News from Piwigo.com, online photo gallery software
Available for download since October 11th, Piwigo 13 has been recently deployed on all customer accounts hosted on Piwigo.com. Let’s take a look at what’s new in this release, which focuses on the user experience!
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On March 30th, we announced on the forum the release of Piwigo 13 in beta version.
In this new version, you will discover improvements and redesigns for various features: history search engine, plugin installer, related album selecter, tag renaming, API explorer, album list and album editing.
We decided to try something new for this version 13: Pierrick presents you all the new features, including the ones that are still in development, in a video. We want to get a maximum of feedback from the community!
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How to manage the expiration date of image usage rights and photo consents on your photo library? With the Expiry Date plugin for Piwigo, it’s easy. Today, let’s discover this new plugin designed in collaboration with one of our Enterprise customers.
Expiry Date is a new plugin for our enterprise customers. It is not available by default on your Piwigo: you have to contact the customer support to benefit from it as part of your subscription (if you have an enterprise account).
Once activated on your gallery, this plugin will add a new “Expiry Date” field available on each photo.
You can change the expiry date of a photo from Piwigo’s administration, either individually or in bulk on a selection of photos with the batch manager.
Once an expiry date has been set on a photo, it will appear next to the other fields in your gallery.
The plugin’s settings allow you to choose what happens when the expiry date is reached.
You can choose between 3 options :
In addition, you can send an email notification before the date and on the precise day of the expiry date:
There are several cases where you need to manage an expiration date or expiry date on a photo or any other file.
First of all, it is necessary when the image usage rights are limited in time and must be renewed.
This is often the case when you buy photos from a photographer, or on an online image bank: the license can be limited to 5 years or less.
If you are still using an image on your website or in any communication medium when your license has expired, you may be prosecuted for copyright violation.
Then, there is the case of photo consent: in some cases and some countries, if you want to use a photo or a video of a physical person on your website or any other medium, you must first obtain their consent. The contract can mention a maximum duration, at the end of which you no longer have the right to use this image.
These two legal constraints are the main reasons why an expiration date (or expiry date) can be useful on a photo, but there are many other use cases.
Are you interested in this plugin? Contact the support at the usual email address to request it!
For more information on copyright and image rights, you can read the articles below.
Please keep in mind that rules can differ depending on your country.
Copyright and GDPR for photographers (UK)
The Ultimate Guide To Photo Release Forms
Piwigo is known for being very customizable. We offer many themes, in addition to Modus which is installed by default on all new galleries. Each theme can be declined in many color schemes and have multiple configuration options.
For our enterprise clients who wish to do so, we can customize the gallery to their colors.
In this article, we show you 8 examples of custom Piwigo galleries!
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In a previous article, we talked about user management in Piwigo: who has the right to add files, who sees what… Today, we focus on the collaborative features and especially, all the sharing features.
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Over the years, Piwigo has integrated many features that allow you to collaborate with your team or partners, in an efficient and secure way. However, some of these features are still unknown to our customers! That’s why we have decided to focus on user management in this article.
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After the release of Piwigo 11 in January 2021, the team is not standing still. We are working on the next version (which will be released this summer), and we have decided to involve our users very early in the release process. Discover in this blog post the new features and why not, join the beta testers!
For the first time, we offered to some of our customers the opportunity to participate in webinars presenting this new version. We wanted to get feedback before the release of this version.
The feedback has been positive, which is good news. We have noted some very interesting remarks, which we will try to integrate into the roadmap of this new version.
For example, following a suggestion from a customer, we will add, from the user manager, a reminder of the definition of the different profiles (webmaster, administrator, visitor…).
After these first presentations, we will enter the beta-testing phase. And this is where we need you, Piwigo users!
Anyone can give a little bit of their time to test this version before its official release.
Being a beta tester is the best way to help us release a new, functional, bug-free version. But it also allows you to get involved and contribute to a Piwigo that really meets your needs!
If you would like to volunteer, send us an email at contact@piwigo.com : we will then give you early access to v12, so you can test it and give us your feedback. Of course, this will not impact your Piwigo account!
PS: if you are able to deploy Piwigo by yourself, feel free to download Piwigo 12.0.0beta1 right here.
Piwigo 11 was a major release, with many new features. We decided to speed up the release of new versions: Piwigo 12 has fewer new features than Piwigo 11, but each of them is important.
The user management screen has been completely redesigned, in line with the new group manager that you discovered in Piwigo 11.
The design of this page is more modern and colorful.
In addition, you can choose between different views: a default list; a compact mode that displays a maximum number of users on the same page; and a tile mode that displays users in the form of large tiles.
Modifying your users in bulk will become much more intuitive: a selection mode has been introduced, which makes this page usable from a tactile interface. This new mode also allows you to see the list of selected users before choosing an action (deletion, assignment to a group…).
Advanced filtering has been added: it will make it easier to search for users when you have a lot of them in your Piwigo. You can filter users by status, privacy level, group and creation date.
Another small improvement: the “guest” user (which corresponds to the anonymous visitors of your photo gallery, when it is public), is now managed separately from the “real” users. This helps to avoid handling errors.
Finally, the user edition screen is also getting a makeover.
A new screen appears in Piwigo 012: the User Activity Log.
It allows you to see the actions performed in the Piwigo administration, by each user: add / delete / modify an album, a file, a user…
This screen lists the history of activities and allows you to filter them (by user and by period).
Following feedback from customers during a webinar presentation demo, we have added the possibility to export these activities to a CSV file that can be used with a spreadsheet program (Excel, Libre Office…).
The plugin manager already had a facelift in Piwigo 11, but it evolves again with v12.
Until now, activated and deactivated plugins were displayed separately.
When you activated a new plugin, the screen reloaded, and you had to search in the list for the newly activated plugin, in order to access its settings. This was not very practical, especially for photo libraries with many plugins.
With v12, the way it works changes. To activate or deactivate a plugin, you just need to click on a button, and then you can directly modify its settings.
We have optimized the batch file addition to be more efficient, especially on large photo libraries (more than 100,000 files). Some of our customers know that adding 100 or 1000 files at once to a Piwigo can slow down the server when the gallery already contains a very large volume of photos. Starting with version 12, this should not be a problem anymore.
So, what do you think of these news? Are you eager to discover Piwigo 12? Send an email to contact@piwigo.com to become a beta tester!
Here comes the last episode of our series of articles dedicated to Piwigo 11, the new major version of Piwigo, which is now deployed for most of our customers (and for the others, please be patient!). It’s time to review the new features dedicated to the management and administration of your photo library itself.
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We have already introduced you to the new features of Piwigo 11, regarding user management and photo management. Today we focus on another important aspect of this new version: managing and organizing your albums.
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Last week we presented to you, in this blog post, the new features of Piwigo 11 regarding user management. Today, we take a look at the changes brought to the way you organise and manage your photos (and other files).
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As we announced a few weeks ago, the new version of Piwigo is full of new features. Great news: it is finally deployed on Piwigo.com, for all new accounts and for most of our customers! We plan to present to you the new features in several blog posts. Today, let’s focus on the updates in the field of user management.
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Yesterday, Wednesday 10 March 2021, a fire broke out at the Strasbourg site of the French hosting company OVH. The fire completely destroyed one of the 4 datacenters and partially affected a second one. Fortunately, no human casualties were reported. It seemed important to communicate about the impact of this incident on your data at Piwigo.
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A new version of Piwigo will be coming soon. What is this v11? What to expect? We’ll explain everything to you!
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The news made a lot of noise: around November 12th 2020, Google announced that it would end free and unlimited hosting on Google Photos. What does it mean? Why this decision? What alternatives to GAFAM for data hosting?
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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.
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, 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.
“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).
“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!
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.
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
