Albums

Albums are the primary way to organize photos in Lychee. You can create unlimited albums, nest them within each other, and customize almost every aspect of how they look and who can see them.

Tag, person, and smart albums keep themselves up to date: a photo joins or leaves them the moment it starts or stops matching. See Smart Albums for the full list and their settings.

Person albums depend on Facial Recognition, which is part of Lychee v8 and off by default.

Use the + button in the top bar, or press n, and pick New Album, New Tag Album, or New Person Album. Creating from inside an album makes the new album a subalbum, so the hierarchy can be nested as deep as you need.

Only New Album is offered from inside an album; tag and person albums are always created from the gallery root.

Open Album Settings from the album header (or press i).

The current interface splits these into tabs, with About Album and Visibility sharing the first one. In v8 the panel becomes a single scrolling page with a jump-to-section menu on the side, and Tracks appears as its own section, labelled with the number of tracks the album carries.

Changes in the About section are saved automatically as you type.

Embed Album is not part of this panel: it is a separate dialog, opened from the album’s own menu (or from Embed Photo Stream in the left menu for the whole-gallery variant). See Embedding.

v8 hides the less frequently used fields behind an Expert Mode switch at the top of the settings panel, backed by the expert_album_settings setting. With it off you get title, description, photo and album ordering, thumbnail aspect ratio, and layout; turning it on additionally reveals the slug, the header, the license and copyright, the timeline overrides, the tags shown on the album, and Transfer ownership in the danger zone.

• Title and Description - shown in the album header and in listings.
• Slug SE - a readable URL for the album; it can be generated from the title, and the resulting URL can be copied to the clipboard.
• Order photos by and Order albums by - sort by title, description, creation date, capture date, type, rating, owner, or highlight flag, ascending or descending.
• Set photo layout - square, justified, masonry, or grid.
• Set album thumbs aspect ratio - 5/4, 3/2, 1/1, 2/3, 4/5, or 16/9.
• Set license and Set copyright - applied to the album and displayed in its header.
• Set album timeline mode and Set photo timeline mode - group entries by year, month, day (and hour for photos), or disable grouping. Choosing an explicit granularity requires the Supporter Edition; default and disabled are available to everyone. See Timeline.
• Tags - on a tag album, the tags that define its contents, with an “all tags must match” switch for AND matching. v8 also lets a regular album carry tags of its own, which then feed Search.
• Persons - on a person album, the people that define its contents, with the same AND/OR switch.

The cover is the thumbnail representing the album in listings; the header is the wide banner at the top of the album page. Both are set from a photo’s context menu (Set Album Cover / Set Album Header), and Remove Header takes the banner back off. The header additionally supports a compact variant.

On the Pro tier the header itself becomes editable in place: an edit mode on the banner lets you pick the focus point of the image, cycle the title colour, and place the title in one of five positions.

From the album context menu or the selection toolbar:

• Move - re-parent one or several albums, including to the gallery root.
• Merge - fold an album’s contents into another one.
• Rename.
• Pin / Unpin - pinned albums are shown as Featured Albums at the top of the gallery.
• Delete - removes the album, its subalbums, and the photos that only live there.
• Download - see below.
• Apply Renamer SE - run your renaming rules over the album.
• Watermark SE - apply a watermark to every photo of the album.
• Scan for Faces v8 - queue the album for face detection. See Facial Recognition.

Selection works with mod+click (single item), shift+click (range), or by dragging a lasso over the thumbnails. Admins can also edit many albums at once from the Bulk Album Edit page, which exposes titles, metadata, visibility, sorting, ownership, and deletion in a single table. Changes there apply immediately and cannot be undone, and tag albums are not listed.

The same actions are reachable from the v8 command palette (mod+k), which lists the actions that apply to the album you are currently looking at alongside the search results.

Deep hierarchies get two dedicated aids in v8:

• A breadcrumb above the album header listing the album’s accessible ancestors, controlled by breadcrumb_enabled. Ancestors you are not allowed to see are collapsed into a single ... entry, so the trail never leaks the titles of albums that are closed to you.
• An album tree panel, opened from a floating button in the bottom corner, letting you jump anywhere in the gallery without walking back up level by level.

Albums can be made public, hidden behind a link, protected by a password, or shared with specific users and groups. See Sharing for the details of both mechanisms.

An album can carry GPX tracks, drawn as coloured lines over the album’s map next to the photo markers.

• Today, an album holds one track. Upload it from the + menu in the album header, which then offers Delete Track in place of Upload Track once a track is attached.
• v8 replaces this with a Tracks section in the album settings, holding several tracks per album: upload them in one batch, rename them, delete them individually. The first one uploaded becomes the primary track, and the section header shows the current count.

Albums are downloaded as ZIP archives. You choose the resolution included in the archive (original, medium, small, thumbnail, or their HiDPI variants); large archives are streamed in several parts, and the progress is reported part by part.

Downloads can be disabled per album, and anonymous visitors only get the resolutions the album’s visibility settings allow.

The album header shows the number of subalbums, photos, and the creation date.

With the Supporter Edition and edit rights on the album, a toggle in the header opens a statistics panel with the album’s total photo, subalbum, and storage figures, a breakdown per size variant, and tables of the lenses, shutter speeds, apertures, ISO values, and camera models used in it. Visit, download, and share counters are shown next to the header when metrics_enabled is on. See Statistics.