Announcement

#1 2020-09-14 11:27:02

plg
Piwigo Team
Nantes, France, Europe
2002-04-05
13823

Results of the Piwigo 2020 survey

In January, we asked Piwigo users to answer a survey. Our goal was to get to know better the community members, their uses and expectations.

We sent out the questionnaire at the end of January 2020 in French and English, and in March we sent out the German version.

The questionnaire was sent via Piwigo newsletters in the 3 languages, but it was also distributed on the piwigo.org website, on the piwigo.com blog and on social networks.
We were pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of the answers.

A total of 1116 people responded.

We have summarized the results of the survey in an infographic that you can view by clicking below. But we wanted to comment on the results in more detail in this post.

https://piwigo.org/screenshots/newsletter/2020727-survey-2020-results-1000w.jpg


A. Piwigo, a French project... but not only !

First of all, the French population is over-represented : indeed the French represent 33% of respondents. This is quite obvious, since Piwigo was initially a project born in France. Among the most involved members of the community are many French people, so they are more likely to respond to this type of survey.

But the results show that Piwigo is now used on all continents! Germany, USA, UK, Canada, Switzerland, are the most represented among the survey respondents but there are also users in Mexico, Turkey, India, Morocco, Hong Kong...
Thus, we can see that Piwigo has largely been able to go beyond the borders of France and Europe, which is a great success for us.

B. Various uses

The population most represented in the survey respondents are individuals, who use Piwigo for personal use, and who host their Piwigo themselves.

This makes perfect sense because on one hand, these people make up the majority of subscribers to the Piwigo newsletter; and on the other hand, Piwigo is first and foremost a free and open source project.

But this shouldn't hide the great diversity of use cases. Piwigo is used today in large organizations (companies, charities, public entities), for a wide variety of uses that are sometimes outside the usual framework.
For example, some use Piwigo as a CMS to build websites or web applications.

Concerning hosting, there are also various schemes. Not everyone is comfortable with installing and running Piwigo from their own web hosting, and solutions are being developed to address this.

For example, there are developers who have specialized in setting up, deploying and hosting photo libraries created with Piwigo for their customers.

In addition, more and more companies, public entities and non profits chose to host their gallery on piwigo.com, so they don't have to worry about deployment and update issues. Individuals and professional photographers also choose this solution. The situations are varied and that's what makes the richness of the Piwigo project!


C. You have a lot to say!

The third major lesson from this survey is that users have a lot to say. Let's focus on one of the questions asked: "How could we improve Piwigo"?

The answers were mainly focused on 4 points :

  1. Improve Piwigo's design (34%)
  2. Improve documentation and create tutorials (21%)
  3. Enrich mobile applications (18%)
  4. Add new features (18%)

1. Piwigo’s design

Design improvement is the most popular evolution in the answers to this question.

This shows that we are on the right track, since design and ergonomics improvement are the topics we have been working on the most in the latest updates. And we continue to make progress on this topic (version 2.11, which is currently available in beta 2, continues the work of redesigning Piwigo's administration).

2. Documentation and tutorials

Documentation and tutorials are also a topic we are considering. It takes a lot of time to create and maintain quality documentation that is suitable for both developers and novice users, hosting experts and Piwigo.com customers. We are a very small team and we need to think about the best way to handle this. But we are aware of this need and we will work on it.

3. Mobile apps

Concerning mobile apps, this is also something we have been working on since 2019, with the redesign of the Piwigo application for Android. We know that this application still needs to be improved and we plan to work on it.
As for Piwigo for iOS, the application continues to evolve thanks to Eddy's work.

4. New features and improvements

Last but not least, there are demands for new features and improvements to the software itself.

You have many requests because you have various needs and uses. Piwigo must be able to suit everyone and that's the complexity of maintaining software like this. But some points came up several times and we wanted to answer them here:

* Video management

This is another element that often came up in the responses. Many of you pointed out that video management could be improved and could be native (not using a plugin).

From our point of view, installing the plugin to enable video management should not be a problem. The modularity of Piwigo is one of its strengths: you only install the features you need and can thus model Piwigo to your own image, as it is the case with Wordpress for example.

On the other hand, we carefully follow and support the evolutions of the VideoJS plugin to improve its integration.

* Face recognition

Automatic recognition of content, whether faces or objects/animals, is a recurring request. The "simple" solution would be to go through the API of a web giant (GAFA) to analyze the photos and know what was detected in it. Obviously, proposing an alternative to GAFA while using it would be paradoxical, even hypocritical. It is therefore not the direction we wish to go in. We'd really like to propose something on this subject: so we'll have to spend some time on research and development!

* Better management of social networks

Some themes (such as the very popular Bootstrap Darkroom) add share buttons to your photo library. Plugins also allow sharing. It seems to work. There are probably some improvements to be made, but it is not especially planned.


In conclusion, we would like to thank all the people who took the time to complete this survey. It is very important to us and will be very helpful. And finally, thank you for all the messages of support you have given us!

Offline

#2 2020-09-14 14:17:51

jnashpiwigo
Piwigo Team
2014-10-21
254

Re: Results of the Piwigo 2020 survey

Very nice summary!

Well done

Offline

#3 2020-09-14 15:24:50

Crythes
Member
2020-01-23
113

Re: Results of the Piwigo 2020 survey

Interesting! Something regarding the hosting - when I tried using pwigio.com I noticed that the number of plugins that are available is much smaller than if I self hosted Piwigo. For example, I need the 3Dhop plugin, but it's not available on piwigo.com. That by itself is a deal breaker for me. Is there a reason why the selection is smaller? Or am I looking at the wrong place?

Last edited by Crythes (2020-09-14 15:25:05)

Offline

#4 2020-09-29 10:36:58

plg
Piwigo Team
Nantes, France, Europe
2002-04-05
13823

Re: Results of the Piwigo 2020 survey

Crythes wrote:

Interesting! Something regarding the hosting - when I tried using pwigio.com I noticed that the number of plugins that are available is much smaller than if I self hosted Piwigo. For example, I need the 3Dhop plugin, but it's not available on piwigo.com. That by itself is a deal breaker for me. Is there a reason why the selection is smaller? Or am I looking at the wrong place?

The number of extensions on Piwigo.com is indeed smaller. That's because we "pre-install" them, after tests and validation.

If a plugin is not available and you want it, simply ask Piwigo.com support :-) The plugin may not be installed simply because nobody asked for it!

Offline

#5 2021-10-03 06:29:23

Tmanok
Member
2020-07-25
4

Re: Results of the Piwigo 2020 survey

I'm super late to the party! Just updated from 2.10 to 11.5 and wow what a difference in UI! You've been busy bees, I've been a user for a long time and have been using it personally for family photos and sharing photos with friends and family for a long time. (Please ignore the membership date on the forum, it does not accurately reflect my historic usage of Piwigo).

Go open source software!
Thanks for the hard work.



Tmanok

Last edited by Tmanok (2021-10-03 06:30:23)

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB

github twitter newsletter Donate Piwigo.org © 2002-2024 · Contact