Sharing

Sharing in Lychee works on two independent layers:

• Visibility decides what anonymous visitors can do with an album.
• Permissions decide what a specific registered user or group can do with it.

Both are set per album, from the Visibility and Share Album sections of the album settings.

A public album that is not hidden is listed in the public gallery, and its photos can also surface in search, the map, the timeline, the RSS feed, and Frame. Whether anonymous visitors may use those features at all is decided globally in the settings (search_public, map_display_public, timeline_photos_public, timeline_albums_public, rss_enable, and so on), so you can publish albums while keeping, say, the map for logged-in users only.

Sensitive albums are hidden behind an extra confirmation and can be toggled with the h key. See Sensitive Albums.

The Share Album section grants access to specific users, or to user groups SE. Six independent permissions are available:

The dedicated Sharing page gives an overview of every permission on the instance and lets you edit them in one place. From there you can:

• Propagate an album’s permissions to all its descendants. By default existing permissions are updated and missing ones added; the overwrite mode instead replaces the descendants’ permissions entirely, removing anything not in the list. This cannot be undone.
• Bulk share - select several albums and several users at once and grant them in a single operation.

Each user chooses how albums shared with them appear in their own gallery: inline below their albums, in separate My Albums and Shared with Me tabs, restricted to directly shared albums, or hidden. The server provides the default, which users may override in their profile.

• The album URL can be copied from the album header, and a readable slug SE can be generated so the link reads as words rather than an identifier.
• The optional share button in the album and photo headers offers the usual social and system share targets.
• The optional photo share card v8 produces a card with the photo title, owner, license, and a QR code pointing at the photo (photo_share_card_enabled).
• With the Supporter Edition, AES-Secured Links encrypt the identifiers in shared URLs so they cannot be tampered with or enumerated.
• Enabling temporary image links makes every image be served through a signed URL, which prevents other sites from hotlinking your files.

Any album you can share can also be embedded in an external website. The Embed Album dialog, opened from the album’s own menu, builds the snippet for you and previews the result live; Embed Photo Stream in the left menu does the same for the whole gallery. You can embed either a single album or a chronological stream of all your public photos, and configure:

• the layout: squares, masonry, grid, justified, or filmstrip;
• spacing, row height, and column width;
• the maximum number of photos, from 6 up to 500, or all of them;
• the sort order, newest or oldest first;
• the placement of the header: top, bottom, or none.

The embedded widget comes with its own lightbox, navigable with the arrow keys.

An album can be handed over to another user from the danger zone of its settings. Ownership of the album, its subalbums, and their photos moves to the new owner, and the album becomes a root album in their gallery. Any explicit permission the new owner had on that album is removed, since ownership now covers it.