Importing an Existing Photo Library into Piwigo: How Does It Work?

When an organization decides to implement Piwigo, sometimes the photo library starts from scratch. But more often than not, there is already a system in place: a photo libray tool, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, or even a custom-built solution. In that case, starting over is out of the question—users want to preserve their structure, albums, and metadata (titles, authors, descriptions, copyrights, tags…).

So, how does it work? What can be imported? How? And how easy—or complicated—is it? Let’s take a look, with real examples from the Piwigo team.

The Custom Import Process

When a client asks us to migrate an existing photo library into Piwigo, the general method is always the same, regardless of the previous software:

  1. The client provides a spreadsheet (CSV or Excel), with one row per photo and columns for metadata: filename, title, author, date, description, tags, albums…
  2. They also send us the media files, ideally via an FTP account we set up for them. In some cases, we’ve also received hard drives by post or 220 GB zip files uploaded to cloud storage!
  3. We prepare a development instance of Piwigo, where we first import the images. Then, we match the spreadsheet data with the imported files to populate properties, assign images to albums and tags, and so on.

This matching step (called mapping) is the most delicate: each row in the spreadsheet must correspond exactly to a file. And that’s not always straightforward…

What Makes the Import Complicated?

Several factors can slow down the process:

  • Filenames: Sometimes the filenames in the CSV don’t exactly match the actual files (accents, special characters, spaces, different extensions, etc.). This often requires cleanup and reprocessing.
  • Duplicates: There may be several files with the same name in different folders, complicating automatic mapping.
  • Useless or empty columns: We sometimes spend time analyzing data we end up not importing.
  • Rules to define: In some cases, filenames can’t be used for mapping at all. We then need to get creative—maybe by writing a custom algorithm to extract a date or another property from the filename.
  • Complex or locked exports: Sometimes, the hardest part is getting the data out of the previous system. Some vendors charge thousands of euros for data exports, or deliver hard-to-exploit files. At Piwigo, we think that’s unacceptable—your data is yours, period.

Finally, one of the most time-consuming parts is working with the client: What do you want to keep? What should we do with this column? Does this field have real value? All of this is discussed together, and each project is unique.

Want to Handle the Import Yourself?

Custom data migration is included in Piwigo’s VIP plans. Other clients, including self-hosted users, can request a quote. As you’ve seen, this process is never automatic—it takes time and expertise, so it can’t be free.

However, if you’re on a limited budget, here are a few solutions to help you import your files into Piwigo:

  • Piwigo Remote Sync: Automatically imports a local folder tree into Piwigo, preserving the folder structure as albums.
  • Initial FTP Import (for piwigo.com clients): We can provide an FTP account for you to upload your files. We then take care of the base import and create albums based on your folder structure.
  • Properties Mass Update plugin: Allows you to import metadata from a CSV file. You need one file per property (title, description, author, tags…). The files must already be in Piwigo, and the filenames must match exactly.
  • Flickr2Piwigo plugin: If you previously used Flickr, this plugin lets you import your albums or photos in bulk, along with associated metadata.

Real-World Examples: We Did It for Them

Here are a few examples of clients for whom we performed custom data imports. Their photos were originally stored in various systems like Drupal, Ajaris, ePhoto, or Oodrive.

As you’ll see, each case is unique—and there are always surprises!

INRAE

The vendor of INRAE’s former photo library provided a CSV export, but the file was corrupted: some lines contained data for two photos at once, which we had to manually clean up.

Another challenge: there was no column to indicate which album each photo belonged to. We had to infer the folder structure from the filenames and write a custom algorithm to recreate the album hierarchy. This required several iterations with the client.

London Legacy

This London government agency manages the photo archive for the 2012 Olympics. We received a complex database dump (each custom field in a separate table) and a CSV with 30+ columns, plus a 220 GB zip file on Google Drive—of which 100 GB turned out to be unnecessary duplicates and backups. It took quite a bit of time to sort and download everything!

That’s why we now recommend FTP transfers 😊

Once the data was cleaned, we worked with the client to determine the best way to use each column in Piwigo. For example:

  • The “collection” column sometimes contained multiple values—we used that to create albums.
  • The “location” column also had multiple values—we turned those into tags.

The client paid €1300 for the custom import. That might sound like a lot, but imagine manually importing and tagging 27,000 photos in Piwigo…

In the end, the team was delighted:

“We didn’t expect it to be this good—this is way better than our previous system!”

Grand Paris Seine et Oise (GPSEO)

This local authority previously used a different photo management system. Fortunately, the vendor cooperated to help recover the data—but GPSEO still had to pay €2000–3000 to get the full export.

What we received:

  • A CSV with the files and their properties
  • A CSV with a complex multi-level thesaurus
  • 200 GB of images uploaded via FTP

The challenge: each photo was linked to only one entry in the thesaurus (e.g., “skatepark”), without any information about its higher-level category. But “skatepark” might exist in multiple branches, like under “urban planning” or “leisure.” We had to manually decide, in collaboration with the client, where each photo belonged.

Once the import was completed, Julie, a Piwigo partner and photo librarian, stepped in to fine-tune albums and tags.

Foyers de Charité

This client also used another photo management tool. Their data was relatively clean: 3,200 photos, 14 GB, and a metadata CSV. Still, some cleanup was needed—dates were written out in full text, and filenames in the CSV included accented characters, while the files themselves did not.

The files were transferred via FTP, and the import went smoothly after cleaning.

In Summary

Importing a photo library into Piwigo is rarely plug-and-play—but it’s absolutely doable. It all depends on the quality of your data, the original format, and your specific needs.

Our role is to help you make the right choices: what to keep, how to structure your albums, which metadata matters, and how to ensure your users can find what they need.

One last thing worth repeating: at Piwigo, your data truly belongs to you. We will never lock you into a system that makes it hard or expensive to export your content. If you ever decide to leave Piwigo, you’ll be able to recover your full photo library and metadata—no strings attached 😊

8 examples of customized Piwigo galleries

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!

Read More

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!

Advice

To know everything about the sharing options in Piwigo, read also this article: Sharing and comments: how to collaborate easily with Piwigo?

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. 

piwigo teamwork photo library
Screeshot of our internal Piwigo

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!

Mattermost, an open source online chat
Mattermost, an open source online chat

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

External drives, CDs, network directories : the enemies of your photo library

Whether you are a private individual or a professional, from the moment you start using digital photography, the question arises: how can you be sure not to lose your data? And how to share your photos easily?

So you will set up a backup system: on a USB key, a DVD, an external hard drive, a shared network directory… Let’s take a look at these solutions and see if they are durable… and user friendly.

USB stick, CD, DVD: say goodbye to them

Recently, while I was helping my father-in-law configure his new computer, I realized that for years he has been storing his travel photos on USB sticks.

USB sticks and memory cards use flash memory.

He ignored that a USB stick has a very limited life span. USB sticks or flash drives use what is called flash memory, a storage format that by essence is not sustainable. USB sticks should never be used to store data permanently, but simply to transfer it.

So I explained all this to my father-in-law, and what did he answer ?

“You know, I also have all my photos from the 2000s on CD-Roms!”

You can’t imagine my face when I heard that.

Yes, this kind of face.

Burnable CDs and DVDs are today endangered species, but have long been used as a backup medium, and still are, in families but also in companies.

Big mistake!

I have another story about this. When I was a student I went to Greece for 6 months for an Erasmus exchange, and when I came back home in France, I burned all my photos on 2 CD-Roms. My laptop having crashed, I only had these CDs to keep track of my 6 months abroad.

Some time later, I wanted to show my photos to a friend: unfortunately, one of the two CDs was unreadable. These photos were lost forever. Too bad, isn’t it?

Burnable DVDs are no better. These devices have a limited lifespan and are extremely fragile.

Conclusion: if you have photos stored on USB sticks, CDs or DVDs: move them quickly to a more reliable medium (if they are not already lost).

External hard drives: not as reliable as you might think

External hard drives have the reputation of being a robust backup medium. Yes, they are certainly more reliable than CDs… but they have some issues too.

First of all, external hard drives don’t live forever.

Yes, an external hard drive can die suddenly, and this happens more often than you might think.

First of all, you should know that a hard drive is provided for a certain number of read/write cycles. Depending on its use rate and storage conditions, the average life of an external hard drive is from 5 to 7 years. Without mentioning the risk of failure!

SSD hard drives, which are the new standard, are no exception to this rule since they are based on a flash memory system, such as the USB stick.

Therefore, they cannot be fully trusted.

“Yes, but external hard drives are still very convenient for sharing photos”, are you going to tell me?

It’s true that if you work as a team within an organization, the photo library will often find its place on an external hard drive that you will pass on to your colleagues.

But really, you think it’s convenient?

What if your colleague deletes photos by mistake?

What if you need to manage different access rights for different people?

And honestly, is it really that easy to find your way it out in this mess of files?

Everyone will end up copying all the data onto their own computer’s disk, and you’re done with your attempt to centralize your photo library.

Among our corporate customers, many who have been there no longer want to hear about a shared external hard drive!

Shared network drives and NAS: collaborative, really?

If you are computer literate or work in an organization, your photo library may be accessible from a shared network drive. This is a folder accessible to all users on your local network. This folder can be stored on a single network computer, a server, or a NAS (a shared storage device on a computer network).

Shared networks drives on Windows.

Regarding reliability, this system is far above that of a USB key, of course. But be careful, you must plan a second backup system, otherwise you will lose all your data the day the machine fails.

Moreover, since your data is stored physically at your place, you can still lose everything in the event of a fire, for example.

Finally, if you look at the collaborative aspect of this system, you’re not far from the external hard drive. Of course, no need to move the hard drive from one workstation to another, everyone can access the photo library at any time. You can also limit access rights by directory, and prevent users from deleting files.

But honestly, to find what you look for in this folder tree structure, it’s not always easy. When you have thousands of archived photos, it sometimes becomes a puzzle to find the image you need.

The hosted photo library: reliable and collaborative

You might have guessed what will follow: CDs, USB sticks, external hard drives and even shared network directories are not effective solutions to manage your photo library. They can even turn against you.

This is exactly why more and more organizations are choosing Piwigo to host their photo library.

With an online photo library software, you have a user friendly user interface to sort and organize your photos: by title, by theme, by date or place of shooting…

Piwigo backoffice
Piwigo backoffice

You can share a photo or directory with a person at any time with a few clicks, without any danger.

“Previously, our photos were stored on external hard drive and CDs, and indexed in a spreadsheet. A real challenge to find a file! Now it has become very easy and fast for the whole team to navigate through our photo library. Piwigo has completely changed the way we work! We chose Piwigo because the tool was complete, easy to use and affordable.”

Remi Ancel, Documentation Manager, Archea Museum

You can choose to download Piwigo for free from piwigo.org, and host it on a server of your choice.

You can also create an account on piwigo.com: in this case, we take care of the hosting and the backup of your data. Even if you delete a folder or a file by mistake, we can go back and recover your precious lost data.

For more information, please read the article: Where are photos stored with Piwigo, which details the security measures taken by our team.