Photos self hosting

I wanted to share some photos high resolution photos with my parents so they can print it out. Since I already host my blog on my on computer, I wanted to continue the trend and find a self hosted application.

Tried setting up a few like Lychee, Piwigo, PhotoPrism. They were straightforward to setup. Lychee had two versions, I was able to successfully install current version but the development seems to have stopped on it and there is Lychee-Laravel but is not ready yet (?). Plus not sure who maintains it now. So left it.

I had installed Piwigo on a virtual machine and messed up the VM when I switched to Windows Pro. I might still try this out again as I am also looking for an app to completely replace google photos. It has an Android app too but has just 2.4 stars. :-(

PhotoPrism looked promising but sharing and user management is not there yet.

Finally I tried PiGallery2. It is very easy to setup with docker and all I have to do is add photos to a directory and use sub-directory for albums. It automatically indexes the photos, creates thumbnails... The site looks nice and simple. Password protected sharing is just a click away. It is easy to download original photos. Check out the demo here.