Lychee is a free, open-source photo-management tool that runs on your server or web space. Installation is quick and easy, taking just seconds. With Lychee, you can upload, manage, and share your photos seamlessly, just like using a native application. It comes with all the essential features you need, ensuring your photos are stored securely. Read more on our website.
For even more advanced features, consider the Supporter Edition (SE). The SE version offers additional functionality to enhance your experience. Learn more about the Supporter Edition and its benefits here.
We aim to maintain a free open-source photography library with high quality of code.
Being in control of our own data, our own pictures is something that we value above all.
Through contributions, donations, and sponsorship, you allow Lychee to thrive. Your donations directly support demo server costs, continuous enhancements, and most importantly bug fixes!
There are three deployment options available. The simplest is Docker deployment, as all dependencies are already predefined and configured.
An official Docker image can be found at LycheeOrg/Lychee-Docker or on Docker Hub as lycheeorg/lychee.
Copy the extracted Zip file from https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/releases to your webserver
To run Lychee, everything you need is a web-server with PHP 8.2 or later and a database (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite). Follow the instructions to install Lychee on your server. This version of Lychee is built on the Laravel framework. To install:
- Clone this repo to your server and set the web root to
lychee/public - Run
composer install --no-devto install dependencies - Run
npm installto install node dependencies - Run
npm run buildto build the front-end - Copy
.env.exampleas.envand edit it to match your parameters - Generate your secret key with
php artisan key:generate - Migrate your database with
php artisan migrateto create a new database or migrate an existing Lychee installation to the latest framework.
See detailed instructions on the Installation page of our documentation.
Updating is as easy as it should be. Update »
Sign in and click the gear in the top left corner to change your settings. Settings »
Lychee is ready to use straight after installation, but some features require a little more configuration.
These shortcuts will help you to use Lychee even faster. Keyboard Shortcuts »
In order to use the Dropbox import from your server, you need a valid drop-ins app key from their website. Lychee will ask you for this key, the first time you try to use the import. Want to change your code? Take a look at the settings of Lychee.
Lychee supports Twitter Cards and Open Graph for shared images (not albums). In order to use Twitter Cards you need to request an approval for your domain. Simply share an image with Lychee, copy its link and paste it in Twitter's Card Validator.
Lychee uses ImageMagick when installed on your server. In this case you will benefit from a faster processing of your uploads, better looking thumbnails and intermediate sized images for small screen devices. You can disable the usage of ImageMagick in the settings.
In order to use the new photos email notification you will need to have configured the MAIL_ variables in your .env to your mail provider & setup cron. Once that is complete you then toggle Send new photos notification emails in the settings. Your users will be able to opt-in to the email notifications by entering their email address in the Notifications setting in the sidebar. Photo notifications will be grouped and sent out once a week to the site admin, album owner & anyone who the album is shared with, if their email has been added. The admin or user who added the photo to an album, will not receive a email notification for the photos they added.
Take a look at the Documentation, particularly the FAQ if you have problems. Discovered a bug? Please create an issue here on GitHub! You can also contact us directly on gitter (login with your github account) or on discord ».
As LycheeOrg is a very small team, we do not have many maintainers. Most of us have an active work/family life, and as a result, it is no longer possible for us to apply proper 4-eyes principle in the coding reviews.
In order to keep our high code quality, the following changes have been applied.
masterstays as a stable branch and contains 4-eyes peer-reviewed pull-requests.alphacontains the latest changes (i.e. the above mentionned PR) merged with minimal review.
With this change, we hope to strike a balance between decently paced development (on alpha) and maintaining a robust core (on master).
On Docker, nightly/dev continues to refer to the latest master commit.
The alpha tag is updated daily with the content of the associated branch.
That being said, if you like the gallery and would like to contribute, do not hesitate to open pull request. If you would like to see more functionalities added and help us push Lychee, Join the team!
We would like to thank Jetbrains for supporting us with their Open Source Development - Community Support program.
