Customizing a Self-Hosted Lychee Instance

Lychee is a self-hosted photo-management service.

Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right

Lychee is a free photo-management tool, which runs on your server or web-space. Upload, manage and share photos like from a native application. Lychee comes with everything you need and all your photos are stored securely.

Compared with Photoprism, it is less suitable for personal/family daily use. Instead, it comes with a more artistic interface and features that are more suitable for anyone who wants to create a portfolio.

Because Lychee supports CSS customization and etc., I wrote this blog post to provide a guide to what is possible.

Settings and Branding

Go to Settings > More > Full Settings. Here are some options that you will probably find useful.

• "Config" Section
  • site_owner
  • site_title
  • site_copyright_begin
  • site_copyright_end
  • public_search
  • hide_version_number
  • grants_download
  • share_button_visible - If turned on, even albums without enabling share will have a share button, where you could copy the URL of an image and its sized variants.
  • public_photos_hidden
• "Footer" Section: All 3
• "Gallery" Section: Look through all of them
• "Image Processing" Section:
  • skip_duplicates - You probably want to turn it on.
  • lossless_optimization - If you do not strictly want to save the exact copy, you may turn it on to optimize image size.
  • upload_processing_limit - Increase the number to simultaneously upload more images. I personally use 6.

Custom CSS

p.hosted_by {
  display: none;
}

p.version {
  display: none;
}
div.basicModal__content > form.force-first-child {
  margin-bottom: 0;
}

Enabling Passwordless Login

While creating a passkey, I found that it shows an error message every time. If you face a similar situation, make sure the environment variable HOST is correctly set to your domain.