Does anyone know which one is better for thousands of images? ZENPHOTO or PIWIGO? What is the better for the one you choose?

We were recently testing b2evolution.net, piwigo and ZPC (also in different server environments).
Users were then ask to "play with them" and after some time they had to share which application they prefer.
For my surprise, they voted for ZPC. I say surprise, because I expected them to prefer frontend editing rather than an separate backend.

When it comes to picture management and performance: my impression is, that the quantity is unimport for ZPC. Your server will set the limit. If you keep the picture and album tags up to date you should have an easy living with ZPC. Pls look also for DAM: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-dam.html
As ZPC is folder-/file- based - you'll always have the option to "hard code" and you always have an real overview over the pictures and albums.

Furthermore: I was not able to find any hacked ZPC-site. But I found "others".

I think ZPC is a hidden champion and it is worth giving it a try.

Thanks @nordlicht ;-)

@irisemars We are naturally quite a bit biased here But seriously Piwigo is for sure a good tool and regulary recommend it as an alternative just as Piwigo often recommends us. Piwigo's focus may be on the plain gallery while Zenphoto also has a gallery center but also aims at running a complete site (as a portfolio site) with more than that.

what are your needs and what are your skills in php/html/css?
I tried both software, and I thought Piwigo is easier for me because it is in French.
but after months of use of both, I sincerely believe that Zenphoto is much more powerful and especially more flexible than Piwigo.

if you have no skills or do not feel like coding, Piwigo can be more practical: there are many themes and plugins and they can be set to add/remove informations.
on the other hand it is not easy to change the proposed themes because they uses templates (I do not remember which template engine they use but you need one more skill to manage these templates or take it "as it is").

if you have skills in php/html/css, you can see Zenphoto as a powerful framework with which you can do whatever you want.
the only limits of your theme, its presentation and its functionalities, are your imagination and the comprehension of all the functions of this framework.

to be very complete: Piwigo offers a hosting solution (which does not do Zenphoto) and Piwigo has a very active community of developers and contributors, which, unfortunately, does not have Zenpohoto.

as told before, I really think Zenphoto is a hidden or unknown champion for gallery (and blog too), and the only thing that is really missing is a larger community of theme developers and plugin (that's what made wordpress so popular).

@vincent3569
Plugins: what are you missing? The ZPC-core package is already extensive and the shipped (out of the box) plugins either.

of course zenphoto is wonderfull and powerfull.
as an old contributor of zenphoto, I think there is not a large community to improve the core and to provide new themes (responsive for example) or plugins (whaterever they are).

that contributes to keep zenphoto as a hidden or unknown champion...

Yes indeed, the community seems small.

And I think the community is small based on a lack of visibility and not based on the application itself.
There is need for self hosted picture galleries and picture albums - folks just don't see ZPC "easily".

I found ZPC also just by accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_gallery_software

this wikipedia page should be updated with zenphoto features!

Spread the word on your channels will surely help ;-)

If any one has access to Wikipedia and is able to edit, we would welcome this. There was once a page which was deleted by some WIkipedia admin being not good enough or something.

Zenphoto is available on a lot hosters via auto installer so a lot people seem to use it via those.

But of course using Zenphoto is less convenient for a lot users than using any predefined services that often have million dollar funded companies behind them As vincent3569 put it, the real flexibility comes if you see it as a framework and have some coding knowledge.