How Piwigo can help teams collaborate remotely

The second wave of covid-19 is hitting hard in many countries. Lockdowns are back and most of us are supposed to work remotely. Since the spring, we have had to change our teamwork habits: no more coffee breaks, and welcome to chat messaging, video meetings, and other collaborative online tools…

At Piwigo we are used to working remotely, since all team members (permanent staff, interns, external collaborators, community contributors…) work from different places and even different countries. And among other tools, we use Piwigo every day for teamwork! That’s why we had the idea to share some tips to use Piwigo in the current context.

Moving from Local Storage to the Shared Cloud

It is not possible to share an external hard drive with your colleagues when you are no longer physically at the same workplace. 

It is also difficult to rely on the shared network directory (you know, the Z:/ directory on your computer’s desktop, from which you access billions of folders…).

Moreover, these are rather risky backup media (read our blog post on this subject).

So the right resolution is to move to the Cloud to store, organise and share your files.

How convenient : at Piwigo, we propose a ready-to-use offer to host all your files (mainly images, but also videos, PDFs…). And if you want, you can ask someone who knows about IT to install Piwigo for free on your web hosting.

With Piwigo, a secure Cloud dedicated to media files

With Piwigo, you have all the tools you need to create your company’s media library, secure and accessible from anywhere by all your coworkers.

Most of Piwigo.com‘s corporate customers use Piwigo this way, which means that their photo library is completely private, inaccessible to the public, and only accessible to employees.

It is possible to manage different levels of access (viewing, adding, modifying…), to limit the access of employees to certain albums only (depending on their department, for example). To learn more, read this article about user management in Piwigo!

It is also possible to create temporary access for external partners and to activate sharing by link for people who do not have an account on your photo library.

To keep it short: with Piwigo, you have the perfect tool to store your files on an online, shared, secure space, and the icing on the cake: respectful of your personal data. No advertising trackers with us. No loss of your intellectual property.

To find out more, read the customer testimonial from Germain Dutilleul, Communication Manager at ICAM.

Organize your files for easy retrieval

“Where’s the latest version of the logo?”

You’ve already heard that a thousand times in the office, and now that you’ve switched to working remotely, it’s no better. It’s time to clean up your files, don’t you think? That way, everyone would be autonomous to find the file they need and save time.

That’s great, Piwigo will help you. Instead of searching for hours in a folder tree, with Piwigo finding a file is a piece of cake.

Just like on your computer, you can create albums and sub albums with infinite depth, but that’s not over. You can also use tags to classify and filter your files, regardless of the album they are classified in.

You can of course search for your images by name or other criteria (author, description…) thanks to the search engine, and even display them on a map depending on where they were taken.

You can even set up a multi-criteria filter system as shown in the example below (read this article for more information).

Our customers say it best:

“Since the implementation of Piwigo, we lose much less time looking for the photos we need, it’s instantaneous, we’re always up to date.”

Cindy D, Communication and Marketing Manager at ECT (read the testimonial).

Share your files in a few clicks

“Will you send me a Wetransfer?” 

You’ve heard that a thousand times, too. You organise a photo shoot, the photographer sends you a Wetransfer link, you download it to your computer, clean up the images, and then you send a Wetransfer back to your colleague…

With Piwigo, it’s all over. Your photo library has everything you need to share files and collaborate.

First of all, you can allow your photographer or anyone else to upload files directly to your Piwigo, safely and securely.

Then you can “clean up” the files directly on Piwigo, keeping only the best photos. Or keep the archive and create a selection to share with your coworkers and partners.

All this is true for photos but also for any other type of file, image, video or PDF! Brochures, graphic designs, brand guidelines… That’s why the communication teams love Piwigo.

You can also, when you are asked for a particular file, share the link to that file directly. All this avoids duplicates, version issues (which version is the right one?). 

And the best for last: it’s good for the planet!

Fight digital pollution with Piwigo

Yes, you’ve read correctly: collaborating with Piwigo can reduce the digital pollution caused by team exchanges! 

Indeed, every time you send one or more attachments by email or another messaging tool, every time you upload files to a server, every time a file is stored in duplicate somewhere: you are using server resources, and therefore, energy.

By centralising all your media on Piwigo, you avoid the digital pollution caused by file sharing. Each collaborator can go and get the files they need from the photo library, you can simply share a link rather than attachments. This is one of the good practices recommended to limit the digital pollution linked to the digitalisation of working methods.

How we use Piwigo for teamwork

At Piwigo we use our own solution on a daily basis to work as a team remotely. 

We have an internal Piwigo gallery, which is only accessible to the team. We use it, for example, during the design stages of new features or new pages on our websites. The designer creates an album to share their proposals of graphic models, everyone can view the mockups online and download them if they wish in small or large format. 

Everyone can also post a comment to give their opinion.

Our internal Piwigo also allows us to share screenshots when we encounter a bug or malfunction. 

Finally, we use Piwigo to host all the resources that we regularly need: logos, mockups…

At the same time we use another open source software, Mattermost, an instant messaging software. It allows us to discuss in real time on thematic discussion groups, to share links, documents… In fact, we hardly send emails anymore!

We are convinced that the open source world has an important role to play in the digitalisation of companies. It is important that we do not let our working tools be confiscated by GAFAM. There are alternatives to Microsoft Teams, Google Drive and other Salesforce, and at our level, with Piwigo, we want to help employees and entrepreneurs all over the world to collaborate better and work more efficiently.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

• Category: Best practices
• Tag: digitalisation, remote, teamwork