Toxa invites you to travel in many places of the world : Borneo, Costa Rica, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Thailand and in the USA. Many landscapes, but also portraits and a nice set of animals.
Toxa, featured gallery on Piwigo.com
Priority for the photo: Toxa has selected the minimalist style of the Gally Graphite theme and has disabled the display of many information. Thanks to the PWG Stuffs plugin, he has added a block about copyright (this is a question asked nearly every day at Piwigo.com support).
Direct competitor to Facebook, Google+ is a social media launched in June 2011, only 3 months ago. Subscriptions have been publicly opened for about 1 month. The photographers are very present on Google+. By “circling” a few of them, you get a nice photo stream to browse.
Thanks to the Google+1 plugin, available on the [Administration> Plugins> Manage], you can display a dedicated button for Google+ with 2 functions:
Google+ : +1 a photo or a page from your Piwigo photo gallery
Google+ : share a page from your Piwigo photo gallery
By the way, if you’re already on Google+, add me in you circles: Pierrick Le Gall profile on Google+. I mainly write about Piwigo!
Piwigo is constantly evolving. Every month a new minor version is released, including bug fixes and adding small features. Every six months a new major version is released, including new features and important changes. This is completely invisible to Piwigo.com users because we care about software upgrades.
The next major version is Piwigo 2.3. The beta-testing is starting. We give all details on the announcement of Piwigo 2.3.0RC1. Here follows an example of improvement in Piwigo 2.3:
The upload form was seriously improved. Among visible improvements, you will find a simpler album selector, maximum filesize and dimensions displayed before you select some photos, a selection button translated in all languages, a progress bar for the whole upload and last but not least, the photos are displayed as soon as they are uploaded, progressively.
We propose you to test the new features, give your opinion and help us to make Piwigo 2.3 as stable and robust as possible. If you are interested and wish to participate, tell us and we will provide you a “ready to use” environment for testing.
Wedding is one of the few occasions in which individuals call a professional photographer. Any modern photographer usually delivers a DVD with all photos inside. Sometimes, the very modern photographer adds a private album with a selection of pictures of the wedding in its own online photo gallery. Thus, the newlyweds and their families can come and admire the dress of the bride and the arrival of the cake (via the website of the photographer who thus improves his own visibility).
Wedding, out of church, by Bernard Le Gall
Piwigo.com proposes a partnership to wedding photographers in order to go one step further: delivering a complete photo gallery, pre-filled with all the wedding pictures to the newlyweds. Thus the photographer expands his own offer. Here is the way the partnership works:
On Piwigo.com side, we transform the trial period “1 month for free” into “6 months for free” for accounts created under this partnership. Let’s summarize:
If you’re interested in this offer try it for your next wedding session. If you know some wedding photographers, tell them about this offer. At the next wedding you attend, tell it to the newlyweds or to the photographer!
Photo by Bernard Le Gall
The photo gallery KMP Photography gathers various photography types, from landscapes to sport, including portraits, black & white and clouds in the sky. To make it short, a set of high quality photos.
KMP Photography, landscapes, portraits, sport, black & white
The photo gallery is nicely customized. There you’ll find a graphical banner, a custom home page, a random photo on the homepage, a list of links (albums, contact, news, guest book, log in, private section), a guest book made with a specific photo based on user comments and also legal warnings in a PWG Stuffs block.
KMP Photography also uses a powerful feature of Piwigo: permissions. Some photos and albums are private on his gallery.
For the record, note that KMP Photography is the first paid customer of Piwigo.com. Thanks to his feedback on the payment form, we have changed the length of the trial period: whatever the day you decide to subscribe, Piwigo.com does not reduce the 30 days of trial. The subscription period starts at the end of the first 30 days. Thanks to him, all Piwigo.com customers have won a few free days!
The default home page of a Piwigo photo gallery is the list of root albums. If it doesn’t fit your need, you can create your own customized home page. There are 2 main methods: either you create an additional page or your create dynamic blocks. This blog post describes the first method.
Home Page on Piwigo.com Demo 1
The main idea is to create an home page with free content, such as the home page of demo1.
1) Install and activate plugin Additional Pages from screen [Administration > Plugins > Manage]
2) Create a new page on screen [Administration > Plugins > Additional Pages] with title “Home Page”. If plugin FCK Editor is activated, then deactivate it on the “Content” field. Copy the following HTML code and paste it into the “Content” field.
<style type="text/css">
#menubar {display:none !important;}
.titrePage {display:none;}
.myHomePage_photo {text-align: center; margin:50px 0 20px 0;}
.myHomePage_photo a img {border-width:2px; border-style:solid;}
.myHomePage_links {letter-spacing:2px; text-align:center; margin-bottom:0; font-weight:bold;}
.myHomePage_name {margin-top:30px; letter-spacing:2px; text-align:center;}
</style>
<div id="myHomePage">
<div class="myHomePage_photo">
<a href="index.php?/categories"><img src="http://demo1.piwigo.com/uploads/v/8/z/v8z3358vr7/2010/06/27/20100627012304-cd94ddbf.jpg"></a>
</div>
<div class="myHomePage_links">
<a href="index.php?/categories">Albums</a> ⚫ <a href="index.php?/contact">Contact</a>
</div>
<div class="myHomePage_name">
by Piwigo.com Team · This is a demo gallery
</div>
</div>
of course, you have to customize content: replace “by Piwigo.com” with “by John The Photographer”.
And eventually click on the “Set as Homepage” checkbox.
Create your custom home page for your Piwigo photo gallery
3) Select a photo from your gallery, display it in your web browser, right click on the photo and click on the “Copy Image URL” option (or equivalent)
4) Edit the Additional Page and replace the image url (http://demo1.piwigo.com/…/4ddbf.jpg) with yours
PS: if you keep the “Contact” link, activate the Contact Form plugin.
In a Piwigo photo gallery, each photo is available in 3 sizes: high definition, web size and thumbnail.
With Piwigo, 1 photo = 3 sizes : high definition, web size, thumbnail
When you use the web form to upload photos, you can manage resize settings on screen [Administration > Photos > Add > Settings].
Piwigo resize settings screen in your administration panel
pLoader, the Piwigo Uploader, has its own resize settings in the preferences window : pLoader resizes photos before upload.
Unfortunately, we sometimes see some web size photos with huge dimensions and then the administrator set small display dimensions for visitors (either by changing settings for the guest user, or by using the Autosize plugin). This is not the right way to go. Your visitors will see a 640 pixels wide photo but will download a huge file before displaying it. The navigation on your gallery becomes very slow!
A web size photo should not be wider than 1000 pixels, we even recommend 800. If you want a bigger size, use the high definition instead: the visitor won’t download it by default, only on demand (and if the adminstrator gives the permission to see it).
To make things simple: plugin Autosize is great for downsizing a “slightly” too big photo for a “slightly” too small screen, but not for resizing a 4288 pixel to 640 pixel photo.
The Piwigo Showcase project is under active preparation. To make it short, the Showcase is a Live Piwigo Galleries Directory. Each Piwigo live gallery is shown as a screenshot, a description, some tags and a link to see the gallery in action.
The Piwigo Showcase is a collection of Piwigo Live Galleries
How to register?
The Showcase Register plugin in action
Why registering? To increase your visibility on the web. One of the most frequent question on Piwigo.com support is “why can’t I see my gallery on Google?”, the answer is “because Google doesn’t know you yet”. Once you are registered in Piwigo Showcase, Google robots will know about your gallery and you will appear in Google Search results (and other search engines as well, of course)
Not only does Vincent show nice photos on his gallery, he also writes a story for each album. What will you find in his gallery? Travels in France countryside, disused buildings, factories and an old gold mine!
Travel in France with Vincent
Today we have upgraded Piwigo.com galleries with the new Piwigo 2.2.4. This version brings several new features, here is a short list.
Bulgarian is added in the language list of Piwigo
Easier selection of the CSS file in plugin LocalFiles Editor
If you need in-depth details, read Piwigo 2.2.4 Release Notes on Piwigo.org.