Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Synology Photos

Lychee is a self-hosted photo and video management system built on Laravel and Vue. It gives you a fast, modern web gallery with drag-and-drop uploads, albums and nested sub-albums, a full-screen viewer with EXIF and GPS data, a map view, smart albums, tags, ratings, and RSS feeds. Originals are kept untouched while Lychee generates optimised variants and thumbnails, and photos can be captioned, re-dated, downloaded individually or as album ZIPs.

Sharing is granular. Albums can be public, password-protected, embeddable in other sites, or limited to specific registered users with read or write access. The public gallery can be switched off entirely, sensitive albums can be hidden behind an extra click, and multi-user installs get per-album permissions along with invite links and trust levels. Login works with a local password, WebAuthn security keys or biometrics, or OAuth providers such as Google, GitHub, Apple, Microsoft, Keycloak, Authentik, and Nextcloud.

Lychee ships as a Docker image running FrankenPHP with MariaDB, or can be installed on any PHP 8.4+ host with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. Media can stay on local disk or move to S3-compatible object storage. The core edition is MIT-licensed; a paid Supporter Edition adds statistics, user groups, watermarking, AES-secured share links, white-labelling, upload quotas, multi-admin support, and a webshop for selling photos.

Immich is a high-performance self-hosted photo and video management solution designed as a direct alternative to cloud-based services like Google Photos and iCloud Photos. It provides a complete media management experience while keeping all your data under your own control.

The platform features automatic mobile backup for photos and videos, including background backup and LivePhoto/MotionPhoto support. It uses machine learning to provide facial recognition and clustering, object detection, and CLIP-based semantic search, allowing you to find photos by content without manual tagging.

Immich supports multiple users with shared albums and partner sharing, so families can maintain separate libraries while sharing select content. The global map view uses photo metadata to show where memories were captured. Other features include Memories (automatically surfacing photos from past years), archive and favorites, offline mobile support, user-defined storage structures, and public sharing links.

The responsive web interface and native mobile apps (iOS and Android) provide a seamless experience across devices. Administrative functions, OAuth support, API keys, and a well-documented API make it suitable for both personal and small-team deployments.

PiGallery 2 is a fast, directory-first photo gallery website built with a rich user interface and optimized for low-resource servers — especially the Raspberry Pi. It scans your existing photo folders and generates a beautiful, responsive web gallery without moving or duplicating your files.

Features include automatic thumbnail generation, full-text search, map-based geo-location browsing, and a clean Angular-based UI. It is a solid self-hosted alternative to cloud photo services, keeping your photos on your own hardware while offering a modern browsing experience.

Home Gallery is a self-hosted, open-source web gallery designed to help you browse, organize, and rediscover your personal photo and video collections. It features a mobile-friendly interface, smart tagging, EXIF metadata support, and AI-powered capabilities including face detection, face recognition, reverse image search, and geo reverse lookups.

The application runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and provides a lightweight alternative to cloud-based photo services. With its emphasis on privacy and local storage, Home Gallery keeps your memories under your own control while still offering modern discovery features.

Stash is a self-hosted web application written in Go that indexes, tags, and serves a personal collection of videos and images. You point it at one or more folders, it scans and fingerprints the files, generates thumbnails, previews and sprites with FFmpeg, and keeps the catalog in an embedded SQLite database. The interface runs in a browser at localhost:9999; Windows, macOS and Linux builds run it as a background service with a tray icon, and Docker is the usual choice for a home server.

Metadata is the main draw. Stash pulls titles, performers, studios, tags and cover images from StashDB, other stash-box instances, and community-maintained scrapers and plugins. The Identify task walks the library and matches scenes automatically, while the scene tagger, duplicate checker, galleries and performer/studio statistics handle the rest. Everything is extensible through JavaScript plugins, custom CSS themes and a GraphQL API.

Compared with Plex or Emby, Stash is built around tagging, scraping and curating a library rather than a polished TV-style interface, and it adds the adult metadata sources those servers lack. Against cloud photo libraries and paid asset managers such as Eagle, it keeps the catalog on your own hardware with no subscription, under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Monbooru is a single-binary, self-hosted gallery for a personal image collection, built around the booru conventions that anime and AI-art collectors already use: tag categories with aliases and implications, a general-to-explicit rating scale with a configurable SFW ceiling, ratings, favourites, saved searches, collections and a search syntax with wildcards, OR and exclusions. Images, video, animated GIFs and CBZ/ZIP archives stay as ordinary files and folders on disk, while a per-gallery SQLite database holds tags, relations and thumbnails. Removing monbooru leaves your files exactly where they were.

It is aimed squarely at local media libraries rather than phone-camera rollups. Stable Diffusion metadata from A1111/Forge and ComfyUI (prompts, models, seeds, full workflows) is read and shown per image, and local ONNX taggers such as WD14 SwinV2, animetimm EVA02, JoyTag, Camie v2 and PixAI can label the collection on CPU or GPU without sending anything off the machine. A file watcher picks up new, moved and deleted files within seconds, SHA-256 hashing keeps one file from becoming two entries, and declared relations plus near-duplicate detection with a side-by-side review session handle alternates, version chains and duplicates.

The core app never touches the internet. Downloading from boorus and reverse image lookup (IQDB, SauceNAO, Hydrus Public Tag Repository) happen through the optional monloader companion, with a browser extension (monsender) for sending the page you are on. Compared with cloud photo services such as Google Photos or iCloud Photos, there is no storage subscription and no upload, but also no mobile apps or automatic camera backup. Compared with a paid desktop catalogue like Eagle, you get booru-style tagging, an inbox review workflow and a documented REST API, and you host it yourself instead of licensing a seat.

Highlights

• Tag-based gallery with folder tree, ratings, favourites, saved searches and collections
• Local ONNX auto-tagging (WD14, EVA02, JoyTag, Camie v2, PixAI) on CPU or GPU, with per-model tag provenance
• Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI metadata, including full generation workflows
• Manga reader for CBZ/ZIP archives, plus video, GIF and animated hover previews on the grid
• Batch operations across a selection or a whole search: delete, move, tag, auto-tag, set collection
• Multiple galleries per instance, each with its own filesystem and database, with export/import
• REST API under /api/v1 with scoped tokens, OpenAPI spec and built-in docs; plugin and theme support
• Optional password login; intended for local network use, not public exposure

Arcadeia is a self-hosted photo and video library for people who keep a personal media archive on their own hardware. It scans folders and network shares, generates animated thumbnails that preview key moments in each video, and lets you browse, favorite, and open files in the browser without hunting for filenames.

Search is backed by Apache Solr: you can query filenames and descriptions, and optionally enable local Whisper transcription so words spoken in videos become searchable too. Video playback is transcoded on the fly with FFmpeg into web-friendly formats, and uploads accept individual files, whole directories, or URLs downloaded with yt-dlp.

Compared with Google Photos, iCloud Photos, Synology Photos, and Amazon Photos, Arcadeia keeps the library and any transcription on your own server and has no subscription. The trade-off is maturity: there are no mobile apps or automatic phone backup, and the project has no built-in authentication, so it should stay on a local or trusted network behind a VPN or authenticated reverse proxy. It ships as a Docker Compose stack with the .NET application, Solr, and an Apache reverse proxy, and asks for at least 4 GB of RAM.

FerrumPix is a desktop application that combines photo management and image editing in a single tool. Browse local folders with fast thumbnails, sort and rate your collection, search by metadata, people, or location, and develop RAW files from the sensor data with lens correction for over 1,300 lenses. Edits to RAW and Photoshop files are stored in non-destructive sidecars, and originals are never modified without an explicit save.

The editor covers crop, resize, perspective correction, exposure and colour adjustments, tone curves, HSL, masks and selections, layers, retouching, text and shapes, filters, LUT files, and XMP presets compatible with Lightroom and Camera Raw. Batch workflows let you rename, convert, resize, watermark, and export entire selections in one run. Optional model files (downloaded on demand) add AI-powered object selection, depth-based blur, object removal, denoising, and upscaling, all running locally on your machine.

FerrumPix connects to self-hosted Immich and Nextcloud servers for browsing, uploading, downloading, editing, and metadata sync. It ships as an AppImage, Flatpak, DEB, RPM, and portable ZIP for Linux, as a setup or portable ZIP for Windows, and as an unsigned app bundle for macOS. The interface is available in sixteen languages.