Version 7 released!

2025: A Year of Innovation and Growth for Lychee

As we close out 2025, we’re thrilled to celebrate another milestone year for Lychee! Our journey this year has been marked by significant technical achievements, expanded functionality, and a deepened commitment to our community. Throughout the year, we’ve shipped an impressive 41 releases packed with new features, performance improvements, and important security fixes. From introducing Flow (a social-friendly feed-like display) and Timeline views to adding powerful tools like watermarking, zip upload support, and the Renamer module, we’ve continuously enhanced what Lychee can do for photographers.

We welcomed a new reviewer, @JasonMillward, who has been instrumental in maintaining code quality and ensuring that every release meets our high standards. We also had the pleasure of welcoming new contributor @cdzombak, who brought fantastic UX improvements including pinned albums, embedded galleries with video support, and numerous usability enhancements.

Security remained a priority with multiple SSRF vulnerability fixes, ensuring your self-hosted gallery stays safe. The foundation we built through tags refactoring, user groups, Flow and Sync improvements, and multiple admin support has culminated in our most ambitious release yet: Version 7.

Version 7: Our Most Ambitious Release Yet

Version 7 marks a major architectural shift for Lychee. Our Docker release is now powered by FrankenPHP with Laravel Octane instead of the traditional nginx + PHP-FPM stack. This infrastructure keeps the framework in memory and reuses components across requests, eliminating the overhead of rebuilding the entire application on every page load. As a result, boot time drops from 40-60ms to just 4-6ms per request, with 3-4x better throughput and significantly reduced latency. In May 2025, FrankenPHP gained official support from the PHP Foundation, cementing its position as the future of high-performance PHP applications.

The new FrankenPHP-powered Docker image is available at ghcr.io/lycheeorg/lychee and has become the default now that Version 7 is fully stable.

This architectural change means you will need to update your Docker setup when upgrading from Version 6 to Version 7 with FrankenPHP. Please refer to our upgrade documentation for detailed instructions.

IMPORTANT: PHP 8.4 Required - Version 7 requires PHP 8.4 or higher. If you are using the release build with nginx/apache + PHP (not Docker), ensure your environment is updated accordingly before upgrading.

Do note that the FrankenPHP change also has consequences in the way Lychee reads your .env file. Updating values in the .env file will now require a container restart to take effect.

Performance Revolution

In addition to changing the PHP engine, we’ve implemented several key performance optimizations:

Asymmetric Processing: Intelligent parallel processing for photo imports, slashing the time needed to upload and process large photo collections
Worker Mode for Horizontal Scaling: Ability to run Lychee with multiple workers for background image processing, enabling truly scalable deployments
Album Pre-computation: Smart caching of album covers and date ranges, dramatically improving album loading times

New Features That Matter

Star Rating System: We listened to your feedback! Users can now rate their photos from 1 to 5 stars. In the future, we will be adding smart albums related to ratings, filters, and more. Whether you’re a professional photographer curating a portfolio or simply want to mark your favorites, this feature puts powerful organization tools at your fingertips to showcase your best work.

Webshop: The biggest feature addition of 2025! After 6 months of intensive development, we’re proud to introduce our fully-integrated webshop solution. This game-changing feature enables photographers to:

Sell prints, digital downloads, and photo products directly through Lychee
Process payments seamlessly via Mollie, PayPal, or offline methods
Manage product catalogs
Handle orders from creation through fulfillment

The Webshop empowers photographers to monetize their work without leaving their Lychee galleries, opening new revenue streams and simplifying the sales process. This feature is exclusive to Lychee Pro users.

As a thank you to our loyal supporters, we’ve granted Lychee Pro access to all our existing supporters. It is now available at the $10/month tier or with a one-time support contribution. This is our way of recognizing the community that makes Lychee possible.

New License Key Delivery System: We’ve streamlined the license activation process with a self-service solution! Instead of receiving keys by email, our new automated system at keygen.lycheeorg.dev automatically checks your supporter tier and instantly provides you with the appropriate license key for your level. Get your Lychee Pro key on-demand, whenever you need it.

Additional Features:

AVIF Support: Native support for the AVIF image format using the imagick extension, bringing next-generation image compression to your galleries
Timeline Enhancements: Album titles formatted as dates now automatically integrate into the timeline display for better organization
Smart Album Improvements: New option to make smart albums only consider photos belonging to the specific user
Profiling Support: Added hprof support to enable detailed performance profiling and optimization

Looking Ahead

The innovations in Version 7 lay the groundwork for even more exciting developments. Our commitment remains unchanged: building the best self-hosted photo management/portfolio solution while respecting your privacy and giving you complete control over your images.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to making 2025 such an extraordinary year for Lychee. Here’s to another year of innovation, community, and beautiful photography!

Ready to upgrade? Visit our documentation to learn how to update to Version 7 and start experiencing these improvements today.