Lychee

What is Lychee?

Lychee is a self-hosted photo management system you run on your own server. It’s a web app — a PHP/Laravel backend with a Vue frontend — that lets you upload photos through the browser, sort them into albums, tag them, read their EXIF data, and share individual photos or whole albums with public links. Every file stays on storage you control.

What is Lychee best for?

Lychee is best for people who want a clean, self-hosted gallery to present and share photos — photographers, hobbyists, and home-lab owners leaving Flickr or a paid gallery host who want an attractive, fast web viewer they own. It fits anyone whose priority is organizing and publishing a curated library, rather than automatically backing up a phone’s entire camera roll.

What can Lychee do?

• Upload and manage photos from the browser — rename, move, delete, and batch-select
• Organize photos into albums and nested sub-albums, with tags and starred favorites
• Read and display EXIF and IPTC metadata (camera, lens, exposure, and more)
• Share albums or single photos with one-click public links, with optional passwords
• Import from your computer, a server path, a URL, or Dropbox
• Handle JPEG, HEIC, RAW formats (NEF, CR2, ARW, DNG), and MP4 video
• Support multiple users and store originals on local disk or S3-compatible object storage
• Full-screen viewing with keyboard navigation

Where does Lychee fall short?

• It’s a gallery, not a Google Photos clone — by design. Lychee deliberately leaves out face recognition, object/AI tagging, and semantic search, so you can’t search “photos of a dog” or browse by person. If those matter, Immich or PhotoPrism fit better.
• No official mobile app or automatic phone backup. Lychee is browser-first; there’s no first-party app that silently backs up your camera roll in the background the way Google Photos or Immich do. You upload deliberately, not automatically.
• PHP memory limits can bite on large jobs. Importing big collections or downloading large album ZIPs can hit PHP out-of-memory errors, and the official Docker image doesn’t expose PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT as a configurable environment variable — so very large libraries need manual tuning.

Is Lychee free?

Yes — Lychee’s core is free and open source under the MIT license, and the free edition isn’t crippled to push upgrades. An optional Supporter Edition (SE) costs $5/month and adds library statistics, per-user upload quotas and groups, anonymous uploads, secured (signed) image links, watermarking, and extra customization. A Pro edition builds on SE with a webshop for photographers who want to sell prints. None of it is required — the free version is fully functional.

What does Lychee replace?

Lychee is a self-hosted Flickr alternative: the same job — a good-looking online gallery for organizing, presenting, and sharing photos — but hosted on your own server, with no account tiers or storage caps beyond your disk. It also works as a Google Photos alternative for the sharing-and-organizing side, though it intentionally skips Google’s automatic phone backup and AI search; for those, a tool like Immich is a closer match.

FAQ

Is Lychee open source? Yes. Lychee’s core is licensed under MIT and its full source is public on GitHub. The paid Supporter and Pro editions add extra features, but the free edition is complete and isn’t feature-gated to force an upgrade.

Can I self-host Lychee for free? Yes. The free MIT edition is fully functional and self-hostable at no cost — you only pay for the server. It runs on PHP with Laravel and a database (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), and there’s an official Docker image for quick setup.

Is Lychee a good Google Photos alternative? Partly. It’s an excellent self-hosted gallery for organizing and sharing photos, but it deliberately omits automatic phone backup, face recognition, and AI search. If you want those, Immich is a closer Google Photos replacement; if you mainly want a curated, shareable gallery, Lychee is the better fit.

What do I need to run Lychee? A web server with a modern PHP version (8.2+, and PHP 8.4 for the latest release), a supported database (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), and storage for your photos. Docker Compose is the recommended path and gets you running in a few minutes.