Lychee

WHAT IS IT?

Lychee is an open source photo management system you install on your own server. You upload photos, organize them into albums and share them through public or protected links, all wrapped in a clean interface that holds its own against cloud services. It is the self-hosted alternative to Google Photos or Flickr for anyone who wants to own their photo library.

WHY IS IT INTERESTING?

• Your photos, your server: originals stay with you, with no forced compression, no third-party scanning and no risk of the service shutting down or changing its pricing
• Granular sharing: albums can be public, private, password-protected or reachable only through a direct link. You decide exactly who sees what
• Polished interface: smooth navigation, full-screen viewing, nested albums and EXIF metadata display (lens, aperture, ISO). It feels like a finished product, not a weekend project
• Solid Laravel stack: PHP 8 with Laravel on the back end, Vue.js on the front, and support for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite depending on your setup
• Official Docker deployment: team-maintained images and a ready-to-use docker compose file get you running in minutes

USE CASES

• Personal or family photo library hosted on a NAS or a VPS
• Photographer portfolio with public galleries and client deliveries through protected links
• Sharing event photos (weddings, clubs, associations) without going through social networks
• Leaving Google Photos while keeping full-resolution originals under your control