Your photos deserve better than being locked in corporate cloud services with monthly fees, privacy concerns, and limited control. Lychee gives you a stunning, self-hosted photo management and sharing platform. Kamatera provides the reliable, affordable infrastructure to run it exactly the way you want.
Lychee is the premier choice for photographers and teams who want total control over their media without sacrificing beauty or speed. By hosting Lychee on Kamatera’s high-performance servers, your high-resolution portfolios and private archives load instantly, anywhere in the world.
Why host Lychee on Kamatera?
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Lychee is a free, open-source photo management and gallery application that you host on your own server. It provides a beautiful, modern interface for organizing, viewing, and sharing your photo collection. Think of it as your personal alternative to services like Google Photos or Flickr, but completely under your control.
Lychee automatically generates thumbnails, preserves EXIF data, supports multiple albums and tags, allows public and private sharing, and presents your photos in an elegant, responsive gallery that works perfectly on desktop and mobile devices. It’s designed for photographers, hobbyists, and anyone who wants a better way to manage their digital photo library without relying on third-party services.
The Lychee gallery has a few system requirements. You will need to make sure your server has the following:
A web server such as Apache or NGINX
PHP >= 8.3
A database using one of the following:
· MySQL (version > 5.7.8) / MariaDB (version > 10.2)
· PostgreSQL (version > 9.2)
· Lychee’s inbuilt SQLite3 support
For more details, refer to the Lychee docs.
Basic Linux familiarity is helpful but not required. Lychee installation involves running standard commands to set up PHP, a web server, and a database—tasks that are well-documented with plenty of tutorials available. Many users successfully deploy Lychee as their first self-hosting project. If you’re comfortable following step-by-step guides, you can get Lychee running.
Simply add more storage to your Kamatera server. You can attach additional storage volumes and either expand your existing Lychee photo directory or create new ones. This scalability means you can start small and grow as your collection expands without needing to migrate to a completely different server or service.
Yes. You can point your domain to your Kamatera server and access your Lychee installation through your own custom domain. This is particularly useful for photographers wanting a professional presence or anyone who wants a memorable, branded URL for their photo galleries. Setting up a domain is straightforward and makes sharing much more professional.
Kamatera allows you to create snapshots of your entire server, which captures everything including your photos, Lychee installation, and database in one backup. You can also use standard backup approaches like rsync, automated scripts to copy files to remote storage, or database dumps combined with file backups. Many users run automated daily backups to separate storage or download critical photo collections to local drives as an additional safety measure.
Kamatera offers a free 30-day trial period. This free trial offers services worth up to $100 on 1 server. After signing up, you can use the management console to deploy a server and test our infrastructure. You can select a data center, operating system, CPU, RAM, storage, and other system preferences.
Our system accepts credit/debit cards issued by your local bank branch with a cardholder’s name. We also accept payments through PayPal.