Autophagosomes engulf cytosol or damaged organelles and deliver them to lysosomes to be degraded and released as nutrients. Hung et al. show here that damaged lysosomes themselves are degraded in this way. They utilized a photosensitizer that is targeted to lysosomes by endocytosis; its light-mediated activation triggers the formation of reactive oxygen species, and thus lysosomal membrane permeabilization (LMP), with spatio-temporal precision. Imaging experiments following LMP in HeLa cells revealed that tagged versions of ubiquitin, the selective autophagy adaptor p62 and the late autophagosome marker LC3 accumulated in the illuminated (and thus damaged) region of lysosomes. The authors also showed that the autophagic structures that are triggered by LMP become mature autolysosomes. Thus, they propose that damaged lysosomes are removed by a type of organelle-specific autophagy that they term lysophagy.