6 Month of Piwigo

Hi All,

I’m using piwigo for almost 6 month now. Mainly on our travel home page We-go.ch where I’ve tried a few new things. On this page I only have about 4000 images.

Import:

I mainly import images via the “Quick-Sync” option from the hard drive directly into the gallery. This allows me to sync the files with rsync from  my laptop to the server, with all the comfort of the rsync, like continues upload after failure. This is helpful as the internet connection might not be so optimal. For the sake of speed, I only sync images in 4k resolution. This makes it a lot smaller for the upload. I do still try to sync all images, including RAW and video files when bandwidth allows.

Post actions after the sync: As I like to have the latest albums and images at the front, I need to re-order the albums after each sync. Unfortunately the sync does not look at the default order set in piwigo.

Mobile upload is also something I use a lot from the piwigo mobile app which works most of the time.

GPS location:

Further I had to learn the hard way that Lightroom export by default does not include GPS information into the image, so I had to re-render a lot of images. As my D850 has a GPS sensor attached, I get location information for almost every image. And most images uploaded by the phones, also have GPS enabled.

Plugins:

I have installed 8Plugins,

  • OpenStreetMap
    • Adds a small map next to each image, if GPS data is available, further you can add a banner-map for each page
  • gdThumb
    • Replaces the look of the standard theme, with a fluid tiled layout
  • Maps & Earth
    • Nice map where you have taken the images, all you need a is a Google-API key. I think especially for travel blogs, this looks good
  • SmartAlbums
    • Creates dynamic Albums, based on a self created rules set.
  • Statistics
    • Adds Google-Analytics

WordPress integration

One of the key points was that I can smoothly integrate the gallery into WordPress, so I don’t have to upload each image again into WordPress in case I like to insert an image into a post.

WordPress offers two plugins:

  • PiwigoPress
    • Sophisticated integration, with many options on how the images look. Further it offers a Widget.
  • Embed Piwigo
    • Simple integration, just past the URL of the gallery image page and you are done.

And many thanks to the Piwigo team to release 2.10 release, this make it so much nicer to work with. And it’s supper stable, I never had any issues which I was not able to fix via the gui.

cheers

roman