Piwigo is an open-source web application that allows users to manage collections of photos and other forms of media.
The software can be downloaded and installed for free as long as you have your own web hosting.
In this article, we will outline exactly what the Piwigo installation minimum requirements are, as well as some other optional requirements that will ensure you are able to use all the powerful features Piwigo has to offer.Â
Minimum Piwigo Installation Requirements
- A web server such as Nginx or Apache
- MySQL 5 (or the equivalent with MariaDB)
- PHP 5.3 (Piwigo recommends 7.0 or 7.1)
- A graphic library such as ImageMagick or GD (often bundled with PHP).
- An FTP client software like FileZilla will be required to upload the files (either with the netinstall or full package)
- Piwigo is also included in Softaculous and other auto-installers.
- Enough disk space for your photos. Multiple sizes of photos will be generated in directory _data/i.
Optional Piwigo Installation Requirements
On top of the minimum requirements needed to download and install Piwigo, there are also some additional optional ones that enable you to do things like write metadata or rotate images without compression.
To be able to use the full extent of Piwigo’s features, make sure you can meet the following requirements as well:
- You will need to have ExifTool in order to add the Piwigo Write Metadata plugin or any other plugin dealing with EXIF/IPTC metadata.
- To create a video poster, you will need to use FFmpeg to access the VideoJS plugin.Â
- Piwigo recommends JPEGTran in order to install the RotateImage plugin which enables you to rotate images without compression.
- Piwigo also recommends pdftoppm with Piwigo 2.10+ in order to be able to generate a poster from PDF files (replacing ImageMagick).
Additionally, On some hosts, multiple PHP versions are enabled and you need a .htaccess file with specific instructions in order to enable PHP 5. With InMotion Hosting, you can easily change your PHP version in cPanel by using MultiPHP Manager.
As a reminder, you will only have to meet these requirements if you are planning to download and install Piwigo.
The software is also available with several paid plans that give you the advantage of fully managed installation, updates, and backups on a dedicated infrastructure that was designed for Piwigo.Â
If you are interested in this option and would like to test it out, Piwigo offers a free 30-day trial and allows you to pick which plan you want once it ends.Â
