Piwigo
Open-source photo gallery and management software for individuals and teams.
Open source alternative to:
Piwigo is a mature open-source photo gallery management application with over 20 years of development history and a large active community. It offers a complete solution for organizing, sharing, and managing large photo collections with support for albums, tags, geo-tagging, and user permissions.
Piwigo features a powerful plugin architecture with hundreds of extensions available, including mobile apps for iOS and Android, batch upload tools, slideshow players, and social sharing features. It supports multi-user setups with granular permission controls, making it suitable for photography clubs, families, and organizations that need to share photos with different groups.
Licensed under GPL-2.0, Piwigo can be installed on standard LAMP/LEMP web servers or via Docker. It is available as a free self-hosted solution and also as a managed cloud service at piwigo.com. Piwigo is a great Google Photos alternative for users who want a web gallery with a traditional album-based organization structure.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can I run Piwigo on ordinary shared web hosting?
Yes — Piwigo is a PHP application that runs on standard LAMP/LEMP stacks, so it works on most shared hosting plans as well as VPS setups and Docker. You only need PHP, MySQL, and a web server, which makes it one of the easiest self-hosted gallery platforms to deploy. Its hundreds of plugins run fine on modest hosting as well.
How does Piwigo handle sharing photos with different groups of people?
Piwigo supports multi-user setups with granular permissions, so different users or groups can be given access to different albums. Photos can be organised by albums, tags, and geo-tagging, and the plugin ecosystem adds mobile apps, batch upload, slideshows, and social sharing. With over 20 years of development, it comfortably handles large collections shared across many people.
Is Piwigo free, and what do you pay for?
The Piwigo software itself is free and GPL-2.0 licensed, and self-hosting costs you nothing beyond your server. The freemium part of the model is the managed cloud service at piwigo.com, where you pay a subscription to have the platform hosted and maintained for you. You can start self-hosted at no cost and only pay if you prefer not to run a server.
Repository details
Updated 8/14/2026, 3:00:31 PM
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