How does Lychee keep photos self-hosted and under my control?

Updated

Lychee is a self-hosted photo-management tool: you install it on your own server or web-space, and your photos are stored there rather than on a third-party cloud service. That means control over storage, access, and sharing stays with you. The trade-off is that you also supply and maintain the server it runs on.

What "self-hosted" means in practice

Lychee runs on infrastructure you control. The site describes it as a solution where "your server, your data, your rules," and states that you never depend on someone else for your photo library. Concretely, that changes three things:

  • Storage location — photos live on your server or web-space, not in a vendor's cloud account.
  • Access control — you decide who can reach the instance and which albums are visible.
  • Longevity — your library is not tied to a subscription or a company's continued operation of a service.

The project is also completely open-source, so the software itself can be inspected, modified, and improved by anyone.

How sharing works without giving up control

Self-hosting does not mean private-only. Lychee separates where photos are stored from who can see them:

  • One-click public sharing — an album or individual photo can be made public for an audience.
  • Password-protected albums — if you want a limited audience instead of a fully public album, you can protect it with a password.
  • Selective visibility — you choose per album or per photo whether it is public, protected, or private.

So the control model is: the files never leave your server, but you can still hand out a link or a password when you want someone to see them.

What you get for managing the library

Because the library is yours, Lychee focuses on giving you full management rather than storage upsells. The site highlights:

  • No storage limit, no compression, no loss in data — the tool does not downsample your originals to fit a quota.
  • EXIF and IPTC metadata support — camera and descriptive metadata is preserved and displayed alongside each photo.
  • Batch operations — desktop-like multi-select for tagging, marking as important, moving, renaming, describing, or deleting photos.
  • Import from multiple sources — local computer, server, URL, or Dropbox.
  • Full-screen viewing — keyboard navigation forward and backward through images.

Deploying it

Lychee is distributed for container-based deployment. The site provides a Docker Compose file and a "Docker Compose Wizard," and describes deployment as taking seconds. Docker pull counts on the site are listed as 23.9M for LinuxServer and LycheeOrg combined, which reflects how commonly it is run this way.

If you want to evaluate it before committing to a server, the site offers a live demo and links to the GitHub repository.

Who this fits

Choose Lychee if you want your photo library to live on hardware you control, you are comfortable running a server or web-space with Docker, and you want public or password-protected sharing without handing your originals to a cloud provider. If you would rather not operate any server at all, a hosted photo service will be less work — at the cost of the control described above.