DarkRoom catalogues, culls and develops RAW photographs. Edits are stored as a graph of operations beside the original rather than baked into it, so every change stays reversible and the file the camera wrote is never rewritten.

The library can live in a plain directory — a local disk, an external drive, an NFS or SMB mount — or on a Nextcloud server, browsed and edited without downloading whole RAW files first.

Where it differs from the tools it sits beside:

• Culling shows the camera's embedded preview immediately and replaces it with a full render when one is ready, so moving to the next frame does not wait on a demosaic
• Sidecars are the record of an edit; the catalog is a cache that can be deleted and rebuilt
• The develop pipeline runs on the GPU through Vulkan, including drawn masks — a working Vulkan driver is required, not merely preferred, because there is no CPU renderer behind it
• Faces are detected and grouped locally — nothing is uploaded to identify anybody