There are various ways to customize your Piwigo gallery:
- By choosing and setting up the theme of your choice
- By installing plugins
- But Piwigo's different standard configuration options should also be explored. This is what we are showcasing in this article.
For this, go to the administration, in the Configuration > Options menu. This menu centralizes various customization options for your Piwigo gallery.
General tab
The first tab is divided into several sections.
Basic settings
Editing your gallery’s title
Here, you can choose your gallery's title: in a way, this is the name of your website. It is used by Piwigo in multiple places.
Some themes, such as Bootstrap Darkroom, show the gallery's title on all pages by default (as you can see below), but this is not the case with Modus, the default theme.
Setting up the content of a banner
The "Page banner" area lets you create a banner which will be displayed at the top of all pages on your website just like the example below.
To learn more about creating banners for your Piwigo gallery, read this article:
Adding a custom banner to your galleryChanging the photos' display order
This is also where you can modify the order in which photos are displayed on pages. By default, they are sorted by upload date (from newest to oldest), then in alphabetical order and by ID, but you can customize this display order.
Permissions
This is where you can choose whether or not to activate ratings on your gallery ("Allow rating" option). Learn more about ratings
This is also where you will choose whether or not you allow users to be able to create an account on their own ("Allow user registration" option). Learn more about users
Lastly, here, you can choose whether or not to allow users to customize their display preferences from the gallery (by activating or not activating the "Customize" menu). Learn more about preferences
Miscellaneous
The options available in the Miscellaneous section aren't really related to gallery customization, but rather general options applied to Piwigo as a whole:
- first day of the week
- saving visit history
- whether or not to promote the mobile app
- theme for the emails sent (light or dark)
- whether or not to detect duplicates during upload
Photo sizes tab
This tab lets you customize the photo sizes available in your gallery.
Watermark tab
This tab lets you automatically display a watermark on all photos displayed in your gallery.
Display tab
This tab lets you customize your gallery with many options you can activate or deactivate.
It is divided into multiple sections.
Main page
The "Main page" section contains various options for customizing the actions available in your gallery.
Namely, this is where you can customize the number of albums per page in your gallery. By default, this number is set to 12, but if you have a lot of albums, you can display more of them.
This is also where you will be able to activate or deactivate most of the icons available on your gallery's home page, or on an album page.
Photo page
The "Photo page" section contains the actions and display options you can activate or deactivate on a photo page.
This way, you can customize the actions available for a photo, namely activating or deactivating the download.
You can also choose whether or not to activate the navigation bar that lets you go through the photos of an album.
Lastly, you can choose whether or not to display the gallery menu from a photo page (it is hidden by default).
Photo properties
The "Photo properties" section lets you choose the properties to display in the information section on a photo page.
Comments tab
This tab lets you activate or deactivate comments on your gallery, and set up some options related to comments.
Customizing your gallery's appearance through preferences
There is another possibility, often unknown, which lets you edit some display settings of your gallery: these are the user preferences.
For example, preferences let you customize:
- The number of photos per page on an album
- The display period through the "Recent photos" menu
- The display of sub-albums in a tree structure in the browsing menu
- etc.
Preferences can be different for each user, but, as an administrator, you can:
- Set the default preferences for each new user
- Set the preferences for the "guest" user (anonymous users of your gallery, not logged in)
- Edit your own preferences and those of other users.