Build Your Own Flickr with Piwigo

In 2006, the family computer on which our digital photographs were stored had a hard drive failure. Because I'm obsessed with backups, it shouldn't have been a big deal, except that my backups had been silently failing for months. Although I certainly learned a lesson about verifying my backups, I also realized it would be nice to have an off-site storage location for our photos.

Move forward to 2010, and I realized storing our photos in the "cloud" would mean they were always safe and always accessible. Unfortunately, it also meant my family memories were stored by someone else, and I had to pay for the privilege of on-line access. Thankfully, there's an open-source project designed to fill my family's need, and it's a mature project that just celebrated its 10th anniversary!

Piwigo, formerly called PhpWebGallery, is a Web-based program designed to upload, organize and archive photos. It supports tagging, categories, thumbnails and pretty much every other on-line sorting tool you can imagine. Piwigo has been around long enough that there even are third-party applications that support it out of the box. Want mobile support? The Web site has a mobile theme built in. Want a native app for your phone? iOS and Android apps are available. In fact, with its numerous extensions and third-party applications, Piwigo rivals sites like Flickr and Picasaweb when it comes to flexibility. Plus, because it's open source, you control all your data.

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