I have been using Piwigo for a couple of years (photos.samwilson.id.au), and have been really happy with it. The ability to work with large numbers of photos (uploading lots, and bulk-editing) is what made it a pleasure to use to start with; these are usually the initial tasks one does with this photo-gallery software, and they’re usually where systems are not at their best. Now I’ve got a few thousand photos in it, I’ve gotten the hang of a reasonable workflow, and Piwigo has mostly receeded to the background and just carries on working without issue. I’ve added my albums’ URLs to all sorts of places, including in printed archival descriptions, and feel pretty committed to sticking with Piwigo.
So it was nice to recieve a newsletter from the Piwigo development team, talking about their recent shift of the codebase to GitHub, a new Java desktop synchronisation client, and other things. If one doesn’t actively haunt the forums, it’s hard to remember that Piwigo is still a going concern — but I’m very glad that it is!
Open source software is great, I love using it and contributing to it. But sometimes it goes away. :( Of course, that happens to proprietary apps too, but with FOSS failures I feel sad, because it feels like I’ve personally failed the project (I should’ve been more involved). It’s one of the reasons it’s good to pay for free software. I’m glad Piwigo makes money from their piwigo.com service (well, I assume that’s what keeps the lights on).
Anyway, all I wanted to say was: thanks for Piwigo.