Lychee

Lychee is a free photo management tool that runs on your own server or web space. It answers a plain need, keeping a personal photo library under your control rather than in someone else's cloud, while still feeling like a native application to use.

Installation is quick, and the maintainers treat Docker as the recommended route. A published compose file brings up the application next to a MariaDB database and a separate worker container for background jobs, then serves the gallery on a local port. A minimal template exists for a quick trial before committing to anything.

A few practical details shape how you deploy it.

• Images: published to both the GitHub Container Registry and Docker Hub, tagged latest for stable releases and edge for development builds.
• From source: needs PHP 8.4 or newer, Composer and npm, with pre-built releases as the middle path.
• Version 7.0: changes the Docker image significantly, so read the upgrade guide before moving from an earlier release.
• Supporter Edition: a paid edition layers additional functionality on the open source core.
• License: the project is MIT licensed.

Contribution guidelines cover setup, coding standards and a specification-driven workflow, and AI-assisted contributions are explicitly permitted. Documentation, GitHub issues and a Discord server handle support, while donations and sponsorship pay for the demo server and the steady stream of bug fixes.