Hi all,

I am new to Piwigo, hoping that I finally solve my photo organization challenge. I have tried photo organization with Nextcloud and Plex (both excellent at what they do best), but non of them served all my needs in terms of photos.

I am running a TrueNAS core system (former FreeNAS, which is based on FreeBSD) for storing data and photos of members of my family, so everyone has his own photos folder. Piwigo is installed as a plugin in a FreeBSD jail (basically a lightweight virtual instance), where all the user's photo folders are mounted to /galleries/.

After synchronizing, I get a physical album structure according to the file structure of each user:
>galleries
--> user1
----> 2020
------> vacation1
------> event2
----> 2021
------> vacation3
--> user2
----> 2021
------> vacation3
etc


My goal is now reorganizing these physical albums into a new virtual album structure, effectively replacing the old structure, something like this:
> galleries
--> vacations
----> vacation 1
------> pics-user1.jpg
----> vacation 3
------> pics-user1.jpg
------> pics-user2.jpg
--> events
----> event 2
------> pics-user1.jpg
--> nature
------> pics-user2.jpg

So a few things to notice:
- I'd like to fully get rid of the physical structure (in Piwigo), I don't need annual albums anymore because Piwigo does this very nicely
- I'd like to merge user albums of the same event/vacation together.


Now, I am unsure about the best way to achieve this:
a) Manually: I saw that I could go to each physical sub-album, "manage album photos", then batch manage them using "associate to album" (or "move to album??"). Would be a ton of work, since we are talking about roughly 1000 albums (plus often additional sub-albums), that are organized in the currently existing annual folders.

b) Use a plugin like Virtualize and VirtualizeAlbumById, but it seems as both weren't maintained recently and 11.5.0 is not supported for those. Any reason for that? Not necessary anymore because it was built into native Piwigo? I didn't find it however.

c) Self coded? Since importing is a one time thing, some coded workaround would be acceptable, but I'd had no idea where to start.


If anyone had to do something similar, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in advance,
Cheers
weingeist