Self-hosted Photo Galleries: what licence are you actually agreeing to

“Self-hosted” and “open source” are not the same promise, and the lists that recommend these projects rarely separate them. This page sorts 25 photo galleries projects by the licence you are actually agreeing to, as read on 2026-08-20.

8 of 25 are permissive: run them, change them, keep your changes to yourself. 7 are AGPL, where serving a modified copy over a network obliges you to publish those changes, which is the clause that catches people who self-host for a team. 3 are not open source at all, carrying a proprietary or restricted-use licence. The remaining 7 are ordinary copyleft.

Project	Licence	What that means	Stars	Maintenance	Language
Thumbor	MIT	Permissive, no strings	10,511	Active	Python
LibrePhotos	MIT	Permissive, no strings	8,045	Active	Python
Lychee	MIT	Permissive, no strings	4,261	Active	PHP
PiGallery 2	MIT	Permissive, no strings	2,256	Active	TypeScript
ChronoFrame	MIT	Permissive, no strings	1,909	Active	Vue
HomeGallery	MIT	Permissive, no strings	1,173	Active	JavaScript
Photofield	MIT	Permissive, no strings	603	Active	Go
This week in past	MIT	Permissive, no strings	101	Active	Rust
Photoview	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	6,509	Active	Go
Piwigo	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	3,842	Active	PHP
Damselfly	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	1,784	Active	C#
Immich Kiosk	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	1,634	Active	Go
Zenphoto	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	319	Active	PHP
SPIS	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	211	Active	Rust
Memtly	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	190	Active	C#
Immich	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	112,081	Active	TypeScript
PhotoPrism	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	40,092	Active	Go
Ente	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	28,424	Active	Dart
Nextcloud Memories	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	3,827	Active	Vue
bewCloud	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	1,219	Active	JavaScript
Chevereto	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	956	Active	PHP
Mediagoblin	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	-	Not measured	Python
PhotoStructure	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	-	Not measured	Nodejs
Reservo	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	-	Not measured	PHP
Single File PHP Gallery	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	-	Not measured	PHP

What the licence column means

Permissive (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC): do what you like, keep changes private.
Copyleft (GPL, LGPL, MPL, EPL): changes you distribute must ship their source.
AGPL, network copyleft: the same, and running it for others over a network counts as distribution. This is the one that surprises people who self-host for a team or a side business.
Source-available (SSPL, BUSL, Elastic, Commons Clause): not open source. Reading and self-use are usually fine; offering it as a service is not.
Other / unstated: the dataset lists no licence we could classify. Check the repo before you rely on it.

The Maintenance column is a second, independent check: the age of the most recent commit on the default branch, read from the GitHub API on 2026-08-20. Active is within 180 days, Slowing is 180 to 365, Dormant is over a year, Archived means the maintainer marked the repo read-only, and Not measured means the project is hosted outside GitHub so the check does not apply.

Source data from awesome-selfhosted-data, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Licence family grouping and maintenance status are computed by this site (from the upstream licence fields and the GitHub API) and are not part of the upstream dataset. Licence classification is a summary, not legal advice: check the project’s own LICENSE file before you rely on it. This page is published under the same licence.