Photo gallery hosting you control

Share albums from a club, a family, a photography hobby or a project, on your own domain, without adverts and without a platform deciding how your pictures look. Free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month if you keep it.

Start your gallery free How it works

First 30 days: £0
Then £0.99 a month if you continue
No card needed to start
Bring your own domain

First, the storage maths

Galleries are the one kind of site where storage really matters, so it’s worth being clear. A Traxio account has 3GB of storage, shared by everything on it:

Photos as…	Typical size	Roughly fits in 2.5GB
Straight from a phone or camera	3–6MB	about 500
Resized to 2048 pixels wide	0.5–0.8MB	about 3,500
Resized to 1600 pixels wide	0.25–0.4MB	about 7,000

Resize before you upload and a 99p account holds thousands of photos that still look sharp on a big screen. If you need to keep full-resolution originals online, or you have tens of thousands of images, you need more storage than this account offers. Keep originals in a backup service, and put the web-sized copies here. Work out your own numbers with the hosting calculator.

Gallery software

Piwigo

Software built for photo galleries: albums, tags, private albums, user permissions, batch uploads and plugins. It reads EXIF data such as camera and date, and makes its own thumbnails. A strong choice for clubs, families and photographers.

Coppermine

A long-running, simple gallery with albums, comments and ratings. Lighter and more old-fashioned than Piwigo.

WordPress with a gallery

If the gallery is part of a website or blog, WordPress’s built-in gallery blocks may be all you need. Add a lightbox plugin to view images full screen. WordPress hosting.

Hand-built HTML

For a portfolio of a few dozen pictures, a static page is fastest of all. The portfolio template is a ready-made image grid.

Piwigo and Coppermine are both in Softaculous, the one-click installer in DirectAdmin.

Set it up

Start your free 30 days and connect your domain. A subdomain such as photos.yourname.co.uk keeps the gallery separate from a main site: create a subdomain.
Install Piwigo (or Coppermine) from Softaculous in DirectAdmin.
Set your size limits. In Piwigo, set a maximum upload size and let it resize large uploads. Then resize your library before uploading anyway, because it’s faster: image optimisation.
Decide who can see what. Make family or members-only albums private, and give people accounts.
Upload in batches. Big uploads can hit PHP limits. Upload a few dozen at a time, or upload by SFTP and sync in the gallery.
Back it up. Photos are irreplaceable. Keep your originals elsewhere, and download a full backup of the gallery from time to time: create a full backup.

Photo gallery questions

Is gallery hosting free?

For your first 30 days, with no card needed. After that it’s £0.99 a month if you keep it. There are no adverts on your gallery.

Can I make albums private?

Yes. Piwigo and Coppermine support private albums and logins, so a family or club gallery can be visible only to members.

Will my photos be compressed?

Only if you or the gallery software choose to. Nothing on the hosting side recompresses your images.

Can I sell prints from my gallery?

You can link to a print service or add a small shop, but a gallery isn’t a shop on its own. For a few products, see small shop hosting.

Can I run a gallery alongside a website?

Yes, on a subdomain. Piwigo and Coppermine need a database, and one is included with the account. Pair the gallery with a plain HTML website, or install the gallery by hand into your WordPress database with its own table prefix.

What about video?

Upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo and embed them. Video files are large, and streaming them would use the storage and bandwidth a gallery needs.

Your first 30 days are free.

Then it’s £0.99 a month for the same hosting. No card to start, no setup fee, and the same price next year.

Start your free 30 days How it works

£0 today
No card required
£0.99 a month afterwards
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