Lychee

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 754 words

Lychee is a gallery, not a camera roll. It exists to take the 300 photos you actually want people to see, arrange them into albums with a clean grid, and hand out links, some public, some behind a password. Immich exists to swallow every photo your phone ever took, recognise faces and put it all on a timeline. People pick the wrong one constantly: they install Lychee expecting phone backup, or Immich expecting a portfolio, and end up disappointed by a tool that is good at the other job. Decide which job you have first.

What a gallery tool does that a library tool does not

Lychee's front page is a grid of albums, each with a cover, and inside each a justified layout of photos with EXIF data (camera, lens, exposure, GPS if present) shown on demand. Albums can be public, unlisted behind a random link, password-protected, downloadable as a zip or not, and nested. Multi-user arrived in the Laravel rewrite, so a household or a small studio gets separate accounts and can share albums between them. Uploads are drag and drop from the browser, or an import from a server folder, which is the workflow for a photographer who edits on a desktop and exports finished JPEGs to a share.

What it lacks is what Immich and PhotoPrism sell: no face recognition, no object tagging, no map view of everything you own, and search limited to titles, descriptions and tags you typed. The catalogue's "no AI features" and "basic search" cons are exactly right and also beside the point for a curated gallery of a few thousand images.

One container, SQLite, done

The catalogue's Easy rating is earned:

services:
  lychee:
    image: lycheeorg/lychee:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - ./conf:/conf
      - ./uploads:/uploads
      - ./sym:/sym
      - ./logs:/logs
    environment:
      - PHP_TZ=Europe/London
      - DB_CONNECTION=sqlite
      - APP_URL=https://photos.example.com
      - TRUSTED_PROXIES=*
    restart: unless-stopped

First visit creates the admin account. uploads holds originals plus the generated sizes, conf holds the .env the installer writes, and sym holds symlinks if you import from a server path without copying. MariaDB or PostgreSQL are a DB_CONNECTION change away and worth it past a few tens of thousands of photos, but SQLite handles a portfolio fine. Memory sits under the catalogue's 512 MB; it is a PHP app doing image resizing, and the resizing is the only time it works hard.

Budget disk at roughly 1.3 to 1.5 times your originals, my estimate, because Lychee generates thumbnail, small and medium variants for each upload. Point the reverse proxy at port 8080, and raise the upload size limits at the proxy if you push 50 MB RAW-derived TIFFs.

Sharing is the feature, so learn the four settings

Every album has four switches that matter: public or private, visible on the front page or hidden (link-only), password or none, and downloadable or view-only. A wedding album is public, hidden, password-protected, downloadable. A portfolio section is public, listed, no password, view-only. Family albums stay private and are shared with the other user accounts instead. Get those combinations right and Lychee replaces the "album link" half of Google Photos without exposing anything you did not intend, which is more than can be said for a shared Immich link left on defaults.

The alternatives, honestly

Immich is the bigger project by a wide margin and the safer pick if there is any chance you want backup, and the Immich vs PhotoPrism page covers the archive case. Lychee is not competing with them. Its competition among gallery tools is Piwigo, which does more and looks older, and the choice between the two is mostly taste.

What I'd do

Run both if you have both jobs: Immich on the big disk taking phone uploads, Lychee on the small one with the 200 pictures a year worth showing, SQLite, behind the same reverse proxy, backed up as a folder. If the only job is a portfolio or a way to send relatives an album link, Lychee alone, and skip the GPU, the machine learning containers and the 4 GB of RAM the alternatives ask for.