Photo gallery and media management applications for uploading, organising, and showcasing images and multimedia content. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Coppermine is a free, open-source software solution designed for managing and displaying photo galle...
Piwigo is a free, open-source photo gallery software designed to help individuals, photographers, an...
ZenPhoto CMS is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) specifically designed for managi...
A photo gallery is one of the few kinds of website expected to outlive the software running it. Anyone who kept an archive on Picasa Web Albums, or watched Flickr change its free storage terms, has learned that lesson at least once. Self-hosted photo gallery software puts the images in a folder on your own hosting and the metadata in your own MySQL database, so if a project stops tomorrow the pictures are still files in directories with names you can read.
The hosted alternatives deserve naming, because for a lot of people they are the better buy. SmugMug sells unlimited full-resolution JPEG storage on annual plans, with RAW storage as a paid add-on. Flickr Pro sells unlimited full-resolution uploads with no monthly cap. Pixieset, Zenfolio and Adobe Portfolio all aim at photographers who want client galleries, proofing and print sales without going near a server. Piwigo itself sells a hosted version, Piwigo Cloud, for people who want the software without the hosting.
Open source gallery software wins on three things. The gallery is on your own domain rather than a subdirectory of somebody else's brand, the cost is your hosting plan instead of a per-gigabyte fee that scales with an archive that only ever grows, and nobody can change the terms underneath you. It loses on payment handling, print fulfilment and mobile apps. That is a real trade, not a footnote, and it is worth being honest about before you start uploading.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Clubs and societies digitising their own history end up with tens of thousands of images, most of which nobody will ever look at, and none of which they want to pay a per-gigabyte fee on forever. A self-hosted gallery turns that into a disk quota question, which is a much cheaper curve.
Password-protected albums per client, watermarks on the previews and a URL that carries the photographer's own brand rather than a platform's. Piwigo and Zenphoto both handle this without a subscription, provided print ordering and payment are handled some other way.
Sports days, productions and fundraisers produce photographs that must be visible to parents or members but not to the open web or to search engines. Per-album passwords and private groups do that job, and keeping the images on UK hosting makes the safeguarding conversation shorter.
Museums, local history groups and research collections need EXIF and IPTC fields preserved, a controlled tag vocabulary and search that works across both. Piwigo handles this better than most hosted consumer services, which tend to flatten metadata on upload.
Generally any standard configured webspace package on any shared host should fit Zenphoto's requirements. You don't need your own dedicated server unless you have really huge plans.
Refreshingly unlike the marketing automation category, where the software itself tells you to go and buy a server. Gallery software really is undemanding at rest, so the decision to move up a plan is driven by how many gigabytes you are storing and how much bandwidth the pictures pull, not by the application.
It's not the size of the file that matters here; it's the number of pixels that determine memory use in GD.
This one sentence explains most failed gallery uploads. A heavily compressed 3 MB JPEG from a modern camera can carry 24 million pixels, and GD needs the source and the resized copy in memory at once, so it can ask for a couple of hundred megabytes to make one thumbnail. Check the megapixels, not the file size, when uploads start failing.
Photo galleries trip on PHP upload limits, file storage, and on-the-fly thumbnail generation. We raise upload_max_filesize and post_max_size to 256MB on install for any gallery app, recommend pre-generating thumbnails on import rather than letting the application build them on first request, and set sensible cache headers so popular albums do not regenerate the same thumbnail twice. For libraries above 100,000 images, NVMe storage on a managed cloud server changes the experience more than any application tuning.
All three are maintained, but not equally. Piwigo is busiest by a distance: 16.4.0 came out in May 2026 and commits land most weeks. Coppermine released 1.6.29 in April 2026 and is close to a one-person project, so judge it on what it does today rather than on a roadmap. Zenphoto last tagged 1.6.8 in May 2025, but its repository was still absorbing PHP 8.5 deprecation fixes in August 2026, which puts it in the maintained column.
The failure people hit is memory during resizing, and the cause is pixel count rather than file size. GD holds roughly four bytes per pixel and needs the original and the resized copy in memory together, so a batch of full-resolution camera files exhausts a modest PHP memory limit long before it fills the disk. ImageMagick is lighter, but it is usually driven through PHP's exec() function, which many hosts disable. Check which graphics library your gallery is set to use before uploading a large batch.
Then budget disk for the derivatives, not just the originals. Every gallery here caches resized copies, so an archive occupies meaningfully more space than the files you uploaded, and large collections push file counts high. If you are storing hundreds of gigabytes, or you want print sales and card payments, a managed cloud server or a hosted gallery service is the better answer.
Common questions we hear from people running gallery applications on 365i hosting.
More than the originals, because every one of these applications caches resized copies. Piwigo stores its multiple sizes in a cache directory, Coppermine and Zenphoto do the equivalent, so plan for the originals plus a meaningful margin for thumbnails and intermediate sizes. The practical approach is to resize before upload if you do not need full-resolution downloads: an archive intended for viewing rarely needs 45 megapixel masters online. Our standard web hosting suits collections in the low tens of gigabytes, and a managed cloud server takes over above that.
Almost always PHP memory, and the culprit is pixel count rather than file size. Coppermine documents this plainly: with GD, memory use follows the number of pixels, and GD needs the source image and the resized copy held at once. A 24 megapixel photograph can therefore want a couple of hundred megabytes to produce a single thumbnail. Switch the gallery to ImageMagick if the host allows exec(), raise the PHP memory limit for the package, or resize the images before uploading. Batch uploads that stop partway through are usually the same problem plus a script timeout.
Piwigo for most people. It is the most actively developed of the three, it handles metadata and large collections well, and it has a large plugin library behind it. Zenphoto suits anyone who wants the gallery to be the website rather than a section of one, since it is a CMS with pages and blogging as well as albums. Coppermine is the choice if you already run it and it works, or if you specifically want its long-established album and user-group model. All three install in one click here.
Not properly, and this is the honest limit of the category. None of the three ships a print lab integration, a shopping basket and payment handling in the way SmugMug, Pixieset or Zenfolio do, and bolting a payment gateway onto a gallery plugin is rarely worth the effort or the PCI scope it drags in. If selling prints is a core part of your business, buy a hosted service built for it. If you are selling occasionally, a self-hosted gallery for proofing plus a separate shop or invoice is a cleaner split.
Yes, though narrowly. Release 1.6.29 went out in April 2026 with a security fix, and the work is one maintainer keeping the 1.6.x line compatible with current PHP. That is enough for an existing gallery to stay safely online, and it is more than can be said for a lot of software of its vintage. For a new gallery where you expect active development, new features and a larger community behind you, Piwigo is the safer starting point.
Upload the files by FTP and let the gallery scan them. Piwigo, Coppermine and Zenphoto all have a synchronise or batch-add function that walks the album directories and imports what it finds, which avoids browser timeouts and PHP upload limits entirely. It also lets you keep your existing folder structure as the album structure. Give the first synchronise plenty of time, since the application still has to generate thumbnails for every file, and run it in stages if you are working through a very large archive.
Get Gallery apps up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
All 3 gallery applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
