Chevereto

Chevereto is a self-hosted image and video hosting/sharing platform that lets you build your own Flickr or Imgur-style media site on your own server. Started in 2007 as a one-click alternative to ImageShack, it supports user accounts, albums, categories, tags, an upload API, CDN integration, and multi-tenant setups, and is used both as a simple host and as the engine for media communities, portfolios, and SaaS platforms.

Yes. Chevereto publishes a Chevereto Open Source edition that is free and licensed under the AGPL-3.0, freely available on GitHub. It covers personal use and getting started. The project also sells commercial proprietary editions — Chevereto Lite ($9/mo) and Chevereto Pro ($99/yr) — which add features like upload moderation, watermarks, extra storage APIs (Google Cloud, Azure, SFTP/FTP, Backblaze B2, OpenStack Swift), OAuth2 logins, and spam protection. The source code of the paid editions remains accessible (not encrypted), just under a different license.

100% — that is its whole purpose. Chevereto runs on your own server and gives you full control over content, data, and platform rules. Because it is PHP-based, you can deploy it via Docker, a CLI console, or standard web hosting, and it supports one-click upgrades. There are no vendor, provider, or usage restrictions, and no phone-home telemetry that limits your installs — you can freely switch storage or hosting providers anytime.

Yes. Where Imgur and Flickr are centralized platforms you depend on, Chevereto eliminates the risk of platform restrictions, content takedowns, or shutdowns by giving you complete ownership and autonomy over your hosting environment. You set your own rules for content, privacy, moderation, and external storage. It's designed to handle very large image collections efficiently and is optimized for network usage.

Chevereto includes image and video hosting, full user accounts with registration, profiles, 2FA and roles, albums, categories and tags, customisable listings and theme palettes, privacy controls, CDN support, caching, image optimisation, an API for integration, multi-language support (30+ languages), multiple storage backends (local, Amazon S3, S3-compatible, and more on paid editions), and multi-tenancy — hosting multiple independent sites from a single installation.

The free edition is AGPL-3.0. If you modify and distribute the software you must make your source code available, and notably under AGPLv3, making the software available over a network counts as distribution — meaning you must provide the source code to users who interact with your Chevereto instance remotely. If you use Chevereto commercially and want to avoid these obligations, the paid Chevereto License (Lite/Pro) is the option, which grants proprietary usage rights.