What looked like a beautiful way to display photos turned out to have a few more drawbacks than anticipated.

Koken was a CMS (Content Management System) especially designed to manage photos online. Early 2021 it was discontinued, ending a system that looked great and made managing photos a pleasure.

My Koken Photography Site

Luckily, I didn’t spend much time setting it up. As with all non-mainstream applications support can vanish without warning.

The photos below show how far I got with it.

Koken Pros and Cons

The presentation is great, and you can customise the pages to suit. There are several free templates to choose from, but the better-looking ones can get expensive, making Koken unsuitable for the amateur.

Photos can only be searched for from the back end. To get front end searching a template needs to be bought. The free templates were not mobile compatible.

Its strength was the backend which gave remarkably similar search and grouping features to what Adobe’s Bridge or ACDsee have.

Koken, A Photographer’s CMS

I got onto Koken from an article by Graham Fisk who had a problem of what CMS to use for photos. He looked at two alternatives, Piwigo and Koken; and chose the latter for his gallery. After looking at both I started a website with Koken, but in the end, WordPress won out.

Koken’s Demise

Sadly, in early 2021 Koken was discontinued, and Graham had a big problem moving his photo collection, and its organisation to X3 Photo Gallery Website. Koken’s demise shows how important ongoing support is. Without updates your system eventually won’t work due to internet technology moving on.

I had to do a similar process (although much simpler I suspect) to move photos between versions of JoomGallery, using some SQL.

Further Information