Piwigo Open-Source Gallery

Piwigo is the veteran of open-source albums, maintained since 2002 on PHP and MySQL with more than 200 plugins and themes. Its strength is not AI but permissions and album management: user groups, per-album access, privacy levels. It is made for the "one big family, one gallery, everyone sees their own part" scenario.

What it does well

• Fine-grained permissions: groups, album-level rights, privacy levels, guest visibility.
• Large library management: batch manager, FTP synchronisation, tags, smart albums, duplicate detection.
• Rich ecosystem: themes, watermarks, comments, ratings, notifications, maps, print ordering.
• Low requirements: runs on any PHP host, and the Docker image is light.

Images and ports

Official image piwigo/piwigo:latest on Docker Hub, database mariadb:lts, default mapping 8080:80.

Deployment cost

1 vCPU / 1 GB will run it; 2 GB is better for a family. There is no built-in automatic phone backup — use FTP sync, web upload or a third-party client. If "set it up and forget it" backup is the goal, choose Immich instead.

Full walkthrough: Piwigo Docker deployment tutorial.