Lychee

Lychee is one of the longest-running and most polished open-source photo management platforms, with thousands of GitHub stars and an active community of self-hosters who use it as the central repository for personal photo archives, family libraries, and small-team shared collections. The community-maintained LycheeOrg fork has been actively developed since 2018 on top of Laravel, with regular releases bringing security patches, new features, and broader integrations.

Common Use Cases

Photographers and hobbyists self-host Lychee as their personal photo archive, taking advantage of EXIF-driven organization to find shots by camera body, lens, focal length, or geolocation without manual tagging — all under their own domain with no cloud subscription. Families share a private Lychee instance to keep generations of family photos in one accessible spot, using album passwords and invite-only sharing to control what relatives versus extended family see. Small photography studios run Lychee as a client-delivery platform, generating per-shoot albums with per-album passwords so clients can preview, select, and download proofs without exposing the rest of the studio's portfolio. Bloggers and content creators use Lychee as a curated public gallery embedded in their personal site, leveraging the public album view as a polished alternative to scattered Instagram or hosted-gallery links. Travel photographers organize trips by date and location, using Lychee's geolocation tags to map shoots onto interactive views.

Key Features

• Nested album hierarchy with drag-and-drop ordering and per-album cover images
• Automatic EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata extraction with metadata-driven filtering
• RAW and HEIC support alongside JPEG, PNG, GIF, and video
• Public, password-protected, invite-only, and private sharing per album or per photo
• Responsive web UI with photo, gallery, slideshow, and map views
• OAuth login for Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Discord, and other providers
• LDAP authentication for enterprise directory integration
• S3-compatible object storage backend for libraries that exceed local disk
• REST API for automation, third-party clients, and mobile uploaders
• Configurable thumbnail sizes, watermarking, download permissions, and EXIF stripping for shared albums

Performance and Scale

Lychee is built on Laravel and runs efficiently as a single PHP container backed by MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite depending on the size of the library. Thumbnails are generated on upload and cached on disk, so browsing remains responsive even with tens of thousands of photos. For libraries that outgrow local disk, the optional S3-compatible storage backend keeps the same UI and album organization while moving full-resolution originals to object storage. Background jobs run via Laravel queues, and the admin can configure thumbnail sizes, watermarking rules, EXIF stripping for public shares, and download permissions per album.

Why deploy Lychee on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Lychee on a Hostinger VPS gives photographers a private, full-resolution photo platform under their own domain with no per-photo storage fees, no third-party scanning of personal images, and no SaaS lock-in. Self-hosting also keeps detailed metadata — including GPS coordinates and timestamps — out of cloud provider hands, which matters for both privacy-conscious individuals and professional studios subject to client confidentiality agreements. Persistent volume storage protects uploaded originals, generated thumbnails, and database state across container updates and rebuilds, while full root access lets you scale up storage with object storage backends, configure custom OAuth providers, integrate with backup pipelines, and tune PHP and MariaDB for the size of your library without negotiating with a SaaS vendor or hitting opaque rate limits.