What photo management and sharing features does Lychee offer?

Updated

Lychee is a self-hosted photo-management tool that runs on your own server or web space, and its feature set covers the full loop of getting photos in, organizing them, publishing them, and viewing them in the browser. It is aimed at photographers and anyone who wants their library stored on infrastructure they control, with no storage limit, no compression, and no data loss described on the project site. The features below are the ones the project itself documents.

Managing your photos

Lychee's management features are built around doing common library tasks from the browser rather than a desktop client.

  • Upload photos or create new albums directly.
  • Move, rename, describe, or delete photos.
  • Search your photos.
  • Batch selection with desktop-like multi-select, so an action can apply to many photos at once.
  • Tag photos or mark them as important, either one at a time or across a selection.

The site frames this as "all in one place, right from your browser," so the intended workflow is browser-based administration of the whole library.

Sharing and access control

Sharing is designed to be one action, with control kept on your side.

  • One-click publishing: every photo and album can be made ready for the public in a single click.
  • Password-protected albums: if you want to limit who sees an album, you can protect it with a password.
  • Share to your favourite service: albums or photos can be shared out to an external service.
  • The project states the sharing stays "under your control."

Viewing photos

  • Full-screen mode for looking at images.
  • Keyboard navigation forward and backward through images.
  • Public albums so others can browse your photos.
  • EXIF and IPTC metadata are supported and displayed, listed next to the other photo information and available one click away.

Importing from other sources

Lychee can import photos from several places rather than only a local folder:

  • Your local computer
  • A server
  • A URL
  • Dropbox

Self-hosting and deployment

Lychee is described as completely open-source and self-hosted, meaning your server, your data, your rules — you never depend on someone else for storage. Deployment is documented as a matter of seconds, and the project provides a Docker path: a docker-compose file plus a Docker Compose Wizard, with "Lychee on Docker" called out as a first-class option. The site reports 23.9M Docker pulls combined across LinuxServer and LycheeOrg.

The project also publishes adoption figures — 45.9K downloads, 4.3K stars, and 381 forks — and offers a live demo and a GitHub repository if you want to evaluate it before installing.

What to check before deciding

  • Storage and compression: the site claims no storage limit, no compression, and no loss in data. That claim depends on your own server's disk, so plan capacity yourself.
  • Sharing model: public one-click sharing and password-protected albums are the documented controls. If you need finer per-user permissions, verify against the current documentation.
  • Metadata: EXIF and IPTC display is supported; confirm your specific camera or workflow metadata is covered if that matters to you.
  • Deployment: Docker with the provided compose file is the documented quick path. If you are not running Docker, check the GitHub repository for other installation routes.

A reasonable way to test it: run the live demo to judge the interface, then deploy the Docker compose setup on your own server and import a small set of photos from one of the supported sources to confirm the import, tagging, and sharing flow matches how you work.