photoprism/assets/locales

Backend 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 %d files, for numbers and other variables.

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

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.

default.po files in subdirectories 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.