Piwigo vs Stingle Photos

Piwigo is open-source photo management software for organizing and sharing photo and video collections. Albums, sub-albums, tags, metadata, and search help structure a library; roles, groups, and permissions let users publish galleries or restrict access. The software can be extended with plugins, themes, settings, and custom code, and both cloud and self-hosted versions provide API access.

Piwigo Cloud is hosted in France on Piwigo’s own infrastructure; the company says customer data is not transferred to the United States. Android and iOS apps support browsing libraries, editing photo details, and uploading photos and videos. Piwigo describes automatic tag and description generation and OCR text extraction, with its AI hosted on its own infrastructure. Users can export photos, videos, and metadata without charge and switch between Cloud and self-hosted deployments. The self-hosted plan is free. Cloud Pro costs €32 a month, billed annually and excluding VAT, and includes 10GB storage, one administrator, unlimited users, and no contributors. Other listed plans vary in storage, formats, contributors, and support. A Cloud subscription is limited to one Piwigo.

Stingle Photos is a gallery and camera app for backing up and syncing photos and videos across devices using the same account. It backs up files in the background and supports video recording and playback. Files are encrypted locally before they are sent to cloud storage. Stingle names XChaCha20 with Poly1305 for file data, X25519 for public-key cryptography and Argon2 for key derivation; it says sensitive photo and video metadata is encrypted in the file header. Albums can be shared with other Stingle users using encrypted album keys. The product is open source under GPLv3, and listed platforms include Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, API access and self-hosting. The free plan includes 1 GB. Paid storage starts at $2.99 a month for 100 GB; other listed plans include monthly and yearly capacities up to multiple terabytes. Users can host their own API server, with Linux, S3-compatible storage, a domain name and Git among the prerequisites. The hosted service uses DigitalOcean and Wasabi hot cloud storage. The provider cannot recover or change a forgotten password, so users should save the recovery phrase. The maker’s August 2026 post says the iOS app is available on the App Store and includes a built-in camera; a web version is planned.