What is on the Santa Claus wish list?

It has been a long time since last post: the initial release of Version 6. Since then we have seen a few minor releases with the addition of a timeline view and a lot of bug fixing. We still have a few more to resolve but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the future of Lychee.

At the moment we are only 2 in the team: Martin Stone, the lead reviewer and myself, the main dev. As a result, due to being pretty much the sole developer, my vision for Lychee is pretty much the roadmap. That being said, I am also open to suggestions and ideas, and should you want to join our team on this journey, you will be welcomed with open arms.

But let’s get back to the subject. What is next for Lychee? What is the vision for the future of the project?

I see Lychee as a tool that can be used in multiple ways:

• as a Gallery: a self-hosted alternative of Flickr, Immich and a few others.
• as a Pro Photographer: a self-hosted alternative of pixieset.
• as a Content Creator: a self-hosted alternative of Patreon.

How do I plan to achieve this? Here is a list of things I would like to have in Lychee:

• Content Creator: have a feed similar to a Patreon page.
  A post will be linked to an album. This will require the creation of a new page: feed where those will be displayed. However one notable difference with Patreon is that we do not plan to be multi-user support on that feature. In other words, the admin is the content creator.
• Content Creator: automatically create posts when a new albums is created.
  As a potential continuation of the above, whenever a public album is created it could be included in the feed page. Note that those are just some ideas, nothing is set in stone.
• Pro Photographer: have a basket to “buy” pictures.
  This will require a new page: basket.
  As a photographer I would like be able to sell my pictures, more easily without having to deal with.
• Photographer: ability to “pick” pictures by clients.
• Photographer: possibility to rate pictures (1 to 5 stars, not just mark as favourite).
• Automation: possibility to upload an album as a Zip (a big part is already implemented, never merged).
• Automation: possibility to auto rename some files given some (user defined/toggled?) rules.
• Automation: set up a regular backup of the DB.
• AI: Facial/Person recognition. While Lychee aims to be privacy preserving, this is often a highly thought for feature.

In term of Quality of Life improvements that are needed in Lychee:

• Must have: User Groups.
• Must have: Permission propagations.
• Must have: Mass sharing v4 like in a single page.
• Must have: Refactoring settings to have ability to order category and options and most likely a new layout.
• Mobile UI: Allow multiple photo selection.
• Tags: Refactor the complete tag system to be more flexible (including tag albums).

With regard to security, I would like to see the following improvements:

• Photo storage at rest encrypted (this will need a big warning sign because if the key is lost bye bye data). However the implementation may require some smart ideas… E.g. where do we decrypt?
• Password locked albums even when logged in.

But even though I there are still so many things to had, one thing that I really want to keep is the simplicity. While we do have a lot of configuration items to allow for personalizations, Lychee should remain easy to use and simple to configure.

I hope you are as excited as I am for the future of Lychee.