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.

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Piwigo 12 is coming and needs some beta testers!

Claire Michard on July 5, 2021

piwigo beta 12

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!

Demo webinars

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…).

Call for beta testers

After these first presentations, we will enter the beta-testing phase. And this is where we need you, Piwigo users!

via GIPHY

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.

What’s new in Piwigo 12 ?

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.

User Manager Redesign

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.

user manager piwigo 12

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.

Compact view
Tile view

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.

Users activity log

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…).

Redesign of the plugin manager

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.

Optimization of file upload for large galleries

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!

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.

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.

Plugin Automatic Size replaces Autosize

Pierrick Le Gall on June 12, 2013

As described on previous post, plugin Autosize had too many problems. Anyway the feature of automatic photo size is an excellent one. Plugin Automatic Size is taking over, with a much simpler code (simpler code = less bug).

Plugin Automatic Size is now available for Piwigo 2.4 and 2.5 on Piwigo.com. Considering many users are still blocked on Piwigo 2.4 because they use Autosize, in the coming days we will change the upgrade script for accounts: if Autosize is activated, it will automatically be deactivated and Automatic Size will be activated. This will allow the upgrade to version 2.5.

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!

New Plugin: GThumb+

Pierrick Le Gall on January 23, 2012

A new plugin is available on your screen [Administration > Plugins > Manage]: GThumb+. This plugin modifies the design of the thumbnails page. All thumbnails have the same height, except the first one which takes 2 lines.

Piwigo and GThumb+ plugin in action, all thumbnails have the same height except the first one.

Piwigo and GThumb+ plugin in action, all thumbnails have the same height except the first one.

Plugin GThumb+ doesn’t modify your existing thumbnails, it just creates new and specific thumbnails for its own use. GThumb+ is compatible with all themes.

Custom Page Footer

Pierrick Le Gall on December 8, 2011

Until now, to add a personal message in the footer, we recommended to use the plugin LMT (license manager on your photos) because it features such an option. This plugin is very powerful and complete, so it might seem excessive for such a simple need. Now and for this specific purpose, we recommend instead plugin Perso Footer, whose sole mission is to add a message in the footer.

Custom Footer on your Piwigo photo gallery

Custom Footer on your Piwigo photo gallery

Perso Footer is compatible with all themes. The most frequent message we encounter looks like “Photos are copyrighted, ask before any use” but this is free text, you decide what you write.

Simple task = simple use: once plugin Perso Footer is activated on screen [Administration > Plugins > Manage], submit your text on screen [Administration > Plugins > Perso Footer] and you’re done.

Google+ button

Pierrick Le Gall on September 15, 2011

Direct competitor to Facebook, Google+ is a social media launched in June 2011, only 3 months ago. Subscriptions have been publicly opened for about 1 month. The photographers are very present on Google+. By “circling” a few of them, you get a nice photo stream to browse.
Thanks to the Google+1 plugin, available on the [Administration> Plugins> Manage], you can display a dedicated button for Google+ with 2 functions:

  1. the first click lets you say publicly that you like a photo or a gallery page (equivalent to the “like” button of Facebook)

    Google+ : +1 a photo or a page from your Piwigo photo gallery

    Google+ : +1 a photo or a page from your Piwigo photo gallery

  2. the second click lets you share the photo as a message in Google+ and all the people who “circles” you will see the photo in their stream, with a link to your Piwigo gallery.

    Google+ : share a page from your Piwigo photo gallery

    Google+ : share a page from your Piwigo photo gallery

By the way, if you’re already on Google+, add me in you circles: Pierrick Le Gall profile on Google+. I mainly write about Piwigo!