News from Piwigo.com, online photo gallery software
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
In January, we asked Piwigo users to answer a survey. Our goal was to get to know better the community members, their uses and expectations.
We sent out the questionnaire at the end of January 2020 in French and English, and in March we sent out the German version.
The questionnaire was sent via Piwigo newsletters in the 3 languages, but it was also distributed on the piwigo.org website, on the piwigo.com blog and on social networks.
We were pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of the answers.
A total of 1116 people responded.
Only 10% of the people who responded to this survey are customers on piwigo.com. The others host their Piwigo gallery themselves. This makes sense because these people make up the majority of subscribers to the Piwigo newsletter, and because Piwigo is first and foremost a free and open source project.
The results of the survey are available in the form of an infographics that you will find at the end of this blog post; but we also tried to find out if there were any notable differences between the answers of the customers on piwigo.com and those of the users who host their Piwigo themselves.
Here are the main differences we observed!
While the French account for 33% of respondents overall, they represent 68% of piwigo.com customers who responded to the survey!
To the question “why did you choose Piwigo”, (3 possible answers) the piwigo.com customers chose 3 answers among the 10 proposals:
It was found that French customers also largely chose Piwigo for its French origin.
Half of the customers who filled the survey indicated that they used physical media (CDs, USB keys, hard drive…) to store and share their photos before setting up Piwigo.
We noticed while reading the survey results that many customers are not aware of the extent of Piwigo’s possibilities.
Here are a few features that are not well known but that you might be interested in:
And now, the information that pleased us the most: 100% of piwigo.com customers said that they would be willing to recommend Piwigo to someone they know!
For more information on the results of this survey, look at the infographic below and read the announcement on the piwigo.org forum !
You want to offer your visitors an user friendly interface to navigate through your photo gallery? With the Tag Groups plugin, you can add multiple filters to your Piwigo photo library.
Warning
This plugin is not available to customers who have subscribed to an “Individual” offer on piwigo.com.
If your Piwigo photo library contains a lot of media, you’ve probably decided to organize them with tags, or keywords.
Tags allow you to qualify your photos according to your own classification criteria: this can be colors, image formats, places, themes or any other useful information to easily find photos that have something in common.
A photo can have an infinite number of tags, and you can combine tags to refine your search.
The tag search is available from the “Related tags” menu item of your photo library (that you can activate with the “Menu Tags” plugin), or from a tag cloud that can be displayed on a page of your gallery.
Thus, the tags are complementary to the albums.
Let’s take the example of the photo library of the Archeological Museum Archéa.
The photos of this photo library are organized in albums: Exhibitions, Collections… Each album is also organized in sub-albums: in the Exhibitions album, there is one sub-album per exhibition.
But if you’re looking for photos that match a finer criterion, that’s where the tags will prove themselves useful. You can find in one click all the photos tagged “Middle-Ages”, “Necropolis”, or “Merovingians”, whatever their album.
What if I want all the pictures of Merovingian necropolises?
Don’t worry: I just have to combine the two tags “Necropolis”, and “Merovingian”, as you can see on the example below.
This operation is very simple and convenient, but the tags are all mixed together.
For an even better organisation, and an easier search, a new plugin is available on your Piwigo photo library.
This plugin allows you to use tags to set up a filtering search bar on your photo gallery.
How does it work?
You now have the ability to regroup the tags by family, with the new notion of “tag group”.
The tags “blue”, “pink”, “green” can be associated with a “color” group. To do this, simply add a prefix in the tag name. Thus, by naming a tag “color:blue”, you will have the tag “blue” belonging to the “color” group.
You can see below a page that lists the tags of a Piwigo gallery, grouped by tag group.
If we go on with the Archéa Museum example, we could imagine that the tags “High Middle Ages”, “Classical Middle Ages”, “Gallo-Roman Antiquity” and “Merovingian” would be classified in the “Period” group.
And the tags “ceramics”, “ornaments”, “furniture”, “tools”, “religious practices” etc. could be classified in the “Objects” group.
We could thus set up in the gallery a search engine with filters by period, and by type of object, with drop-down lists as in the example below.
On the above example, (click on the image to enlarge it if necessary), you can see that we first filtered the pictures to show only the “Tulip” type flowers.
You can then refine the selection by color with the “Color” filter. It lists all tags of type “Color”, but only those that are present on photos that also have the tag “Tulip” are clickable.
If I select the “Purple” color, the selection only shows me files with the “Tulip” tag AND the “Purple” tag.
If you wish to test by yourself, you can view a demo by clicking on this link.
We hope you like this new feature! Would you like to implement it on your Piwigo gallery?
If so, you have two options :
They are exceptional circumstances calling for exceptional measures. Until the end of the lockdown phase, we have decided to double the trial period on Piwigo.com, for companies. Here are the reasons that led us to make this decision.
First of all, the Piwigo team hopes that you are all well and in a good mood in these unusual times. We at Piwigo are used to working at home, and the remote communication tools hold no secrets for us. But let’s be honest, the latest events have turned our lives upside down…
And in the last few days, we noticed an unusual phenomenon: several companies that were testing Piwigo contacted us to ask us to extend their trial period. The trial period for Piwigo is usually 30 days, which is normally enough to test Piwigo software and make an opinion.
But these days, many professionals have seen their work processes turned upside down. Priorities are changing, people have to start working remotely, they need to replace colleagues who are on sick leave… The decision-making process is slower and, overall, everything takes a little longer.
And at the same time, it’s an ideal time to focus on substantive projects, such as setting up an online photo library to replace external hard drives, shared network directories and USB sticks! Because now they are stuck at home, people realize how much they need reliable tools to work and collaborate from anywhere.
That is why we have decided to temporarily increase the trial period for companies to 60 days instead of 30 days.
If you are a company (or public sector, or non profit) and are currently on trial, you will receive an email informing you of the extension of your free trial. This is normally applied automatically.
If you’re a private individual, you’re not concerned: we assumed that it doesn’t make any difference to you since you use Piwigo in your spare time anyway.
In any case, we advise you all to take advantage of the lockdown period to take the time to organize and sort your photos! It’s a very useful activity that is often postponed, so now that you are stuck at home, you can get on with it 🙂
Good luck to you all, and take care! 🥰️
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Since January 2020, the Bootstrap Darkroom theme is available on Piwigo.com. It’s a big step in the evolution of Piwigo, so we will tell you in this blog post everything there is to know about this modern, functional and mobile friendly theme for your Piwigo gallery.
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To start the year off on the right foot, we have decided to invite you, members of the Piwigo community, to have your say.
We need to get to know you better and understand why you are loyal to Piwigo, and how we can make it even better.
It will only take a few minutes to complete this survey, but it will really help us!
We hope that many of you will participate. And as we value transparency, we will communicate the results of the survey.
If you are a Piwigo user, you may have received an email announcing that Piwigo 2.10 has been deployed on your account. What does this update change for you?
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We announced it in our latest blog post: for several months now, we have been working hard to finally release a new version of the Piwigo application for Android.
Good news: that’s it, the application is available! 🥳
This mobile app is the result of a collaborative effort between Phil Bayfield, an English contributor who relaunched the Android application project a few years ago, Raphael Mack, our German Android lead developer, and Valentin Baizeau, a French intern at Piwigo for several months.
Let’s hear Valentin presenting his work in person:
“ My role is to take part in the developpement of the android application. For this first version, we focused on the user experience, by listening to the users requests about what features were priorities for our app. It is now possible to view in full screen your photos by tapping on them for instance, and it is also possible to create new albums and add some photos to them. The idea is to gradually develop new features to be able to offer the same possibilities as the iOS app.”
Valentin, student at EPITECH Nantes and intern at Piwigo.
We are very happy and proud to present this new application that will allow you to:
Don’t wait any longer to download the application and give us your feedback!
If you wish, you can also download the application from the alternative F-Droid directory.
Discover some screenshots below:
It has been a while since we have given news about our Piwigo mobile apps : new features, upcoming projects for Android and iOS… Let’s take a tour in this blog post!
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The Piwigo team is very happy to announce that the next Piwigo release is coming soon! But before making Piwigo 2.10 official, we need you, users, to test our new features. Are you up for it?
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Some changes have been implemented on your Piwigo in June. If you haven’t noticed anything yet, maybe you will be interested by this blog post!
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