Testimonials

Let's discover what Piwigo users have to say! On this page you can read genuine testimonials from real life experiences with Piwigo.

I've been using Piwigo for almost 4 years. After gathering our families photos, and figuring out there was not an easy way to sort them on just one computer, I knew there had to be an easier solution. We could have spent 10$/mo on some online storage to sort them (google photos), but with our videos, I would blow right through that.

After trying a few other 'self hosted' options, I found Piwigo. The best part is that is was open source, and well made. I tend to want things done a certain way, and of course my way, is the best way. My setup was to run Piwigo on my FreeNAS box in a jail (FreeBSD). My wife and my phone upload to my FreeNAS box, and Piwigo see's the image when I 'synchronize'. The way I import my photos is a backend way, but since Piwigo was made with dynamic changes in mind it still works.

I send 10$ to Piwigo every half year to year, as if it wasn't here, there would not be anything else I would use.

I hope more people come to Piwigo, as I think I have saved a bunch of money using it, and the family (and extended family) like it to see our pictures.

Thomas Sweeney
Individual

Maryland, USA, November 2018

I am a photography enthusiast, sharing lots of free stock photos and photos from hiking trips in New Zealand. I have close to 3,500 images in my Piwigo photo gallery, and all is running very smooth.

I discovered Piwigo in 2015. I needed to replace a discontinued photo gallery with something new and Piwigo ticked all the boxes for me. I never looked back - setup was fairly straightforward and maintenance is effortless. No fuss, things just work. And when something breaks (I had a broken version update once) then I received immediate help on community forums and the issue was resolved within a few hours. Frankly, that's faster than paid-for commercial support with most vendors I know of.

One important factor why I picked Piwigo over other available options is the community spirit. I prefer supporting software that is available for everyone to use in any way they like. This is profoundly different from vendor lock-in and EULAs full of small print, that you find with proprietary products.

Tomas Sobek
Individual

New Zealand, April 2018

For years, my family used an older gallery product that is no longer supported. As that code base grew older, I was troubled about keeping it in use but I didn't like other options -- until I found Piwigo. We currently have over 11,000 photos in our family gallery, and Piwigo is handling that nicely, with easy options for adding a lot more in bulk (and I have a LOT more to add).

I feel more limited by my time and energy than by the software. Keep up the good work!

Stuart J. Whitmore
Individual

USA, March 2018

After using many so called photography specific web hosts over the years, I could never find one with software that worked how I wanted it, always how they wanted it. Then I chanced on Piwigo one day, and created our family website of 4,000 photos. Next I created my own Piwigo website, with my 50 years of photographs in mind.

What a joy! Piwigo is the three 'P's - Powerful, a Pleasure to use, and Pleasing to the eye. Thank-you Piwigo Team!

Richard Histon
Individual

United Kingdom, March 2018

Over the past years I have switched between Zenphoto, Wordpress and Piwigo. After using these other systems for a while, I always returned to Piwigo.

Here is why: when it comes to speed - especially with a large amount of images - Piwigo feels like the fastest system. Piwigo has an active development and a very active and friendly community. Updating to the most recent version is very easy through the backend, you save a lot of maintaining time compared to other systems. Piwigo is highly configurable with the local files editor plugin. It is very feature rich and for a gallery systems it has all the features you need - in my opinion more than other commercial addons (gallery systems for wordpress for example).

If you want to run a rock stable gallery system I would highly recommend Piwigo.

Ralf Kerkhoff
Individual

Germany, March 2018

Piwigo is an amazing help. All the heavy lifting of transferring your photography to an online gallery is easily managed, along with so many advanced features: smart albums, tagging, searches, plug-ins, themes, resizing, downloads, watermarks, users, stats... go get it.

Robert Miller
Organisation

Canada, December 2017

I discovered Piwigo 3 years ago and, since the beginning, it was a pleasant surprise. I am using it for my private photos database on a Synology NAS, around 340 GB and 70.000 pics.

Piwigo it works like a charm and it is very customizable. Due to NAS hardware limitations, I prefer to generate the thumbnails outside of Piwigo.

Piwigo doesn't have a rival! Thank you, Piwigo Team!

Ştefan-Liviu Ene
Individual

Romania, December 2017

I was having increasing problems with Gallery3 because the support and development was effectively discontinued. I was able to move my then 15,000 photos in dozens of albums and sub-albums to Piwigo with a relatively small amount of effort and I am so pleased I did. In particular, I was able to move all the captions which did not want to retype!

Piwigo works well on a variety of web browsers, mobiles and tablets. I have since added several thousand more photos and another dozen albums. It is a wonderful product and solution.

David Kerr
Individual

Australia, December 2017

I have been using Piwigo since 2013. Before I had a website based on Adobe-Flash and I wanted something new and more organised. As open-source platform (and free of charge) Piwigo had all the good cards. The options that really convinced me were: easy to use, quickly upload your new photos, create password protected private albums, the search options, display the photos metadata, give your own personal touch to your site etc.

At first I ran my website on my own server and tried to customise my site to my liking with the help of the numerous tools and plug-ins. But due my lack of knowledge in the PHP-language I move over to the Piwigo.com server. For me this suited a lot better, no maintenance for myself, just uploading my pictures, so I can spend more time with taking photos.

Over the years I had some contact with the real programmers to help me out if I made a mess again. In the time my website was on my own server I used a lot of the support tools provided by Piwigo: the documentation, the forum and even direct e-mail contact. All very helpful.

In other words a great and alive initiative.

Jan Eijdenberg
Individual

The Netherlands, December 2017

I am writing to compliment you on your photograph organization software. I am a pathologist, and I use this to organize photomicrographs for teaching and distribution to colleagues. It is easy to use, easy to understand, requires minimal maintenance, and my colleague have no trouble getting what they need. I appreciate having access to such a great product.

William R Oliver, MD
Organisation

USA, December 2017

I've used Piwigo for my personal website on a Raspberry Pi for years. It is wonderful open source software. It allows family and friends to view our pictures and saves shipping them around by email.

Keep up the good work team!

John Anderson
Individual

Canada, December 2017

I discovered Piwigo after my parents died and left tens of thousands of slides and negatives that tracked the lives of their ten children from birth. The setup and organization has been simple and intuitive so many local and extended family members have found connections here. Say it: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Allen Simpson
Individual

USA, December 2017

I have been using Piwigo since April 2013 for a family photo album.

It is so powerful, uses a tagging system to share photos across albums and is so easy to use.

I love Piwigo.

Peter Preneas
Individual

Australia, December 2017

I'm using Piwigo now for 2 years now to host my private collection of about 9000 photos. For me its the perfect way to show my pictures since its 1) easy to use 2) comes with a number of plugins, themes, ... to adapt to my needs 3) gives me the chance to tweak things on a low level if I feel like it 4) has an active community with great support in case of questions.

And of course its FREE to use!

Thomas Feuster
Individual

Germany, December 2017

I'd recommend this tool for those who want to create organisations' galleries or for individual purposes.

I found Piwigo simple and useful. I've been using it for few years now. THe Piwigo Community is growing and it sounds very positively as well. Add-ons for more demanded users are in place. The platform is being developed and updated on regular basis. I've already made few galleries with Piwigo.

Bogusław Swierczek
Organisation

Poland, December 2017

I have been using piwigo for 1 year. The feature in piwigo took my attention is I could create categories and let specific users access to them with a password so easily. So I could offer privacy to my clients with the ease of browsing that piwigo offers.

I have over 5000 images in my piwigo system. One of the best thing is after you upload original files resizing to different sizes are done only once. Once file is resized it is cached and ready to be served from the disk.

The mobile site is fantastic. I could show a gallery to anyone without teaching the interface. Mobile apps makes upload very easy.

Sami Onur Zaim
Professional

Turkey, December 2017

Just wanted to thank the development team behind the ever growing Piwigo community. Piwigo is easy to install, easy to learn and use, and most importantly gives a good user experience to visitors of your gallery site. Plus many well designed "plugins" to customize to a galleries need.

Nigel Aves
Individual

USA, December 2017

A longtime search for a suitable photo gallery brought me to Piwigo. This is the only gallery that gives a collector incredible help with the possibility of integrating an easy to use SEARCH engine into the collection of photo's.

Wilfried
Individual

Belgium, December 2017

We use Piwigo as a media sharing platform for the family, and it's a great alternative to messing with Facebook or Instagram. It's far more flexible, private, and - the not to be taken lightly - you have control and ownership of your stuff! Installation is easy, and the documentation is solid for most aspects, including plugins.

I can't say enough about the platform and the work of the Piwigo team. Their support of the open source community and, indirectly maybe, my own little community here is greatly appreciated!

Kade
Individual

USA, December 2017

I have been using Piwigo for about 3 years now after the demise of the Gallery3 manager. Piwigo is much more straightforward to use than Gallery and I would recommend anyone to give it a try!

Bill Peters
Individual

Austria, December 2017

Just want to add my "props" to the folks at Piwigo for the great product they have put out for their clients. I create a Piwigo photo album for each of the websites I create and walk each client through the "how to's" of Piwigo, which is very user friendly. I have tried other photo albums in the past and have always come back to Piwigo not just because it's free, but because it is honestly... the best!

Bill Gowacki
Professional

USA, December 2017

I first used other open source galleries or main streams photos applications such as Picasa. I'm based in France and mainly use Piwigo to store and maintain my photo collection for friends and family usage and sharing. My library now hosts 40,000+ photos, all organized in a date based organization (2017, 2016, 2015, ...) with sub-albums for each year event.

I moved to Piwigo in 2009 on my self hosted hardware, without interruption since first installation.

Piwigo is a great tool with a maximum of personalization features, from which the capacity to use (or create) plugins which can without any limit extend the tool capabilities. The community around piwigo.org never let you out of support or hints, which is greatly appreciated ! Many thanks for authors and contributors !

Arnaud
Individual

France, December 2017

I've tried other platforms before and found myself limited by either being restricted to a single brand of computer/tablet/phone equipment, or by not being able to define myself the access rules.

Then I found Piwigo. It is accessible on all platforms, so when I upload new pictures, I can tell my mom to have a look and although she is 94, she can use her tablet to immediately look at the new pictures. Family, colleagues and other people have separate groups so I can share what I want with who I want. And there is no need for them to belong to any social media.

I like the calendar view, and yes I have images dating back to the year 1720, in order to sort out scans with genealogy data. With Piwigo I am in control, while other platforms were trying to control me.

I like to be in control, that's why I like Piwigo.

Christian Lempereur
Individual

Belgium, December 2017

I looked extensively at alternatives, tried multiple and been longtime user of zenfolio - so coming at this deliberately. Your product is great mix of simplicity and functionality. Security configuration options in particular are appreciated.

I’ve been able to publish a 4000+ image family photo album using your product, LightRoom 4 and the Piwigo Export Plug-in by AlloyPhoto. The combination of these three tools allows me to leverage keywords and smart folders to populate and maintain the photo site with ease. The capabilities around security, variety of themes and plugins have been particularly appreciated.

Thank you for making this great product available.

Jonathan Bartleson
Individual

USA, January 2013

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