Expiry Date : a new plugin to manage expiration dates on photos

Claire Michard on February 23, 2022

plugin expiry date piwigo

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 : presentation

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.

Add an expiry date to a selection 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.

Display of the expiry date on the gallery

The plugin’s settings allow you to choose what happens when the expiry date is reached.

You can choose between 3 options :

  • doing nothing (the date is just informative)
  • deleting the photos
  • archiving the photos (i.e. move them to a private album of your choice)

In addition, you can send an email notification before the date and on the precise day of the expiry date:

  • to users who downloaded the file (if visit history is enabled)
  • to your gallery administrators.

Why should you use the Expiry Date plugin?

There are several cases where you need to manage an expiration date or expiry date on a photo or any other file.

Information

Expiry date or expiration date? Well, both terms are OK. Expiry date is most often used in British English, and expiration date is more frequent in American English.

Image usage rights / copyright

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.

Photo consent policy

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! 

Warning

Any request made in the comment section on the blog will not be treated.  But feel free to tell us in comments what you could use this plugin for!

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

Image Usage Rights 101: How to Make Sure You’re Covered

Legally using images

How to organize team work with Piwigo?

Claire Michard on November 16, 2021

team work piwigo user management

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.

Read More

Add a filter bar to your photo gallery

Claire Michard on June 9, 2020

plugin filter bar piwigo

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.

Reminder: how tags work with Piwigo

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.

tag cloud piwigo

Example of tag cloud

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.

search multi tags piwigo

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.

Set up a filtering search bar with The Tag Groups plugin

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.

word cloud tags piwigo

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.

tag groups plugin piwigo
Photo library on which the Tag Groups plugin has been installed

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.

filter bar multi criteria piwigo

If I select the “Purple” color, the selection only shows me files with the “Tulip” tag AND the “Purple” tag.

filter bar multi criteria piwigo

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 :

  • If you host your Piwigo yourself, download the Tag Groups plugin
  • If you are a customer of a hosting offer with Piwigo.com, please contact support. Indeed, you can’t (yet) activate the Tag Groups plugin yourself. Warning! This plugin is only available for customers who subscribed to an Enterprise offer.

Where are photos stored with Piwigo ?

Claire Michard on February 25, 2019

piwigo photo hosting

Looking for an online solution to manage your photo library, someone recommended Piwigo, but you don’t really understand how it works, and where your photos will be hosted? Don’t worry, you will find everything you need to know in this blog post!

Piwigo.org or Piwigo.com ?

Firstly, you will need to understand the difference between the two options available, this difference could be confusing for some :

  • On the one hand you can download the open source Piwigo software on piwigo.org;
  • Or on the other you can create an account on piwigo.com.

1 – You host Piwigo by yourself

If you choose the first option, you will download files for free from piwigo.org, which you will have to install on a server. You will have to subscribe to an offer from a web hosting service and deploy your Piwigo yourself before you can upload your photos and organize them.

Manual installation of Piwigo

In this case, your photos will be stored on the server that hosts the application. Thus, if you install Piwigo on a shared hosting, at Gandi for example, your photos will be saved on the storage system associated with this hosting.

To find out more, check with your host to find out exactly where this storage system is located because it can be “remote”.

2 – You choose Piwigo.com

If you choose the second option, and sign up with piwigo.com, your Piwigo library will be created directly on our platform.

Sign up form on Piwigo.com
Sign up form on Piwigo.com

In this case, your library will be hosted on dedicated servers (which means that they are not shared with other sites). Piwigo rents these servers from OVH, a french host. Our servers are located in France at the Roubaix, Strasbourg and Gravelines data centers. Your data is stored on the hard drives of these servers, i.e. exactly where the Piwigo app runs.

To answer the question many users might ask, especially public administrations, we do not use the services of Amazon (AWS), Google (Cloud Platform) or Microsoft (Azure). We do not use them for two main reasons:

  • Firstly, we do not want to entrust them with our customers’ data;
  • Secondly, these services are very expensive, which would in all logic increase the price of our offers.

What guarantees for you data safety ?

If you choose to host your Piwigo yourself, it is up to you to make sure that your hosting provider has done what it takes to ensure that your data is safe. You are also solely responsible for backing up your data and files.

But if you choose one of our offers on Piwigo.com, we take care of everything: let’s see how we ensure that your data will not be lost.

Piwigo.com’s technical infrastructure is based on coupled servers. Each “main” server is duplicated by a “secondary” server that serves as backup system.

A Piwigo.com account is hosted on a main server (photos and database). Every night, each main server is synchronized to its secondary server. And every night, we make a copy of each database, and we keep at least the last 30 days. This allows us to restore your photo library in case of handling errors. To make it simple, we can restore an album that you deleted by mistake.

backup server
Every night, each main server is synchronized to its secondary server.

In addition to night-time synchronization, we have set up a backup system with finer granularity. Every 15 minutes, a script checks if there have been any changes on your Piwigo: add/edit/delete photo/album/tag/user/comment.

If any change is detected, your account is automatically synchronized on the secondary server. All these mechanics allow us, in the worst case scenario, to lose only the last 15 minutes of activity.

What if I want to switch hosting ?

One of Piwigo.com’s promises is to fight against “customer lockdown”.

We definitely don’t want to put a brake on you the day you want to switch to another hosting, or even to your own infrastructure. If you host your data on Piwigo.com, you can download your database and files at any time. You can move your Piwigo on to your own server if you wish, keeping your photo library exactly the same.

You will not lose the many hours spent organizing your content, visit history or user comments. All these operations are documented, just follow the guide!

But you can also decide to move your Piwigo from your server to Piwigo.com. We regularly carry out this operation for our customers. We take care of everything: data transfer, database import, Piwigo updates and extensions. This transaction is not billed as we consider it to be part of the services associated with the Piwigo.com offer.

To sum things up :

Piwigo offers two different ways to use its photo library management software and therefore, two different ways to store your files:

  • On the server of your choice if you choose the free download on piwigo.org
  • On our dedicated servers if you choose one of our piwigo.com offers.

Both solutions are used by thousands of individuals and professionals, and might fit your needs. It is up to you to decide which one is best for you!

Piwigo.com technical infrastructure

Pierrick Le Gall on January 21, 2015

Today we publish a new page on Piwigo.com presentation website: Infrastructure. You will learn where and how your photos are hosted. You will also learn which measures we have implemented to make Piwigo.com a safe place for your photos.

Piwigo.com technical infrastructure, where and how are your photos stored?

Piwigo.com technical infrastructure, where and how are your photos stored?

Special thanks to Tadjio for correcting the page.

Feel free to ask questions if you want to learn more about our infrastructure.

Robots and visit history

Pierrick Le Gall on May 7, 2014

Piwigo 2.6 has introduced a geolocation feature for your visitors. Now you know where your visitors come from and you may have discovered that you often receive visits from Redmond (Washington, USA)  and Mountain View (California, USA). Don’t panic, this is not an attack: they are just robots of Bing (Microsoft search engine) and Google.

Visit history, Bing is visiting your Piwigo (Redmond, USA)

Visit history, Bing is visiting your Piwigo (Redmond, USA)

Their visits are useful because they make you “findable” in search engines. But maybe you don’t want to see all this noise in your visit history. Activate the new plugin No Stats for Robots if you want to see only real human visitors. Of course, this plugin won’t stop search engines, it just avoid registering their visits.

Import from Flickr to Piwigo

Pierrick Le Gall on May 21, 2013

Plugin Flickr2Piwigo lets you import your albums (sets) and photos from Flickr, directly into your Piwigo gallery. Here is the procedure to follow.

1) activate plugin Flickr2Piwigo

2) open page [Administration > menu Plugins > sub-menu Flickr2Piwigo > tab Configuration]. We’re going to follow the steps described on this page.

3) click on the flickr.com link and login to your Flickr account

4) from the Flickr2Piwigo configuration page, click on the “API keys page” link, click on the “Get another key” button, and click on the “Apply for a non-commercial key” button

5) describe your application (name, description, checkboxes) and submit

Create an app in Flickr

Create an app in Flickr

6) get your Key and Secret and copy them into Flickr2Piwigo configuration page

Get your app keys on Flickr

Get your app keys on Flickr…

... and copy Key/Secret on Piwigo

… and copy Key/Secret on Piwigo

7) on the Flickr page, click on the “Edit auth flow for this app” link and copy your Callback URL, provided on Flickr2Piwigo configuration page.

8) back to Piwigo, go to the “Import” tab of Flickr2Piwigo and click on the “Login” button

Flickr2Piwigo login

Flickr2Piwigo login

9) Import your photos. You can select photos with a specific batch manager or you can import your whole Flickr structure.

Flickr2Piwigo select photos and start import

Flickr2Piwigo select photos and start import

New plugin Birthdate

Pierrick Le Gall on May 15, 2013

Plugin Birthdate gives people age on each photo. Since Piwigo knows the date of the photo and if you tag the photo with people name, Piwigo only needs to know the people birthdate to display their age on photo. Plugin Birthdate let you define the birthdate of any tag.

Plugin Birthdate: first step is to add birthdates

Plugin Birthdate: add a birthdate

Plugin Birthdate: on administration side you can see the list of defined birthdates

Plugin Birthdate: on administration side you can see the list of defined birthdates

Plugin Birthdate: on the page of the photo, next to each tag Piwigo displays the age

Plugin Birthdate: on the page of the photo, next to each tag Piwigo displays the age

Depending on the age, Piwigo will display seconds or minutes or hours… or years. If you have a family photo gallery, you will certainly appreciate to immediately know the age of kids on each photo!