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Lychee
MITLychee replaces Google Photos with a self-hosted web gallery featuring zero recurring storage fees, password-protected albums, and full EXIF metadata.
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Overview
Lychee originated in 2013 as a self-hosted PHP photo manager and has evolved across major releases to serve personal image collections. Running on standard web hosting or Docker, it stores pictures in original quality on local drives or network storage. The browser interface helps families and photographers organize, view, and share albums without recurring cloud storage fees.
Why Lychee instead of Google Photos
Google Photos charges recurring monthly subscriptions once photo collections exceed free quotas, turning personal archiving into an escalating expense. Upgrading cloud tiers to store high-resolution mobile pictures and family videos creates an ongoing bill. Lychee eliminates per-gigabyte subscription fees by running on servers you control, such as a home NAS or a low-cost virtual host. Expanding storage requires purchasing physical hard drives once rather than paying monthly cloud rental in perpetuity.
In daily use, Lychee provides core gallery essentials including nested albums, full-screen viewing, tag organization, and password-protected sharing links. What it lacks compared to Google Photos is proprietary machine learning: Lychee does not detect faces, index object searches, or assemble automated video reels. It also omits background mobile camera roll synchronization, meaning uploads occur through a browser or external file sync utilities. For users prioritizing predictable costs and file ownership over corporate convenience, Lychee delivers a focused photo gallery without a subscription paywall.
What it does well
- Album hierarchy: organizes pictures into nested folders for events or trips, keeping large collections orderly and easy to browse.
- Granular privacy controls: lets owners set passwords, toggle public visibility, or restrict downloads so private pictures stay protected.
- Original resolution storage: saves uploaded media in original quality without lossy compression that degrades image clarity.
- EXIF metadata extraction: reads camera models, shutter speeds, and timestamps directly from files for side-panel display.
- Interactive map view: plots geotagged photos on a map using embedded GPS coordinates to explore trips visually.
- Multi-user accounts: supports multiple accounts on one server, giving household members private libraries alongside shared albums.
