Open-source Google Photos alternatives

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management server with companion mobile apps and a web interface. Your media stays on hardware you control while you still get automatic phone backup, a timeline view, albums and sharing, which is the role many people otherwise hand to Google Photos.

Search works on metadata, recognized objects, faces and CLIP-based natural language queries, and face recognition groups people into clusters. Other features include shared albums and partner sharing, a global map, memories, archive and favorites, RAW format support, LivePhoto and MotionPhoto handling, duplicate prevention, OAuth login, API keys and a user-defined storage structure. Background backup and selective album backup keep the mobile app flexible.

Immich is released under AGPL-3.0, and its documentation includes installation guides, a roadmap and a public demo. The maintainers stress following a 3-2-1 backup plan, since a self-hosted library is only as safe as the backups behind it. It suits households and small groups who want private, searchable photo storage.

PhotoPrism is a photo management application that uses machine learning to help you browse, organize and share photos and videos. It tags and classifies media automatically, so you can search and rediscover pictures without sorting them by hand. The project says it was built to run wherever you need it without compromising privacy, and its topics place it as a Google Photos alternative.

The web interface is a progressive web app that can be installed on a phone, tablet or desktop home screen and feels like a native app. It handles RAW images and many video formats, and offers search filters that can be combined across many properties. A public demo lets you try it first, with a warning not to upload private material. PhotoPrism is written in Go and uses TensorFlow for image analysis.

You can self-host PhotoPrism or use a cloud-hosted setup. Its license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so check the terms if you plan to redistribute it. It suits photographers and families who want a private, searchable photo library on hardware they own.

Ente is a service built on an open-source, end-to-end encrypted platform that lets you keep data in the cloud without having to trust the provider. Three apps run on it: Ente Photos, an alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos; Ente Locker, for important documents and credentials; and Ente Auth, a two-factor authentication app positioned as a replacement for Authy. The monorepo contains the clients and the server.

Ente Photos includes triple data replication, face detection, semantic search, private sharing, collaborative albums, family plans, background uploads and straightforward import and export, all encrypted across platforms. Clients exist for iOS, Android, F-Droid, web, Linux, macOS and Windows, built with Flutter, Go and TypeScript. The README says the source code and cryptography have had external audits. The server can be self-hosted, and the code is under the AGPL-3.0 license.

LibrePhotos is a self-hosted photo management service for people who want to organize a personal library on their own server. It scans pictures on the file system and adds machine-learning features such as automatic face recognition, object and scene detection and semantic image search.

It supports all kinds of photos, including raw files, as well as videos, and offers a timeline view, multiuser support, reverse geocoding and search by metadata. Albums can be generated automatically from events, for example a day spent in a particular city. The README warns that the machine-learning features use a lot of memory: it lists 4 GB of RAM as a minimum and recommends 8 GB or more.

The project is a monorepo containing a Django 5 backend, a React and Vite web client, an Expo mobile app for Android and iOS, a Docusaurus documentation site and deployment files for Docker Compose and Kubernetes. It is released under the MIT licence and runs on any Docker-compatible system, with Linux recommended.

Photoview is a photo gallery for self-hosted personal servers, made for photographers who need to navigate directories containing thousands of high-resolution images. You configure it to look for photos and videos in a folder on the file system, and it takes care of the rest.

A scanner picks up the media automatically and generates thumbnails so browsing stays fast. Once scanning finishes, the media appear on the website organized the same way they are on disk. Repository topics point to support for RAW files and EXIF metadata, and the project is distributed as a Docker image that is commonly deployed on NAS devices. The README gives migration notes about a new Docker registry and a move to PostgreSQL 18 on the master branch.

Photoview is written in Go and licensed under AGPL-3.0. It is meant to be run on your own hardware, there is a Discord server for setup and development questions, and its approach of mirroring the folder structure suits people who already keep photos neatly organized on disk.

Lychee is a free, open-source photo management tool that runs on your own server or web space. You can upload, manage and share photos through a web interface that is meant to feel like a native application, with the aim of keeping the photos stored securely.

Installation is described as quick, and the project provides Docker images, with version 7.0 bringing significant changes to the Docker image and an upgrade guide. Lychee requires PHP 8.4 or 8.5 and has documentation, a changelog and a Discord community. It is built with PHP, TypeScript and Vue.

Lychee is licensed under MIT. A Supporter Edition adds extra functionality for people who want more than the free version, and users can also support the team directly. Topics on the repository describe it as a photo gallery and photo management application.

Memories is a photo management app that runs inside Nextcloud. It sorts photos and videos on a timeline by the date taken from Exif data, and lets you jump to any point in the past instantly. It aims to be a batteries-included solution for self-hosted photo libraries.

Features include AI tagging that groups photos by people and objects using the recognize and facerecognition apps, albums that can be shared with others and with people outside your Nextcloud instance, bulk editing of dates and metadata, an archive folder, video transcoding with HLS, and a map view with reverse geocoding. It can migrate from Nextcloud Photos and Google Takeout and has been tested on instances with over a million photos.

Install it from the Nextcloud app store, follow the recommended configuration, run the occ memories:index command to build metadata indices, and select the directory containing your photos. An Android client is in early access, and automatic uploads can use the official Nextcloud mobile apps. Memories is written in PHP and licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Piwigo is open-source photo gallery software for managing and sharing a photo library on the web. It is designed for individuals, teams and organizations that want to publish and organize pictures on their own site, and it is tagged with privacy, photography and self-hosting topics.

The project advertises more than 200 plugins and themes to extend and restyle the gallery, and its website provides feature lists, demos, forums, documentation and news. To install it you need a web server such as Apache or nginx, PHP 7.4 or later, MySQL 5 or MariaDB, and ImageMagick or the PHP GD library. The code is written in PHP.

Piwigo is licensed under GPL-2.0. You can install it on your own server, or choose the Piwigo Cloud ready-to-use hosted service if you do not have one. It suits photographers, families, clubs and companies that want a self-controlled alternative to commercial photo sharing sites.

Fossify Gallery is an open-source photo and video gallery app for Android that is described as ad-free and free of unnecessary permissions. It is part of the Fossify family of apps, which aims to give people control over their personal data.

A basic photo editor can crop, resize, rotate, flip, draw and apply filters. For privacy, EXIF metadata such as GPS coordinates and camera details can be stripped, and the whole app or specific photos and videos can be locked with a PIN, pattern or fingerprint. A built-in recycle bin allows deleted items to be recovered, and the look and function buttons can be customized.

The gallery handles many formats, including JPEG, JPEG XL, PNG, MP4, MKV, RAW, SVG, GIF and AVIF, and uses Material design with dynamic themes. It is written in Kotlin and licensed under GPL-3.0, and its source is hosted under the FossifyOrg organization.

Lynavo Drive is an open-source tool for keeping your phone's photos and videos on a computer you own instead of in a third-party cloud. A mobile app on iOS or Android syncs new media incrementally to a desktop app on macOS or Windows over the same local network, which makes it a private alternative to iCloud and Google Photos.

The repository covers the desktop and mobile application runtimes for the local-network core, with foreground sync between devices that share a LAN. Linux is supported only through local source builds and package verification. The project is written in TypeScript and published under the AGPL-3.0 licence.

The maintainers distinguish an open-source edition from an official commercial edition. The open-source repository provides source builds and unsigned verification files, while signed installers, official mobile builds, account services, remote access and billing are built and operated outside the repository and may follow different terms.