A photo manager is a pretty crazily important thing to us, especially now we have a baby memories to save! I have been using Piwigo for about 10 years or so. It has been…fine. I started looking at alternatives a while back because of the lack of mobile support, but then it got a functional iOS app. I decided to keep using it. Generally it works.

However, now we have significantly more photos and videos that 10 years ago…so what if we wanted to migrate to different software?

It’s not simple in Piwigo - photos are not stored in a logical file structure, so you can’t just download them that way. Infact, Piwigo natively has no way of downloading your images - you need to use a plugin.

Unfortunately this plugin (Batch Downloader) seems to be a little bit shit and keeps breaking. I figured a blog post was needed to remind me of how I fixed it for when it breaks in the future.

This is mainly relevant to the Piwigo docker image from Linuxserver, particularly with regards to issue no.1.

Downloads failing

So each time Piwigo updates the Batch Downloader plugin, this fix seems to get overwritten too. There are Github issues open for it, but it seems that little has been done to actually fix it.

Basically the plugin gives an error that contains Undefined array key "SIZE_INFO" along with other errors. As far as I can tell, this only affects Piwigo running in a Docker image.

Thankfully, PaulSpa on Github has a solution.

Head to the directory where Piwigo’s config is stored by Docker (in my case it’s a folder called config) and then head to /www/plugins/BatchDownloader.

There should be a file called download.php. Make a copy of it with $ cp download.php download.php.bak.

Edit the original with $ nano download.php.

The top of the file should look something like:

define('PHPWG_ROOT_PATH', '../../');
include(PHPWG_ROOT_PATH.'include/common.inc.php');

Change it to:

<?php
#define('PHPWG_ROOT_PATH', '../../');
define('PHPWG_ROOT_PATH', '/app/www/public/');
include(PHPWG_ROOT_PATH.'include/common.inc.php');

Downloads should now work (you might need to restart the container).

Only images are exported, not videos

That being said, if you’re using the videojs plugin, you might find that Batch Downloader only downloads images. For this you’ll need another plugin…LocalFiles Editor.

One you head into this plugin you will see tabs on the top - you need the Local Config tab.

This has a huge list of settings. At some point in the file add the following:

// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// |                                 Batch Downloader                      |
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

// Include different formats in Batch Downloader archives, not just photos.
$conf['batch_download_additional_ext'] = array('mp4');

Make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit save when you’ve added your changes!

You can probably add any other video formats you have on your Piwigo server too.

At this point, Batch Downloader should now correctly download media from your Piwigo Server. It’s a shame, because Piwigo is generally really nice software. It seems to be receiving updates, but I think the writing is probably on the wall given the bugs, issues with basic functionality and slow development.

Perhaps software like Immich will evolve to a level of stability that’s it worth looking at in the future. I need a dedicated iOS app though!