Configure a Raspberry Pi 4 as a webserver and install Piwigo, an open source photo management software to manage, organize and share your photo easily on the web. Your images can be viewed and managed from a common web browser or from Piwigo mobile applications available for Android and Apple devices.
When accessing your Raspberry Pi 4 remotely via a VNC viewer or Teamviewer for the first time it is very likely the screen size shown has a very low resolution and hence is unusable. This can be corrected by modifying the Raspberry Pi configuration file.
Setting up the Piwigo theme configuration file ‘themeconf.inc.php’ for the Elegant Metadata theme to include the properties and initial configuration of the theme base on the Piwigo theme coding guidelines and information from other themes.
A Piwigo theme consists of multiple files and folders containing configuration files, php code, template files, translation files, icons, images, etc. First step is to setup the folder structure and copy the required files to the correct folder.
I started in December 2020 the development of my own Piwigo theme: ‘Elegant Metadata for desktop’. I used the theme ‘Elegant’ created by the Piwigo developers as a base. After playing around with the template files and adding some new coding I decided to re-start the development of the ‘Elegant Metadata for desktop’ theme from scratch and follow this time the Piwigo development guidelines more strictly. To help others I publish my experience on FotoKruse.eu.
The commercial PHP development IDE PhpStorm can be used to develop Piwigo plugins and themes. It has a lot of functionality and if you buy it for personal use it is not that expensive. As a student you can get a free license.
Before starting modifying or developing your own Piwigo themes it is strongly recommended to read the theme development documentation available on the Piwigo website and the Smarty manual. The documentation is not extensive, but enough to get you started with already existing themes as a base.
Before starting developing your own Piwigo plugins it is strongly recommended to read the plugin development documentation available on the Piwigo website. The documentation is not extensive, but enough to get you started.
I decided to use Piwigo, a freely available photo gallery web application, for setting up my photo gallery. Reason is that Piwigo is actively developed, has free themes and plugins available and best of al it is free. You can install Piwigo on your own server (for example on a QNAP nas) or at a hosting provider. Best thing is that I can publish my photos from Adobe Lightroom towards my Piwigo site easily, including all the metadata.
