Lychee VPS Docker Hosting

Lychee is a free, open-source, self-hosted photo-management application written in PHP and Laravel that lets you upload, organize, and share photos and videos from a web browser, with all files stored on your own server. The project is maintained on GitHub by the LycheeOrg community under the MIT license. Most users run it as a portfolio or curated gallery rather than as a dumping ground for unsorted phone photos, since the interface is designed for photographers and prosumers who care about presentation.

Current Lychee builds require PHP 8.3 or newer, a web server such as Apache or Nginx, and a database, with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or built-in SQLite all supported. Required PHP extensions include gd, exif, mbstring, zip, json, and session, along with a database driver matching your chosen storage engine. ImageMagick through php-imagick is optional but recommended for better image processing, including thumbnail generation from RAW source files and from larger source JPEGs uploaded to the gallery on a VPS host.

Yes, Lychee reads and displays EXIF and IPTC metadata for every uploaded image, including camera model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and capture date. You can sort photos by Take Date pulled from EXIF, by Upload Time, by Title, by Description, by Public status, by Star status, or by Photo Format. Metadata is preserved in the original file at all times, and many photographers run Lychee specifically because it surfaces this information cleanly on the public-facing gallery page for visitors to read.

Yes, Lychee supports MP4, MOV, WebM, and similar video formats, but the server must have ffmpeg installed for video thumbnail generation and proper handling of clips as first-class items in the gallery. Without ffmpeg, the has_ffmpeg flag falls back to zero and video uploads fail rather than completing silently. On a VPS you can install ffmpeg through the standard package manager, and many Docker images for Lychee already include the binary as part of the base image.

Lychee can store RAW files such as .nef, .cr2, and .arw as the original asset on disk, and php-imagick will attempt to generate a JPEG thumbnail for display in the gallery view. The extension has to be enabled in the Advanced Settings panel inside the admin interface. Lychee does not aim to be a RAW converter or photo developer in the way Lightroom or Darktable is — it stores the raw file as the original and displays a JPEG preview alongside any embedded metadata in the file.

Yes. Lychee is MIT-licensed open-source software with no license fee and no per-photo limits. A paid Supporter Edition unlocks extras such as LDAP and Active Directory user sync for organizations that want it, but the core application is free for personal and commercial use. You can run as many galleries, as many albums, and as many users on a single install as your server can handle, which is one reason it has stayed popular with photographers running their own portfolio sites on small budgets.

There are three common installation paths. The fastest is Softaculous one-click on a cPanel host. The second is the official Docker image at lycheeorg/lychee, deployed via Docker Compose with a persistent volume for your uploads. The third is a manual install: clone the GitHub repository, run composer install --no-dev, copy .env.example to .env, then run php artisan key:generate followed by php artisan migrate to set up the database tables.

Yes, each album in Lychee can be set to fully public, password-protected, or invite-only on a per-user basis through the access settings panel. Share links can be generated for an album as a whole or for a single individual photo, which is useful when you want to hand a client a preview of one image without exposing the rest of the work in progress. The password protection covers both the album browse view and the direct photo download link generated from inside the album.

HEIC and HEIF support exists from Lychee 4.0.6 onward, but reliable thumbnail generation depends on ImageMagick being built with HEIC delegates on your specific host server. Some object-storage setups using S3-compatible backends still cannot generate HEIC previews. On a VPS, you can install or rebuild ImageMagick with the libheif delegate manually if your distribution does not include it by default.

Yes, Lychee added S3 and remote-storage support in release 5.3.0 in May 2024, so both originals and generated size variants can live on S3-compatible object storage instead of the local disk. Compatible backends include Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, and any other S3 API provider. Configuration is done through the standard Laravel filesystems config and the Lychee admin panel. This is the recommended setup for very large libraries that would exceed the local disk allocation on a smaller VPS plan.