Translations

PhotoPrism uses gettext for localizing frontend and backend. It's one of the most widely adopted standards for translating user interfaces.

Human readable messages like File not found are used as ids for finding matching translations, and used as defaults whenever there is no translation available.

Messages may optionally contain placeholders, like Found %{n} files, for numbers and other variables.

We strongly recommend Poedit for creating and updating translations. Download is free for Mac, Windows and Linux. Its source code can be obtained on GitHub.

Frontend

Localizations can be found in /frontend/src/locales. The POT file, only containing message ids, is translations.pot.

*.po files contain localized messages for each language, identified by their two-letter locale, like de.po for German. You can open, edit and save them with Poedit to update existing translations.

Info

As it doesn't seem necessary for now, and to reduce the amount of work, we don't maintain translations for dialects like de_AT or pt_BR.

To add a new translation, open translations.pot, click on "Create New Translation" at the bottom, select the language, and start translating. When done, save your translation as *.po file using the two-letter language locale as name. In addition, the new language needs to be added to the Languages function in /frontend/src/options/options.js.

If you have a working development environment in place:

Running npm run gettext-compile in the frontend directory compiles existing translations into a single translations.json file.

Now start a frontend build using npm run build or keep

npm run watch

running in the background to automatically recompile JS and CSS whenever there are changes. Lastly, make sure photoprism is running and open the Web UI in a supported browser. Changing the language in Settings automatically triggers a reload.

To extract new or changed text needing translation from *.js and *.vue source code, run

npm run gettext-extract

in the frontend directory. This updates the POT file translations.pot.

Apply changes to existing translations by clicking on "Catalogue" > "Update from POT File..." in the Poedit app menu.

Note

A binary *.mo (machine object) file will be automatically saved along with every *.po file. You won't be able to open those in a text editor, but please include them in git commits or when sending translations via email. The compiled translations.json file is not required for pull requests and often causes merge conflicts.

Backend

Only asynchronous notifications and certain API responses need translation to provide a consistent user experience. Technical log messages should be in English to avoid ambiguities and (even slightly) wrong translations.

Localizations are kept in /assets/locales. The POT file, only containing message ids, is messages.pot.

default.po files in sub directories contain localized messages for each language, identified by their two-letter locale, like de/default.po for German. You can open, edit and save them with Poedit. Please also add and commit binary *.mo files, which will be automatically created by Poedit.

To add a new translation, open messages.pot, click on "Create New Translation" at the bottom, select the language, and start translating. When done, create a new directory (using the locale as name) and save your translation there as default.po.

The POT file /assets/locales/messages.pot will be automatically updated when running go generate in /internal/i18n or make generate in the main project directory. Note that this will only work when you have gettext installed on your system. We recommend using our latest development image as described in the Developer Guide.

Apply changes to existing translations by clicking on "Catalogue" > "Update from POT File..." in the Poedit app menu.