Piwigo

What Is Piwigo?

In 2002, a French developer named Pierrick Le Gall started a small project called PhpWebGallery, a script for publishing photo albums on the web. Twenty-four years and well over a hundred releases later, that project — renamed Piwigo in 2009 — is still actively maintained and still open-source under the GPL. Few photo tools from the early 2000s survived the shift to mobile, cloud storage, and AI-powered search. Piwigo did, by evolving alongside them rather than being replaced.

The software today runs in two forms. Piwigo.org is the free, self-hosted core: download it, run it on your own server, and you own every byte. Piwigo.com is a commercial hosted version operated by PigoLabs SAS, a company registered in the Nantes area of France under RCS Nantes 528 932 114. PigoLabs runs its cloud plans exclusively on OVHcloud servers in France. The split between a free open-source product and a paid managed service is a structure closer to WordPress than to a typical SaaS photo app.

Piwigo targets a different user than Google Photos or Apple Photos. It is built for organisations, photographers, and teams that need structured albums, granular permissions, and long-term control over large libraries — not casual phone-photo backup. Museums, tourism boards, photography studios, and nonprofits use it to manage collections that can run into hundreds of thousands of images. Anyone who has hit the limits of consumer cloud storage, or who simply does not want a US tech company indexing family photos, gets a genuine alternative built entirely under French jurisdiction.

Key Features

Albums, Permissions, and Batch Management

Piwigo's core strength is its album system. Photos live in a hierarchy of albums and sub-albums, each with its own visibility and permission rules. A photography studio can give one client a private album of their shoot while keeping a public portfolio visible to everyone. Batch tools let administrators tag, move, or reorganise thousands of images at once, which matters when a single import can add several gigabytes of new material.

This level of access control is something Google Photos does not attempt to replicate. It is aimed squarely at teams managing shared libraries rather than individuals backing up a phone.

AI Auto-Tagging on Cloud Tiers

The Enterprise and VIP cloud plans add AI-powered automatic tagging and smart albums that group images by detected content, closing some of the gap with Google Photos' search. PigoLabs says the feature runs within its own French infrastructure rather than through a third-party AI vendor, keeping image data on its servers. This is a newer addition, rolled out through 2025, and it does not yet match the depth of Google's decade of photo-recognition training. It does, however, remove the need to choose between smart search and data control.

Plugin and Theme Ecosystem

Two decades of community development have produced a large catalogue of plugins and themes for self-hosted installations. Administrators can add facial recognition, watermarking, batch download tools, social sharing widgets, or custom themes without waiting for the core Piwigo team to build them in. This extensibility is the direct payoff of Piwigo's age: a newer competitor cannot replicate a plugin ecosystem built up since 2005 simply by shipping faster.

The trade-off is that the self-hosted admin interface itself still looks and feels like software from an earlier design era. Functional, but not visually competitive with modern consumer apps.

Dedicated French Cloud Hosting

Rather than pooling customers on shared multi-tenant infrastructure, PigoLabs gives every Piwigo.com cloud account its own dedicated server, hosted on OVHcloud in France. Each server pairs with a backup server in a separate data centre, synchronised nightly. For organisations that need to state, in writing, exactly where their photo data physically sits, this single-tenant French hosting is a stronger position than most competing photo-sharing services can offer.

Metadata, Search, and Geolocation

Piwigo reads and writes EXIF and XMP metadata, supports geolocation mapping from GPS data embedded in photos, and provides full-text search across tags, captions, and metadata fields. Combined with the album hierarchy, this makes locating a specific image in a library of tens of thousands genuinely fast, provided the metadata was captured correctly at import.

Pricing

Piwigo's free option is real, not a stripped-down trial: the self-hosted software carries no licence fee, no user limit, and no feature gate. The catch is that you need a server, and the technical skill to run one, which is the standard open-source trade-off.

For those who want the software without the server maintenance, Piwigo.com's cloud plans start at EUR 29 per month for the Pro tier: 10GB storage, one admin, unlimited users, billed annually. Team runs EUR 99 per month for 100GB and three admins, with support for all file formats including PSD and TIFF. Enterprise costs EUR 199 for 250GB, five admins, and AI auto-tagging, while VIP tops out at EUR 399 for 1TB storage, unlimited admins, phone support, and SSO. Every tier, notably, includes unlimited user accounts — a meaningful difference from photo tools that charge per seat.

The catch on cloud pricing is billing flexibility: there is no monthly-only option yet. Every cloud plan is billed annually upfront, with a 30-day free trial to test before committing. Monthly billing is listed as planned but was not live as of mid-2026. Photographers with large RAW libraries should also note that the entry Pro tier's 10GB cap is thin; a single wedding shoot in RAW format can approach that limit alone.

EU Compliance & Privacy

Piwigo's compliance story has two layers. The self-hosted software gives the strongest possible position: your data never leaves infrastructure you control, full stop. For organisations with strict data residency mandates, this is the cleanest answer available in the photo-sharing category.

The cloud service adds a second, still strong layer. PigoLabs SAS is a French company operating under French and EU law, and it hosts every account exclusively on OVHcloud servers physically located in France. The company states plainly that it does not share customer data with third parties, does not run advertising, and does not profile users. Combined with nightly cross-datacentre backup, the architecture satisfies GDPR requirements without needing complex contractual workarounds that many US-headquartered cloud photo services require.

Who It's Best For

If you manage a shared photo library for an organisation — a museum, agency, tourism board, or school — Piwigo's album permissions and unlimited users make it more practical than consumer tools built for individuals.

Organisations for which data sovereignty is non-negotiable get a free, mature, actively maintained self-hosting option that keeps every image on hardware they own.

Teams that want the software without server administration can pick up the Piwigo.com cloud tiers, which deliver dedicated French hosting starting at EUR 29 per month, though annual billing is the only option.

Anyone who needs a polished mobile-first experience with automatic phone backup should look elsewhere — that remains Google Photos' strongest ground.

The Verdict

Piwigo's 24-year run is not an accident. The project has kept pace with photo management needs — permissions, metadata, AI tagging, dedicated European hosting — while staying true to its open-source roots. Its self-hosted option remains one of the most complete free photo library tools available, and the cloud service extends that to people who do not want to run a server, backed by genuinely French infrastructure. It will not out-polish Google Photos on mobile convenience, and the annual-only cloud billing is an inconvenience worth knowing before you sign up. But for teams and organisations that need structured control over a large photo library, inside the EU, Piwigo remains one of the strongest options on the market.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Piwigo GDPR compliant?

Yes. Piwigo's cloud service is operated by PigoLabs SAS, a French company (RCS Nantes 528 932 114), and hosted exclusively on OVHcloud servers in France. The self-hosted version keeps all data on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over GDPR-relevant data flows.

Can I self-host Piwigo for free?

Yes. Piwigo's core software is open-source under the GPL and free to download and run on your own server indefinitely. The piwigo.com cloud service is a separate, paid option for people who do not want to manage their own server.

How does Piwigo compare to Google Photos?

Piwigo replaces Google Photos best when control matters more than convenience. You choose where photos live — your own server or PigoLabs' OVHcloud servers in France — who sees each album through fine-grained permissions, and how the library is organised, with unlimited users on cloud plans. The trade-off is losing Google's polished mobile apps and free storage tier. See our full breakdown of EU alternatives to Google Photos for other options in the category.

Where is Piwigo cloud data hosted?

Piwigo.com cloud accounts run on dedicated, single-tenant OVHcloud servers located in France, with nightly backup replication to a separate French data centre. Self-hosted installations can be deployed anywhere the user chooses.

What is the difference between Piwigo.org and Piwigo.com?

Piwigo.org is the open-source project: free software you download and install on your own server. Piwigo.com is the commercial hosted version, run by PigoLabs SAS, which handles server management, backups, and support in exchange for a paid subscription (billed annually).