Preamble
Your Piwigo gallery is the website that showcases your photo library.
The Piwigo gallery is used by people who need to search, view, download content in your photo library.
Your gallery is separated from the administration, which allows you to upload photos, create and manage albums, tags, users, edit content and manage your gallery (theme, plugins, languages, settings...).
Your Piwigo gallery can be:
- public: any visitor of the website can see all contents, even without being logged in
- private: only users who are logged in are allowed to view content in the gallery
- or mixed: on a single gallery, some albums can be public and others, private.
If you are not an administrator, you only have access to the gallery.
If you are an administrator, you have access to the administration AND the gallery.
Your gallery's home page
Every gallery is different! However, when installing Piwigo or when creating an account on the piwigo.com site, we all start with the same gallery, empty of all content.
This gallery uses the Modus theme and Piwigo's default settings. This is the "default" version we will be presenting here. But as you will see later, there are many ways to customize your gallery.
Your gallery's home page features the following elements:
- The browsing menu, which contains a search field and a login link
- An album list (if you have created at least one album) and a tool bar
- A page footer with a default text. For galleries hosted on piwigo.com, you will also find a login link there.
The browsing menu gives you access to various ways to access contents in your gallery:
- Browsing the albums
- See the most viewed, most recent, or best rated photos
- View the photos by upload date (calendar)
- Browsing the tags
- Accessing the advanced search
- …
Learn more about the browsing menu
On the home page, the tool bar icons give you access to 3 actions by default:
- Display all photos (regardless of the album).
- Display photos by upload date
- Display photos by creation date
From the moment you choose one of these options, you will access the "List" view, which gives access to other actions. This List view is explained in the Album page documentation.
If you are not logged in, you are seeing what any visitor in your gallery will be able to see, meaning the albums set to public.
If you log in, you will gain access to private albums you have access to, as well as other features that are only for logged in users, such as adding a photo to your favorites, or customizing your preferences.
Accessing the gallery from the administration
Even if you are an administrator, you are frequently using the gallery.
Indeed, this is the easiest way to view and search for files located in Piwigo.
You also need to view the impact of changes you make in the administration.
There are multiple ways to access your gallery directly from Piwigo's administration.
Accessing the home page
From Piwigo's administration, you can switch to your gallery at any moment by clicking on the Visit button in the top left corner.
Accessing an album
From the album list in the administration, you can directly access an album in the gallery by clicking on the eye-shaped icon.
When editing an album in the administration, you can directly access it in the gallery by clicking on "Open in gallery".
Accessing a photo
When editing a photo in the administration, you can directly access it in the gallery by clicking on the button that appears when hovering over it with your mouse.
Customizing your gallery
There are many ways to customize your gallery's appearance and its features.
If you have the webmaster status in Piwigo, you have access to all these options.
It is important to know them in order to offer users of your gallery the best experience possible.
In the following chapters, we will introduce the options available for the main pages.
To obtain more information about customizing your gallery's appearance, visit the following chapters:
ThemesCustomizing your galleryNext →
Albums in your gallery