My Motivation

I have been using Koken as a CMS for my photo website for some years now. When I first stumbled across it, I found it very interesting and a perfect fit for my needs. It was nice looking, easy to use, and easy to be customized. So I installed it on my web server.
Unfortunately the project that started as a three man show was sold a few years ago. Since then the decline began. To name just a few of the problems:

• The code fails to run with PHP 7.4.9 or newer, forcing me to move to a different CMS.
• The development of Koken has completely stalled, there are no security fixes, nor new features.
• Newer versions of MySQL/MariaDB require a legacy parameter because the database queries were no longer recognized as being valid.
• Koken won't make use of newer web standards and technologies.
• And: The problems will get worse the longer there is no active development.

But when there are cons, there have to be pros as well. What I still like about koken:

• Ease of use, including the library manager.
• Possibilities to tag images and articles and to search for tags. And categories, but this is a feature a wouldn't miss.
• The ability to have images in multiple galleries and to easily embed gallery images in articles without the need to have two distinct versions of the image on the server.

Hence I started to look for a modern, lightweight CMS incorporating all or the most important features.

The Competitors

To summarize the result of my search: There are not too many lightweigt content management systems that meet the special needs of photographers and can be self-hosted . After reading countless articles and discussion threads my frustration began to increase. The ones I had a closer look at are:

• ZenphotoCMS
• Lychee
• X2, the predecessor of X3

They all didn't look fitting for my needs, some lacking features, some not looking professionally.
There for sure are other CMSs that I may have missed in my research. The most common ones are too fat for my purposes and lack a good library, while urging the user to install tons of plugins and themes. Some not so common systems would probably have been worth a closer look, but seem to have a doubtful future.

And the Winner is…

Recently I came across a discussion thread where a user mentioned X3 as a good alternative. I gave it a try and am pretty satisfied. Sure, it's missing some features (links, tags), but some are not so important to me anymore, some I worked around with scripts, some even are on the roadmap for upcoming releases. With some more scripting I managed to migrate the contents from Koken to X3. A big downside of a migration like this is that all the old deep links to the albums and images stop working, with the most impact on the index of search engines.
Well, X3 is not FOSS. But that's no big deal as it can be run free of charge (with a small ad at the bottom) and it doesn't cost so much. The $150 are for sure better spent with X3 than with any commercial image processing tools.