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Fully Managed Lychee
as a Service

Deploy Lychee as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

Lychee is the open-source photo-gallery and album-sharing app — fast, dark-themed, EXIF-aware, S3-capable, deliberately AI-free. Photographers and households use it to present and share images on their own domain, without the per-seat billing and machine-learning ambiguity of cloud photo services.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Lychee

Lychee

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
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ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is Lychee

Lychee is an MIT-licensed photo-gallery app maintained by the LycheeOrg community organisation since 2018. It turns a server into a self-hosted gallery — albums, sharing links, EXIF metadata, S3 storage — and intentionally leaves face recognition and AI tagging to other projects.

The project began as electerious/Lychee in 2011 and was handed over to the LycheeOrg organisation on 1 April 2018. Version 7 — released 31 December 2025 — replaced the nginx and PHP-FPM container with FrankenPHP and Laravel Octane, dropping per-request boot time from 40–60 ms to 4–6 ms per the LycheeOrg release blog.

Lychee runs on PHP, Laravel, Vue, and MariaDB or MySQL — with PostgreSQL and SQLite as alternates. It reads JPEG, HEIC, RAW (NEF, CR2, ARW, DNG), and MP4. Originals can stay on local disk or live in S3-compatible storage; the symlink-import mode keeps them at a path you choose. The repository sits at 4,156 stars and 366 forks. Translations run on Weblate across roughly 30 languages.

FEATURES

What Lychee does

Lychee is a gallery, not a Google Photos clone — by design. The feature set covers album organisation, EXIF and IPTC metadata, share links, multi-user access, and S3 storage. It deliberately omits face recognition, object tagging, and semantic search. That omission is the point.

Albums and sub-albums

Photos sit inside albums; albums nest inside parent albums. Drag-to-organise in the Vue 3 admin UI. Cover photos, sort orders, and album-level descriptions are configurable per album.

Public and private sharing

Each album has a visibility setting: public, unlisted, password-protected, or private. Share URLs are persistent. v6.10 added a public-but-hidden mode for albums on the public URL but not listed.

S3-compatible storage

S3 backend support since v5.3.0 (PR #2379). Works with AWS S3, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, and other S3-API providers. Local filesystem stays the default.

Maps and tag search

OpenStreetMap-backed map view plots photos by EXIF GPS coordinates. Tag-based search and full-text search across album titles and photo descriptions. No object-level ML search.

EXIF and IPTC metadata

Camera, lens, shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length, GPS coordinates, and IPTC copyright fields are read on import. ExifTool reads richer metadata than the PHP exif extension.

Multi-user with permissions

Admin and regular users since v4. Per-album ownership and per-album sharing with named users. The Supporter Edition adds multi-admin and a more granular permissions matrix.

RAW and HEIC

NEF, CR2, ARW, DNG, ORF, RAF, and other RAW formats import and render via Imagick. HEIC and HEIF decode when ImageMagick is built with libheif. Originals are preserved alongside JPEG previews.

Watermarking and copyright

Watermark-at-upload toggle landed in PR #4114. Copyright text is configurable per album (PR #1880). Shared sizes can carry a watermark while originals stay unmarked for archive use.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed Lychee

Adobe's Photography Plan rose from $9.99 to $14.99 per month on 15 January 2025 and to a $22.99 list in January 2026. The 2024 ToS controversy over AI-training rights compounded the trust hit. Self-hosting Lychee is the answer — until the first 10 GB album fails to ZIP.

Running Lychee yourself looks straightforward on the README. A small Docker compose file, a database, a reverse proxy. The first 50 photos behave. The first 500 still behave. Then someone tries to download a 10 GB client gallery as a ZIP, or imports a 4,000-photo wedding shoot, and PHP runs out of memory. The error message lives at line 334 of zipstream-php and shows up in discussion #3852 on the LycheeOrg repository, dated December 2025. A maintainer notes that the official Docker image does not currently expose PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT as a configurable environment variable. Tracking work continues.

That class of problem is what "just running Lychee" doesn't include. Memory limits, Imagick versus GD, queue workers for thumbnail generation, FFmpeg for video previews, HEIF decoders, S3 connectivity, certificate renewal, security patches the week they're released, and the recurring question of whether your backup actually restores. We run all of that, on infrastructure we maintain, on a schedule we own. When the next CVE lands on a Laravel package Lychee depends on, the patch is on your instance before you've finished reading the advisory.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run Lychee on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

TWO-PERSON WEDDING STUDIO

Delivering 1,200-image client galleries without Adobe billing

Two photographers, 35 weddings a year, roughly 1,200 finals per shoot. Region-pinned to the closest datacenter for fast client preview loads. Each wedding gets its own password-protected album with a watermark on the shared size. The trigger: a Photography Plan renewal letter dated December 2025 quoting €15.12 per month, up from €9.99.

12-PERSON ARCHITECTURE PRACTICE

Five-year site-photo archive a regulator can actually open

A mid-sized practice with active projects in three countries. Roughly 60,000 site photos across the archive, growing by 8,000 a year. EXIF GPS preserved for surveyor cross-reference. Tag-based albums per project code. Internal-only access. The trigger: a construction-liability review asking where project documentation was hosted and who could access it.

MULTI-GENERATIONAL FAMILY

Replacing Google Photos before the AI Pro rebundle renews

Six family members across two households. Roughly 22,000 photos and 1.8 TB of storage from twelve years of phones and cameras. Multi-user mode with one shared family album and one private album per person. No face recognition (Lychee's deliberate stance). The trigger: Google One renewal at €219.99/year after the first-year promo.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run Lychee

The four paths a buyer chooses between in 2026 are Adobe's Photography Plan, a self-managed VPS, a home NAS, and managed Lychee. Lychee doesn't compete with Adobe on AI features. It competes on price, control, and the absence of those features.

ADOBE PHOTOGRAPHY PLAN (1TB)SELF-MANAGED VPSHOME NASDANIAN MANAGED LYCHEE
Cost — 1 user
$19.99/mo~€24/mo VPS + ops time€600 hardware + electricity€9/mo
Cost — 5 users
~$99.95/mo~€24/mo + DB tuningSame hardware, multi-user€9/mo
Cost — 10 users
~$199.90/mo~€24/mo + scaling workLikely exceeds capacity€9/mo
BackupsIn Adobe's cloud, US jurisdictionOn youOn you (RAID is not backup)Off-site, daily, tested
UpdatesAuto, on Adobe's scheduleOn you (CVE turnaround, breaking changes)On youOn us, tested
AI on your photosAmbiguous since the 2024 ToS updateWhatever you installNoneNone
Setup effortCard on fileA weekend, then ongoingHardware ships, then a weekendThe trial signup
Maintenance timeZero~3 to 6 h/monthVariableZero

Path 1 scales linearly with seats. At 5 photographers each on the 1 TB Photography Plan, the bill is roughly $100 per month — over ten times what managed Lychee costs to host the entire library on a single instance. Path 2 is a real option for someone who has run a Laravel app in production before, and is the right answer for some buyers — until the PHP memory_limit issue surfaces on the first big import. Path 3 makes sense if photos never leave the house. Path 4 is what's left for everyone in between: people who want their photos hosted, not stored on a NAS in a closet.

BY INDUSTRY

Lychee for specific industries

Four industries put specific demands on a photo-gallery host: image-rights paperwork, retention windows, regulated guest imagery, and archival metadata fidelity. Lychee handles all four with the same MIT-licensed codebase — and managed Lychee removes the operational tax that usually comes with running it yourself.

Operational reality: clients now expect a written record of where their images are hosted and who has access. Image-rights paperwork has moved from a niche concern to a standard line in client contracts.

DANIAN configuration choice: region pinning, per-album password protection, per-album expiring share links, and the watermark-at-upload toggle that shipped in Lychee v7 (PR #4114). The original image stays unmarked; the shared size carries the watermark.

Workflow example: shoot Saturday, cull Sunday, upload Monday into a new password-protected album. Email the link. Archive to a cold S3 tier sixty days after delivery. Originals stay on a separate path via Lychee's import_via_symlink setting.

Quantifiable detail: a typical wedding ships 600 to 1,200 delivered images. Lychee handles that volume comfortably on the tuned-default Imagick build with memory_limit raised to 512M.
Operational reality: construction documentation has a long tail. National civil-code retention windows — five to ten years depending on jurisdiction — apply to photographs taken during a project's lifecycle. The site photos are part of the contractual record, not a marketing asset.

DANIAN configuration choice: tag-based albums per project code, EXIF GPS preserved on import, ExifTool enabled for richer metadata (has_exiftool: 1), internal-only album visibility, and a backup retention policy that exceeds the project's liability window.

Workflow example: site visit on Tuesday, upload from phone or DSLR that evening, tag with the project code that matches the issue tracker, reference the album URL from the BIM project. Six months later, the architect retrieves the album by tag.

Quantifiable detail: a mid-size construction project generates 5,000 to 15,000 site photos across its lifecycle.
Operational reality: gallery quality is the single biggest determinant of direct-booking conversion. Several regional tourism authorities require own-domain image hosting for their quality-mark schemes. Guest-image consent rules vary by jurisdiction.

DANIAN configuration choice: a custom domain pointed at the Lychee instance, public galleries with Open Graph cards configured for social previews, and album titles translated through Lychee's Weblate-driven UI. Storage is region-pinned to the property's market.

Workflow example: seasonal photo refresh in March, one public album per property, embed the share link on the booking page. Update the cover photo when the season changes. Past seasons archive into a hidden parent album.

Quantifiable detail: a typical 6 to 10-room property refreshes 150 to 400 gallery images per year and serves the album to 8,000 to 15,000 unique visitors.
Operational reality: digitisation projects measure success in metadata fidelity and retention horizon. Archival best-practice — informed by ICA guidelines and FADGI imaging recommendations — requires preserved originals at known paths and descriptive metadata on every record.

DANIAN configuration choice: import_via_symlink set so Lychee references originals at the archivist's chosen path rather than copying them, ExifTool enabled, copyright text configured per album (PR #1880), and the public-but-hidden mode (PR #3744) for staff curation before public release.

Workflow example: scan on Tuesday, ingest the folder via symlink that evening, tag with provenance fields the next morning, curate publicly visible subsets quarterly. Originals never move.

Quantifiable detail: a small-museum digitisation project commonly catalogues 10,000 to 50,000 items over three to five years and grows the archive by roughly 5,000 items per year.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

Yes, when .heic and .heif are added to Lychee's extensions list and ImageMagick on the host is built with libheif. We ship the libheif-enabled Imagick build by default. Auto-conversion to AVIF or JPEG at import is being discussed upstream in LycheeOrg discussion #3867.
Yes. Lychee stores the original RAW and generates a JPEG preview via Imagick. The upstream maintainers are explicit that Lychee is not a RAW editor: "Lychee was never meant to convert RAW files such as .nef, .cr2, .arw." If you need full RAW processing, edit in Lightroom or Darktable and import the export.
We tune for this. PHP memory_limit is raised from the 128M default to 512M (upstream recommends 256M, which still fails on large ZIP album downloads per discussion #3852). upload_max_filesize and post_max_size are raised to 100M. Imagick is selected over GD. The queue worker handles thumbnail jobs independently of the web request.
No, and not as a roadmap item. Issue #1266 on the LycheeOrg repository sits at Low Priority — the team has no plans to work on it. If you want face recognition or object tagging, run Immich instead. We can host it too.
No official iOS or Android app. The web UI is responsive and PWA-installable. v6.x added native camera capture in the browser, which works on iOS and Android. A community Python client called pychee exists for scripting bulk operations.
Lychee supports MP4 and a handful of other formats via FFmpeg. We ship FFmpeg by default on every Lychee instance. Thumbnail generation for video runs through the queue worker, not the web request, so a large upload doesn't hang the browser.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.
Indirectly. Export your library from the source service (Google Takeout for Photos; the Adobe asset export for Lightroom Cloud) into a folder tree. Mount the folder on your Lychee instance, then use "Import from Server" inside the admin UI. EXIF is preserved on import.
Not via a one-click importer — none of the three projects share an import format with Lychee. Export originals from the source app to a folder tree, then use "Import from Server." Tags and album structure won't carry across; album organisation is a fresh start.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
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Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed Lychee for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.