Hello Piwigo fans,

Piwigo 1.0 was released on April 12th 2002. Back then I was still a student in computer sciences. The photo sharing ecosystem on the web was very different. Social networks and big players such as Flickr (Yahoo), Picasa Web Albums (Google) or Facebook were not born yet. PhpWebGallery, the name of the Piwigo project until 2009, distributed as a free open source software has made photo sharing possible for thousands of users.

In 10 years, many opensource photo galleries were created and nearly as many have died, probably because it's hard to exist compared to web giants. Thanks to its strong community, Piwigo is still alive and its evolution is getting even faster. Years after years, many contributors have joined their efforts to improve Piwigo, by coding on the core, by creating extensions, by translating in their language, by supporting users on the forum or by giving some money to the Piwigo Association.

What makes Piwigo an important project? Many things of course, but here follow the most obvious reasons in my opinion:

1) photo sharing is one of the most common usage for the web and recent news, such as Facebook buying Instagram, shows that it's still true for a long time

2) Piwigo complies with a decentralized web model, in which the user keeps control over his data and is able to customize his website the way he wants

3) although very rich in features, Piwigo strives to remain simple to use for everyone


Happy Birthday Piwigo!