I’m self-hosting a Google Photos alternative on my old Pixel

It’s fair to say that Google Photos has been the best thing that has ever happened to smartphone photography management. For years, it has served as the ultimate set-it-and-forget-it tool. And for the longest time, it was my go-to recommendation. It was practically free. It was unlimited. It was perfect for anyone who didn’t want to think about how to store their photographs in the long run. However, it’s been a while since the party ended and the storage limits kicked in. Suddenly, it’s no longer the obvious choice.

Like many others, I’ve also gone down the NAS route and set up my own Google Photos alternative. I’ve experimented with various self-hosted platforms like Immich and my own storage server to forgo the Google Photos tax. But lately, I’ve been thinking of alternative solutions. Looking at an old Pixel sitting in my desk drawer, I suddenly realized that I was sitting on a high-performance, battery-powered Linux server that was just waiting for a cool weekend project.

I wanted to build a self-hosted alternative that felt modern but didn’t require a rack server in my basement or take up space like my NAS does on my desk. I was curious to see how far I could push the limits of what was possible with a smartphone. Enter Lychee, a clean, professional-grade photo management system that runs beautifully on any old Android hardware, including the Pixel that was sitting on my desk. By using Termux, I was able to turn that old phone into a private cloud that is accessible from anywhere in the world. Here’s what I built over the weekend, and why you should consider repurposing your old smartphones too.

The truth of the matter is that we often treat our old phones as e-waste once the screen gets a scratch, the software updates stop rolling in, or we’re just ready to upgrade to the next big thing. Discarding these devices is, in my opinion, a significant mistake. Even a three-year-old or older smartphone has a processor that can run circles around a Raspberry Pi — which is particularly notable since a Raspberry Pi is basically the default for self-hosting beginners. It has more power, a lot more storage, faster wireless connectivity, and even a built-in battery to maintain uptime during power outages or intermittent connectivity. It’s basically the perfect small computer for self-hosting.

Now, here at Android Authority, we’ve talked a lot about using Immich for building out your own Google Photos alternative. Immich is great, but I didn’t want to go down the Docker route, complete with its heavy system dependencies. So, for this project, I chose Lychee because it strikes a perfect balance between features and resource overhead. Lychee is built on PHP and can run natively in a Termux environment without jumping through major technical hoops. Moreover, it gives you the Google Photos experience, complete with photo galleries and easy sharing, without the obvious AI surveillance or the monthly bill. Compared to Immich, you don’t really need a powerful server to be able to maximize its capabilities. All that to say that it’s the perfect choice for this project.

The first step toward turning my Pixel into a functional development environment was getting access to a stable terminal emulator. And for that, I skipped the Play Store version of Termux entirely. Instead, I grabbed the latest build from F-Droid to ensure I had access to all the latest repositories. The installation process is just like any other app, but once you open it, you are greeted by a command-line interface that can feel just a little daunting if you have never used Linux or a command terminal before. Think of it as a gateway into your Android phone’s true potential.

Here’s where it starts getting a little technical. Once I had the terminal open, the first order of business was granting the app permission to see my phone’s actual storage, without which the rest of the steps simply wouldn’t proceed. I used the termux-setup-storage command, which is a critical first step because, without it, your photo server is essentially trapped within the Android sandbox. This command acts as the bridge between the Linux environment, the filesystem, and your photos. After a quick pkg update and pkg upgrade to ensure everything was current, I was ready to start building the stack.

The next step was, of course, getting the Lychee app up and running. Lychee is a Laravel-based app, which means it needs a PHP environment to work. I installed PHP, the Apache web server, Git, and SQLite. I specifically opted for SQLite for the database because it’s lightweight, handles photo libraries with ease, and avoids the overhead of running a heavy MySQL instance in the background, especially if you are using older hardware for this project. Keeping things lightweight ensures the phone doesn’t overheat or tank performance during heavy indexing.

Next up, you will be using Composer, the PHP dependency manager, to clone the Lychee repository directly from GitHub and begin the actual installation. Right around this time is where I started running into a few issues. You see, one of the biggest challenges of hosting photos is generating thumbnails, and a tool like Immich handles this beautifully. Android, however, works a little differently when it comes to its internal graphics libraries.

After half an hour of fiddling around with the project and almost giving up on it, I ended up installing some PHP extensions like Sodium and ImageMagick so that the server could generate thumbnails instead of presenting me with a wall of broken icons. After installing the packages, I then ran a single command to tell PHP exactly where to find the necessary files. It sounds like a lot of backend configuration, but it’s really just pointing the software to the right folder.

With the dependencies sorted, I ran the composer install command and decided to go grab a coffee. While you might be used to ultra-fast build times and downloads on your regular home server, if you dabble in self-hosting, a smartphone CPU isn’t quite on that level, and some of these processes take a fair bit longer than you might be used to. Regardless, once the build was finished, I ran the database migration using Lychee’s Artisan command-line tool, which effectively builds the internal structure of your photo library.

If you think that we are done here, not quite. There’s still one more step to the puzzle, and that is to give the correct permissions to the folders. Android is notoriously protective of its file system, so you have to explicitly tell the system that the Lychee folder was allowed to write data to the storage and cache directories. While you’re at it, you might also want to bump up the PHP upload limits because, by default, PHP only allows very small files of about 2MB in size. Since I’m uploading high-resolution images, I decided to increase the limit to about 30MB so that none of my uploads would be rejected. This small tweak saved me a lot of frustration during the initial bulk upload.

And that’s it. The Lychee server was up and running. All you have to do is go to your phone’s IP address and append 8083 to the end of it. You will be presented with a beautiful web interface. Set up a username and password, and you’re good to go. At this point, as long as you are within your home Wi-Fi network, you should easily be able to connect to the web server running on your smartphone and upload images to it.

But we are not quite done yet; there are still a few more things to do to make this experience better. If you have ever used an Android phone, you know that the system loves to kill apps to save battery. For a photo or image server, this is simply unacceptable. So to keep Lychee running 24/7, you’ll want to go into system settings and toggle off the setting to kill apps if they have not been used for a while. You should also enable Termux’s wake-lock feature to ensure the process never sleeps.

And of course, since running a server is a fairly power-intensive task, especially when the phone creates thumbnails for images that you’ve uploaded, you might want to consider keeping the smartphone plugged into a wall charger at all times. All in all, the power draw is negligible compared to a traditional PC, but it is enough to drain a battery in a matter of hours if it is not tethered to a wall outlet.

While the bulk of my write-up so far has focused on how to set up the server, you might be wondering if it is any good and if it is worth the hassle. Surprisingly enough, it is much better than I expected. Lychee includes all the essential features that you would expect from a photo server, including albums, the ability to star highlighted images, and even an “On This Day” function similar to Google Photos, which surfaces old photographs that you might have shot on the same day a couple of years ago.

Other features include a timeline view, which organizes all your photographs by time and date in a singular view. There is also a robust EXIF viewer that shows you all the essential details that you might want to see about your photographs. Compared to Immich, which requires a whole separate project to create a digital photo frame, the Lychee server has a built-in frame view that lets you see your images in full size, just like a kiosk. This makes it a perfect use case for an old tablet as well.

Elsewhere, you can import images from a link or import them from a separate server as well. And of course, there’s multi-user support, so you can actually deploy this for your entire family as a lightweight photo server.

You’ll also find built-in sharing support, so if you are in the habit of sharing images from Google Photos between your family members, you can do that here too. What you don’t get are some of the AI enhancements from Google Photos or even the machine learning features of Immich. That means you’re missing out on features like facial recognition or even location-based search. But for a lightweight server like this, that’s not a massive miss.

Access your phone server from anywhere using Cloudflare Tunnels

Of course, the beauty of using something like Google Photos, or even Immich, is that you can more or less access them from anywhere in the world. That’s not the case with a local setup unless you decide to carry your photo server smartphone with you. But there’s a solution for that, too. If you want to show your photo gallery while you’re out and about with your family for dinner, you don’t need to bother with port forwarding or digging into your router’s settings to expose your home internet to the open internet.

Instead, you can bypass all of that by using a Cloudflare tunnel. This creates a secure, encrypted bridge between your smartphone and the internet without opening any ports on your router. To do this, just use the Cloudflare package directly in Termux and authenticate it with your Cloudflare account. This will allow you to map your local Lychee server to a professional domain, and instead of typing out an IP address, you can simply go to the custom domain from any browser in the world and access the photographs on your phone server. It’s magic, frankly, to see your old phone serving data to a laptop a continent away.

The appeal of setting up your own self-hosted photo service is easy to understand. There are no recurring costs. Even though Google One only costs a few dollars a month, it adds up over time. More importantly, you retain easy access to your images in full resolution and can be sure that no company is training machine learning models on them.

However, running such a service on an old phone proves that our older gadgets still have immense value if we are willing to tinker with them. For one, it is a big step forward toward reducing e-waste. Your old phone might just be sitting in the junk drawer, but running a service like Lychee gives it a new purpose. Moreover, the robust feature set, including a powerful processor, built-in connectivity, and power backup, makes it an excellent micro server.

Setting up Lychee on the Pixel took me about 45 minutes from start to finish. In exchange for less than an hour of work, I now have a completely private, self-hosted photo backup system that I own. There are no surprise price hikes, no “out of storage” emails, and my data stays on my hardware. That freedom is worth the effort alone.

The performance on the Pixel is surprisingly snappy. Browsing through galleries feels just as fast as using the official Google Photos app, and the search functionality is robust. Would I replace my Immich server for this? Perhaps not. But if you’re not interested in buying a NAS or paying the nosebleed prices for hard drives in this economy, this project could be just the trick.

If you have an old device gathering dust, this is one of the best weekend projects you can undertake. Even if you’re not ready to give up Google Photos just yet, having a secondary backup, just in case, never hurts.