Best Self-Hosted Photo backup & gallery Tools

6 self-hostable photo backup & gallery tools you can run on your own server — compared on specs, deployment difficulty, and the SaaS each one replaces.

Photo backup & gallery

Ente

End-to-end encrypted photo and video backup — Ente Photos, with its self-hostable server, museum. Files and metadata are encrypted on your device before upload, and face recognition and natural-language search run on your phone or desktop rather than the server. Apps for iOS, Android, desktop and web.

GoPostgreSQL

moderateRead guide →

Photo backup & gallery

Immich

Blazing-fast self-hosted photo and video backup with ML search, faces, and a great mobile app. The Google Photos killer.

TypeScriptNode.js

moderateRead guide →

Ly

Photo backup & gallery

Lychee

A photo-management web app for uploading, organizing and sharing photos in albums from your own server.

PHPLaravelVue

easyRead guide →

Photo backup & gallery

PhotoPrism

Self-hosted AI-powered photo gallery in Go. Lighter on RAM than Immich, strong tagging and search.

GoJavaScript

easyRead guide →

Photo backup & gallery

PiGallery2

A directory-first web photo gallery: point it at a folder of photos and videos and it indexes them into a browsable, searchable gallery, reading the originals without modifying them.

TypeScriptNode.jsAngular

easyRead guide →

Photo backup & gallery

Piwigo

A PHP photo gallery for organizing large photo collections into albums, with per-user and per-group permissions, tags and a plugin system.

PHPMySQL

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Head-to-heads in this category

PhotosSep 2026

Immich

vs

Ente

Server-side smart search vs. a server that never sees your photos.

Read the verdict →

PhotosAug 2026

Immich

vs

PhotoPrism

Phone-first backup vs. mature library organizer.

Read the verdict →