First and foremost, we are excited to announce the release of Lychee version 6!
This new version brings a major upgrade with a completely reworked frontend built on Vue.js.
By leveraging the power and flexibility of Vue, we have enhanced the overall user experience,
making the interface significantly more responsive, modern, and easier to navigate.
If you are wondering what motivated such changes, we invite you to check our previous blog posts on the subject:
- Jun 25, 2024 - Livewire performances problems 📉
- Jun 29, 2024 - The future of Lychee: what is coming next. 🚀
- Sep 24, 2024 - About Lychee API documentation
Some of the new Features
While we originally did not plan to add new features and just rewrite the front-end, we ended up sneaking a few new things along the way:
- Improved User Interface: A more responsive and modern frontend, providing an improved better user experience.
- Slideshow Mode: A new slideshow mode has been added, allowing you to view your photos in a more dynamic way. Just press the space bar or click the play button in the header to start the slideshow.
- Dark and Light themes: By popular demand, we have added the ability to chose between a dark and light themes. No more fiddling with CSS files!
- Upload by chunk: Be free of the limitation imposed by your server. Large files are now automatically split into smaller chunks at your convenience.
To know more about the changes, we invite you to check the release notes.
Introducing Lychee SE
For the past few years, Lychee has been developed by a small group of people who have been working on it in their free time. We are proud to offer this software for free and we will continue to do so. However with time our team has decreased to the point where maintaining Lychee has become a challenge. We have been thinking about ways to keep Lychee alive, to be able to keep providing support, and to add more features.
We have come to the conclusion that we need to add a sponsor tier system. We have extended Lychee with a new version called SE (Supporter Edition) which will be available for our GitHub supporters. This SE version comes with enhanced features and configurations, helping us fund ongoing improvements while offering a bit extra to our supporters. The free version of Lychee will continue to be available but with a more streamlined feature set.
We strongly encourage you to check the full comparison between the free and supporter edition.
If you enjoy using Lychee, please consider supporting us.
Thank you for helping us keep Lychee alive and growing!
Thanks
Finally, I (ildyria) have been working on this new front-end for the past few months and I am very proud of the result.
Nevertheless, that release would not have been possible without the incredible support of two individuals:
Tino has been a great help in the development of the new front-end, providing critical and constructive feedback on how to improve things.
Martin has been an rock star reviewer, not shying away from a Pull Request with 1200+ files changes and more than 70 000 lines of code changed.
Both of you are amazing and I am very grateful for your help!