Hi everyone, I have been checking out Piwigo atleast once a year for almost 10 years. Never fully commited because I was comfortable with what I was using. Well I think the time has come to get it going. My wife and I are creating quite the mess with our photos, especially since having kids.



Usage will primarily be My Wife and I, and possibly a few family members. But before diving in I just wanted to verify a few things to make sure I can do what I am aiming to do.

1. Between the two fo us we have just over 70,000 pictures, live photos from iOS and videos. These files span nearly every common format used in the last 20 years including RAW files in both Nikon (.NEF) and Adobe (.DNG) . Can Piwigo handle this? Especially the Live Photos and Videos?

2. We often create albums and share the link with family. I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but it is possible to create share links for albums and password protect them with Piwigo right?

3. When uploading directly to Piwigo where are my images stored? I dread the idea of something going wrong with my server and not being able to pull my images back out manually if ever needed.

4. This is probably one of the most important. How can I ensure that the metadata changes I make in Piwigo are automatically written into my files? Especially Tags! This is what has lead to the disaster that is our current photo library. Nearly all of the photo managers out there dont write any meta data into the files, only to its own database. So if/when something goes wrong im left with a disorganized mess, because all my meticulous organization only existed in some database thats now gone. So this time around I plan on using Tags extensively, when I do create albums, they will be smart albums based on tags. They are universal and work with pretty much everything...provided the program you created them with actually saved them into the file that is...





--My plan, and what happened to our current library. (just for added context if you want to read it)

I am trying to find something that I can use - hopefully - permanently, but that can also equip me to use other software in the future.

I started making sure I kept my pictures stored locally back when I was in highschool, so around 2005-ish. All my friends trusted MySpace...Well MySpace wiped out all inactive accounts several years ago, and most of my friends werent aware and permanently lost years worth of photos.

Fast forward to around 2008. My, at the time girlfriend, now Wife and I went through a bit of a phaze where we slept in my car and couch hopped. But, I still had my computer, my camera, and my external HDD with all my stuff on it. We got our first place together about a year later and of course, now that I have a desk and aircondinditioning that external drive decided it wants to sing me a song of screeching and clicks...thankfully I burned a LOT of CD's back then, so I was able to recover about 90% of my stuff.

I started using...some photo manager I cant remember the name of, and got everything reorganized. Just my luck, the project shutdown a couple years later. It wasnt until this point that I realized all my organization only existed inside that program...yay. At this point it's around...2011 or so and My - still - girlfriend and I both have smart phones that are constantly filling up with pictures. So I built my first personal "server". Windows 7 running on a 366MHz Intel Celeron (Mendocino). For the younguns that CPU came out in 1999, and was absolute crap when it was new lol. Also had 512MB of SD RAM, a USB 2.0 expansion card, and about 6 external HDD's. I decided to try a program called Tonido since it had iOS apps that could backup our pictures automatically, and it worked over the internet without any real setup. It worked well for about 2 years until lightning hit our apartment building and the "server" let it's magic smoke out...Luckily the "server" was so damn slow, that instead of using it when I was home, I just kept a copy synced to my desktop.

After that I'd had enough and I saved up and bought a Synology DS412+ and 4 1TB WD Reds. I fell in love with Synology Photostation, so of course you know they just had to discontinue it...because thats my luck so far. So Synology released thier new and not-improved app called Moments which luckily carried over most of my organization from Photostation. Moments was then discontinued and replaced with Synology Photos, which is basically still moments but a little better. I still run Synology Photos to this day, but have long since given up on keeping it organized. I discovered shortly after Moments was released that once again, it stores everything in a database and that any organization I do is permanently trapped in thier proprietary software that doesnt seem to get updates very often.

So any semblance of real organization stopped in about 2012, I was more focused on preservation. So now were married and have two kids, needless to say the amount of pictures taken has exploded. I need to get this undercontrol, and I refuse to get trapped in another situation where I'll inevitably end up with another disorganzied mess in a few years.

So moving forward Im on the hunt for somrthing I can host myself, has a nice and secure Web interface and "wife friendly" mobile apps. So far Piwigo checks all thoes boxes and then some. However I also know that Piwigo uses an SQL database to store all of the metadata, virtual albums and other things. From a performance standpoint, I totally get it. But I also know that Piwigo has many extensions avaliable and is very powerful, so I'm hoping I can make my desired organizational sturcture work. The plan is to exclusively use tags to organize everything, then if I want to make an album, I will make a smart album based on whatever tags are relevant. But I absolutely need thoes tags written into the files themselves automatically. This way I can never ever end up with a disorganized mess again. If Piwigo goes away sure Ill loose my smart albums, comments, and other stuff specific to Piwigo, BUT thoes tags will still be there and readable by pretty much any other photo manager on earth.

THE END

lol, sorry for writing a whole book here. Felt like telling the whole story to give some context to my frustrations, and why I want to be able to do things the way I am.