erAck wrote:

B. No. You have either physical albums matching your directories, or virtual albums. Images in physical albums can't be associated with virtual albums, AFAIK. (not very sure about whether this changed, I don't have physical albums anymore for years).

I'm pretty sure you can associate a physical photo with a virtual album (in addition to the physical album it exists in).

Personally, I only use physical albums because I like maintaining a specific folder/sub-folder structure for my photos (everything under "galleries" which contains symlinks out to my NAS, but that's a different discussion) with the original filenames.

Virtual albums are just that ... virtual. All of your photos will be under the "uploads" folder (with generated filenames, sorted in folders by upload date). I guess that's easier to manage for most folks since you can just upload photos to your site, not care really where they are or what they're named, but still have them appear in one-to-many virtual albums. Less maintenance on the file system side.

For my family photo collection, I use both physical and virtual albums.

All physical albums are folders, mounted under the "Original Photos" folder with read-only access.

BTW, this was my reason to choose Piwigo: I wanted to be absolutely sure the program can not in any way modify my photos and folder structure, that I built over decades; but at the same time be able to add whatever tags, comments, etc. and create whatever needed structure of virtual albums.

So, apart from this "Original Photos", I have dozens of virtual albums with selections of photos from physical albums. Works exactly as you would dream ;)