What is Piwigo used for?

Piwigo is a web photo gallery application, open source, with over 200 plugins and themes, built for individuals, teams and organizations. It is a good fit for hosting a personal or family photo archive, photo portfolios for photographers, and shared galleries for clubs and organizations.

Is Piwigo open source?

Yes. Piwigo is open source under the GPL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Piwigo/Piwigo and is written mainly in PHP.

Yes. Piwigo is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from €32 per month.

Can I self-host Piwigo?

Yes. Piwigo can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Piwigo an alternative to?

Piwigo is an open-source alternative to Google Photos, Flickr, SmugMug and 500px. Other open-source alternatives to Google Photos include Lychee, Photoview and PhotoPrism.

Is Piwigo actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Piwigo was on 24 September 2026, and the latest release is 16.4.0, published on 3 May 2026. The project has 3.9k stars on GitHub.

Piwigo: open-source alternative to Google Photos, Flickr

About Piwigo

Piwigo is open-source photo gallery software for managing and sharing a photo library on the web. It is designed for individuals, teams and organizations that want to publish and organize pictures on their own site, and it is tagged with privacy, photography and self-hosting topics.

The project advertises more than 200 plugins and themes to extend and restyle the gallery, and its website provides feature lists, demos, forums, documentation and news. To install it you need a web server such as Apache or nginx, PHP 7.4 or later, MySQL 5 or MariaDB, and ImageMagick or the PHP GD library. The code is written in PHP.

Piwigo is licensed under GPL-2.0. You can install it on your own server, or choose the Piwigo Cloud ready-to-use hosted service if you do not have one. It suits photographers, families, clubs and companies that want a self-controlled alternative to commercial photo sharing sites.

Key features

Web photo gallery management
200+ plugins and themes
Multi-user permissions for teams
Works with ImageMagick or PHP GD
Self-hosted or Piwigo Cloud
Demos, forums and documentation

Good fit for

→Hosting a personal or family photo archive
→Photo portfolios for photographers
→Shared galleries for clubs and organizations

Built with: PHP
Tags: photo-gallery; php; self-hosted; photography; image-gallery; plugins; privacy; cms

Piwigo: questions and answers

What is Piwigo used for?: Piwigo is a web photo gallery application, open source, with over 200 plugins and themes, built for individuals, teams and organizations. It is a good fit for hosting a personal or family photo archive, photo portfolios for photographers, and shared galleries for clubs and organizations.
Is Piwigo open source?: Yes. Piwigo is open source under the GPL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Piwigo/Piwigo and is written mainly in PHP.
Is Piwigo free?: Yes. Piwigo is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from €32 per month.
Can I self-host Piwigo?: Yes. Piwigo can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Piwigo an alternative to?: Piwigo is an open-source alternative to Google Photos, Flickr, SmugMug and 500px. Other open-source alternatives to Google Photos include Lychee, Photoview and PhotoPrism.
Is Piwigo actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Piwigo was on 24 September 2026, and the latest release is 16.4.0, published on 3 May 2026. The project has 3.9k stars on GitHub.