Perfect Cloud-based Photo Setup with digiKam and Piwigo

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Using digiKam's Kipi plugins, you can upload your photos to a variety of popular photo services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and SmugMug. But what if you want to host your own photo album and still be able to populate it with photos directly from within digiKam? In this case, you might want to try Piwigo, a nifty photo application that has everything you need to host and share your photos on the Web. Piwigo is supremely easy to install and get to grips with, and you can use the vast collection of available extensions and themes to customize the application to fit your specific needs. The best part is, though, that digiKam comes with the Piwigo upload plugin, so you can push your photos directly from the desktop photo management application to the Web album. To enable the plugin, launch digiKam, choose Settings | Configure digiKam, switch to the Kipi Plugins section, and enable the Remote Piwigo Export plugin. Press OK, and restart digiKam.

Before you can upload photos to Piwigo, you have to create at least one category. To do this, log in to Piwigo as an administrator and navigate to Administration | Categories | Manage. Create then a new virtual category. Uploading photos from digiKam to Piwigo is easy. Switch to digiKam, select the photos you want to upload, and choose Export | Export to Piwigo. Specify the required connection settings, and press OK. You can then upload the selected photos by pressing the Add Selected Photos button. Before you do that, though, it might be a good idea to enable and configure the Resize photos before uploading option, so the utility reduces the size of the selected photos to a more manageable size before uploading them.