Abstract: We recently discovered ‘porphysomes’, the first all-organic nanoparticles with intrinsic multimodal photonic properties. They are self-assembled from porphyrin-lipid building blocks to form liposome-like bilayer vesicle (~100nm diameter). The very high porphyrin packing density (＞80 000 per particle) results in both‘super’-absorption and structuredependent‘super’-quenching, which, in turn, converts light energy to heat with extremely high efficiency, giving them ideal photothermal and photoacoustic properties. Upon porphysome nanostructure dissociation, fluorescence and photoreactivity of free porphyrins are restored to enable low background fluorescence imaging and activatable photodynamic therapy. In addition, metal ions can be directly incorporated into the porphyrin building blocks of the preformed porphysomes thus unlocking their potential for PET and MRI. By changing the way porphyrin-lipid assembles, we developed porphyrin nanodisc (＜20nm), trimodal (US/photoacoustic/fluorescence) porphyrin shell microbubbles (~2μm), microscopy-controlled porphyrin protocells (~100μm), and hybrid porphyrin-gold nanoparticles, expanding the purview of porphyrin nanophotonics. Compared with classical"all-in-one"nanoparticles containing many functional modules, the simple yet"one-for-all"nature of porphysomes represents a novel approach to the design of multifunctional nanoparticle and confers high potential for clinical translation.