use Piwigo as a free self-hosted solution on my own server. If I don't want to pay, will I have to find another software solution?

Not at all. In our latest survey in 2020, 87% of you were self-hosting. There's no evil plan to turn self-hosted users into paying customers. When that happens, we're obviously happy (because we like money since it works great for paying the bills) but that's not the goal. However, if we increase the total number of users and maintain the ~10% of paying customers, then the goal will be achieved!

4) The piwigo.com website is still up. We're being misled

We'll keep the piwigo.com website running for a few more days while we set up the redirect system. Eventually, all web pages related to Piwigo software and plans descriptions will be removed from piwigo.com.

5) I have a *.piwigo.com account. Will it change to *.piwigo.org?

No. There will be no URL change for Piwigo Cloud subscribers. You can also notice a change in terminology: we no longer refer to a "piwigo.com account" but rather a "Piwigo Cloud account". Even if account creation now takes place on piwigo.org, the account will still be created on *.piwigo.com.


Now it's your turn: if you have any questions, polite insults, or comments, feel free to reply to this message :-)