Lychee
A clean photo gallery for sharing albums from your own server
Alternative toFlickr
Lychee is a photo management and gallery app: you upload images into albums, decide which ones are public, and share them with a link. It is MIT licensed, built on PHP and Laravel, with a paid Supporter Edition for a few extra features.
Best for when
- you want to share curated albums with a link
- you want a portfolio style gallery on your own domain
- you prefer a simple upload and album workflow over automatic tagging
Watch out for
- it is not a phone backup tool and does not index existing folders the way library apps do
- sharing publicly means exposing a PHP app to the internet, which needs regular updates
- a few features are reserved for the paid Supporter Edition
A gallery more than an archive
Lychee focuses on presenting photos well. You create albums, upload images, add titles and tags, and choose which albums are private, shared with a link or public. It reads EXIF data and can show where a photo was taken on a map.
It suits photographers and families who want to share selected albums without handing them to a social network. It is not designed to back up a whole phone or to scan an existing archive of hundreds of thousands of files, and that is fine: it does one job.
What running it costs
It is a PHP application with a database, MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite, and a Docker image is available. RAM use is low. Storage is the uploaded photos plus the resized versions Lychee generates for fast loading, and both belong in your backups along with the database.
Because sharing is the point, some albums will probably be public. Put it behind a reverse proxy or tunnel with HTTPS, keep the admin account protected, and update it regularly, as with any PHP app facing the internet.
