Lychee Meta Tool

Quickly find & edit untitled photos in your Lychee photo library. Automatically identifies photos with generic camera names (IMG_1234, CD5_5678, etc.) and provides an efficient interface for adding meaningful titles.

Features

• Smart Detection: Automatically finds photos with generic camera names, UUIDs, or empty titles
• Album Filtering: Work on photos from specific albums only
• Keyboard Navigation: Ctrl+J/K for previous/next photo
• Single Binary Deployment: All frontend assets embedded
• Multi-Database Support: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite
• AI Title Suggestions: optional Ollama integration for title suggestions

Photo Detection

Identifies photos needing titles by looking for the following patterns:

• 3-character camera prefixes: CD5_1234, IMG_5678, DSZ_9012
• UUID-based filenames
• Screenshot and timestamp patterns
• Empty or null titles

Installation

macOS via Homebrew

brew install cdzombak/oss/lychee-meta-tool

Debian via apt repository

Install my Debian repository if you haven't already:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://dist.cdzombak.net/keys/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
sudo curl -fsSL https://dist.cdzombak.net/cdzombak-oss.sources -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdzombak-oss.sources
sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdzombak-oss.sources
sudo apt update

Then install lychee-meta-tool via apt-get:

sudo apt-get install lychee-meta-tool

Manual installation from build artifacts

Pre-built binaries for Linux and macOS on various architectures are downloadable from each GitHub Release. Debian packages for each release are available as well.

Build and install locally

git clone https://github.com/cdzombak/lychee-meta-tool.git
cd lychee-meta-tool
make build

cp out/lychee-meta-tool $INSTALL_DIR

Docker images

Docker images are available for a variety of Linux architectures from Docker Hub and GHCR. Images are based on the scratch image and are as small as possible.

Run them via, for example:

docker run --rm cdzombak/lychee-meta-tool:1 [OPTIONS]
docker run --rm ghcr.io/cdzombak/lychee-meta-tool:1 [OPTIONS]

Configuration

Configuration is provided via a JSON or YAML file. See config.example.yaml.

database:
  type: mysql  # mysql, postgres, or sqlite
  host: localhost
  port: 3306
  user: lychee
  password: your_password
  database: lychee

lychee_base_url: "https://your-lychee-instance.com"

server:
  port: 8080

Usage

1. Select photos from the filmstrip at the top
2. Use the album filter in the right panel to focus on specific albums
3. Add titles in the right panel editor
4. Press Enter to save and move to the next photo
5. Use Ctrl+J/K for keyboard navigation
6. (optional) Use Ctrl-I for AI title suggestion

License

MIT License; see LICENSE in this repo.

Author

Claude Code wrote this code with management and changes by Chris Dzombak (dzombak.com / github.com/cdzombak).