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

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

Add a filter bar to your photo gallery

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.

Home Page and Breadcrumbs

Any Piwigo photo gallery can have a specific home page, with any content on it. Just use the Additionnal Pages plugin and set a page as homepage.

We have received some emails on Piwigo.com support because the breadcrumbs were not including the albums root: Home / Album level 1 / Album level 2. With a specific home page, the “home” links goes to it. In practice you had to go back to home page to return on albums root.

We have just added a small feature: if you have an home page defined with Additional Pages, then the breadcumbs includes the albums root: Home / Albums / Album level 1 / Album level 2.

The "albums" link is automatically added if you have a specific home page

The "albums" link is automatically added if you have a specific home page

See the result on demo1 →