PiGallery2

PiGallery2 is an open-source self-hosted photo gallery built around a single design choice that sets it apart from most alternatives: it does not maintain its own upload pipeline. Instead, photos live in a directory tree on disk that you populate however you like — SCP, rsync, Syncthing, an automated camera-import job — and PiGallery2 turns that directory tree into a polished, fast-loading web gallery. The folder hierarchy is the album hierarchy. New photos in a subfolder become a new album the next time the indexer runs. Photos deleted from disk vanish from the gallery on the next scan. The result is a gallery that fits naturally into existing photo-management workflows rather than asking users to reorganise around it.

Common Use Cases

Personal photo archivists run PiGallery2 over a years-long photo dump organised by year and trip, getting a browsable web view that surfaces EXIF metadata, geotag maps, and date-range filtering without re-uploading anything to a SaaS provider. Families share vacation albums with relatives via password-protected links — pasting one URL into a group chat replaces the parade of low-resolution attachments most photo-sharing devolves into. Event photographers and small businesses host client-delivery galleries directly from a VPS, with per-album credentials so each client only sees their own shoot. Wedding and portrait photographers self-host portfolio sites where the directory layout doubles as a published portfolio and a private working archive. Travelers maintain a long-running geotagged photo journal that PiGallery2 plots on an interactive map, automatically grouping photos taken in the same city or country into navigable subsets. Bloggers and content creators use PiGallery2 as the image backend for editorial work, embedding gallery widgets into other sites or pulling thumbnails into static-site generators. Privacy-conscious households self-host their entire photo collection on PiGallery2 specifically to keep biometric metadata, face-recognition signals, and image content out of the SaaS data graphs operated by major photo services.

Key Features

• Directory-first model where the folder layout on disk becomes the album hierarchy in the gallery
• Background indexer that scans for new photos, generates multi-resolution thumbnails, and extracts EXIF metadata automatically
• Search across date ranges, locations, faces, tags, ratings, filenames, and arbitrary EXIF fields
• Map view that plots geotagged photos on an interactive map with album-level and date-level filtering
• Public sharing with shareable links, optional passwords, and configurable expiry dates per shared album
• User authentication with admin and viewer roles for restricting private albums to specific accounts
• Slideshow mode, full-screen viewer, keyboard shortcuts, and gesture support for tablets and phones
• Face detection (optional) that clusters photos by recognised people for browsing-by-person workflows
• Tag and rating support written to sidecar files so metadata survives even when using PiGallery2 alongside other tools
• Read-only library mount so the server can never accidentally modify or delete the original photo files
• Pi/low-resource optimised — runs comfortably on small VPS plans with thousands of images per album
• Active open-source development with regular releases and a documentation site at bpatrik.github.io/pigallery2

Why deploy PiGallery2 on Hostinger VPS

Running PiGallery2 on a Hostinger VPS gives photographers, families, and personal archivists a private, vendor-independent home for image collections that may need to outlive any SaaS photo service. Photo metadata reveals more than most users realise — exact GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers, capture times, sometimes who is in the frame — and self-hosting on infrastructure you control keeps that data inside your trust boundary by default. Dedicated CPU on a VPS handles thumbnail generation and EXIF parsing predictably, even for fresh imports of thousands of photos at once, and persistent volume storage keeps the SQLite metadata database, thumbnail cache, and configuration durable across container restarts. The read-only mount of the photo directory means original images are protected against any indexer bug. Combined with Traefik-based HTTPS routing on a clean branded hostname, public share links you paste into messaging apps stay TLS-encrypted, and the gallery loads quickly enough on mobile networks that recipients actually scroll through the album. Because PiGallery2 was originally designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, the footprint is small enough to coexist with several other self-hosted services on a single modest VPS plan.