Lychee

A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system you can run on your server, to manage and share photos.

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Lychee

6,323

A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system you can run on your server, to manage and share photos.

photoprism

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AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web 🌈💎✨

librephotos

7,038

A self-hosted open source photo management service. This is the repository of the backend.

Quick Overview

Lychee is an open-source photo management system designed for self-hosting. It allows users to upload, organize, and share their photo collections through a sleek, modern web interface. Lychee focuses on providing a user-friendly experience while offering powerful features for managing large photo libraries.

Pros

Easy to install and set up, with support for various hosting environments
Clean and intuitive user interface for effortless photo management
Supports a wide range of image formats and offers advanced sorting and filtering options
Provides secure sharing features with password protection and expiration dates for shared albums

Cons

Requires self-hosting, which may be challenging for non-technical users
Limited built-in editing capabilities compared to some commercial photo management solutions
Potential performance issues with very large photo libraries (100,000+ images)
Lacks some advanced features found in paid alternatives, such as facial recognition or AI-powered tagging

Getting Started

To get started with Lychee, follow these steps:

Ensure your server meets the requirements (PHP 7.4+, MySQL/MariaDB)
Download the latest Lychee release from GitHub
Upload the files to your web server
Navigate to the Lychee directory in your browser
Follow the installation wizard to set up your database and admin account

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee.git

# Navigate to the Lychee directory
cd Lychee

# Install dependencies
composer install --no-dev

# Set up environment file
cp .env.example .env

# Generate application key
php artisan key:generate

# Run database migrations
php artisan migrate

# Set proper permissions
chown -R www-data:www-data .
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

After completing these steps, you can access Lychee through your web browser and start uploading and organizing your photos.

Competitor Comparisons

Lychee

6,323

A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system you can run on your server, to manage and share photos.

Pros of Lychee (electerious)

Simpler setup and installation process
Lighter weight and potentially faster performance
More straightforward user interface for basic photo management

Cons of Lychee (electerious)

Less actively maintained and updated
Fewer advanced features and customization options
Limited support for larger photo collections

Code Comparison

Lychee (electerious):

public function photos($albumID) {
    if ($albumID == '0') {
        $photos = Photo::where('album', '=', '0')
            ->orderBy('takestamp', 'DESC')
            ->get();
    } else {
        $photos = Photo::where('album', '=', $albumID)
            ->orderBy('takestamp', 'ASC')
            ->get();
    }
    return $photos;
}

Lychee (LycheeOrg):

public function photos(string $albumID): Collection
{
    $photos = Photo::with('album:id,title')
        ->where('album_id', '=', $albumID)
        ->orderBy($this->configFunctions->get_value('sorting_Photos', 'takestamp'), 'ASC')
        ->get();

    return PhotoCast::wrapCollection($photos);
}

The LycheeOrg version shows more advanced features like eager loading, configurable sorting, and custom collection wrapping, reflecting its more feature-rich nature.

photoprism

35,780

AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web 🌈💎✨

Pros of PhotoPrism

More advanced AI-powered features, including facial recognition and object detection
Supports a wider range of file formats, including RAW images and videos
Offers a more comprehensive search functionality with metadata indexing

Cons of PhotoPrism

Higher system requirements and more complex setup process
Steeper learning curve due to more advanced features
Larger codebase, which may lead to slower development and updates

Code Comparison

PhotoPrism (Go):

func (m *Search) Photos(ctx context.Context, f form.SearchPhotos) (results PhotoResults, err error) {
    if err := f.ParseQueryString(); err != nil {
        return results, err
    }

    s := UnscopedDb().Table("photos").Select("photos.*").
        Where("photos.deleted_at IS NULL").
        Where("photos.photo_quality >= 3")

Lychee (PHP):

public function recent(int $albumID = null): Collection
{
    $query = $this->photos;

    if ($albumID !== null) {
        $query = $query->where('album_id', '=', $albumID);
    }

    return $query->orderBy('created_at', 'DESC')->limit(5)->get();
}

The code snippets show different approaches to querying photos, with PhotoPrism using Go and Lychee using PHP. PhotoPrism's code appears more complex, reflecting its advanced features.

librephotos

7,038

A self-hosted open source photo management service. This is the repository of the backend.

Pros of LibrePhotos

Advanced AI-powered features like face recognition and object detection
More comprehensive metadata handling and search capabilities
Supports video files in addition to images

Cons of LibrePhotos

More complex setup and higher system requirements
Steeper learning curve for users
Less frequent updates and potentially less stable

Code Comparison

LibrePhotos (Python):

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Photo(models.Model):
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to='photos')
    owner = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

Lychee (PHP):

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Photo extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = ['title', 'url', 'description'];
}

LibrePhotos uses Django's ORM with a more complex model structure, while Lychee employs Laravel's Eloquent ORM with a simpler model definition. This reflects the overall complexity difference between the two projects, with LibrePhotos offering more advanced features at the cost of increased complexity.

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README

A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system.

Lychee is a free photo-management tool, which runs on your server or web-space. Installing is a matter of seconds. Upload, manage and share photos like from a native application. Lychee comes with everything you need and all your photos are stored securely. Read more on our website.

Notice: `master` & `alpha` branches

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.

master stays as a stable branch and contains 4-eyes peer-reviewed pull-requests.
alpha contains 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!

Support the Team

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!

Installation

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-dev to install dependencies
Run npm install to install node dependencies
Run npm run build to build the front-end
Copy .env.example as .env and edit it to match your parameters
Generate your secret key with php artisan key:generate
Migrate your database with php artisan migrate to create a new database or migrate an existing Lychee installation to the latest framework.

See detailed instructions on the Installation page of our documentation.

Docker

Alternatively, an official Docker image can be found at LycheeOrg/Lychee-Docker or on Docker Hub as lycheeorg/lychee.

Update

Updating is as easy as it should be. Update »

Settings

Build

Lychee is ready to use, right out of the box. If you want to contribute and edit CSS or JS files, you need to rebuild Lychee-front. Build »

Advanced Features

Lychee is ready to use straight after installation, but some features require a little more configuration.

Keyboard Shortcuts

These shortcuts will help you to use Lychee even faster. Keyboard Shortcuts »

Dropbox import

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.

Twitter Cards

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.

ImageMagick

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.

New Photos Email Notification

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.

Customizing

You can customize lychee with your own css code. Here you can find a list of available themes.

lychee-flat-white-theme

Troubleshooting

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 ».

Open Source Community Support

We would like to thank Jetbrains for supporting us with their Open Source Development - Community Support program.

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Quick Overview

Pros

Cons

Getting Started

Competitor Comparisons

Pros of Lychee (electerious)

Cons of Lychee (electerious)

Code Comparison

Pros of PhotoPrism

Cons of PhotoPrism

Code Comparison

Pros of LibrePhotos

Cons of LibrePhotos

Code Comparison

Convert designs to code with AI

README

A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system.

Notice: master & alpha branches

Support the Team

Installation

Docker

Update

Settings

Build

Advanced Features

Keyboard Shortcuts

Dropbox import

Twitter Cards

ImageMagick

New Photos Email Notification

Customizing

Troubleshooting

Open Source Community Support

Top Related Projects

Convert designs to code with AI

Notice: `master` & `alpha` branches