app.slint carried show-launch, show-library, show-identity, show-settings,
show-import and show-merge as separate booleans, so the root component chose
what to draw with five- and six-term conjunctions and nothing stopped two of
them being true at once. Replaced with two enums: View { develop, library,
identity, launch } for which top-level screen is showing, and Page { none,
settings, import, merge } for which page, if any, is drawn over it.
Two values rather than one, because the two questions are genuinely
different. Settings, Import and Merge are reachable from more than one View
and are drawn outermost without touching it — closing one has to return to
whichever View was already current, and today that works because the
underlying property is left alone while the page sits over it. A single
View with five or more variants would need a second field remembering what
to return to; Page needs nothing to remember, since View was never
overwritten in the first place. Identity, by contrast, genuinely replaces
the window the way Launch and Library do (see the existing "like the launch
screen" comment on its `if`), so it is a View variant, not a Page.
Every `if` chain in app.slint that used to compare four, five or six
booleans now compares active-view and active-page to at most one variant
each. library-visible collapsed from a six-term conjunction to
`active-page == Page.none && active-view == View.library`.
The Rust side follows: every set_show_*/get_show_* call in library_ui.rs,
identity_ui.rs, settings_ui.rs, merge_ui.rs, import_ui.rs, launch_ui.rs and
lib.rs now reads or writes active-view or active-page instead, including
lib.rs's startup match (View.launch vs View.develop, since a Startup that
skips the launch screen used to leave both old booleans false and fall
through the chain to develop) and identity_ui's close handler, which now
writes View.library or View.develop in one call where it used to write
show-library then show-identity separately.
back_one_step needed one deliberate adjustment beyond the mechanical
rename. Identity was never represented in NavState: back had nothing to do
when Identity was opened from the library (show-library stayed true,
unread by IdentityScreen's own condition) and could only reach ToLibrary
when opened from develop, which likewise wrote a property IdentityScreen
never read — so escaping out of Identity was invisible in both cases before
this change. With a single active-view, falling into the general case
would instead overwrite the value IdentityScreen's `if` does read and close
it as an unintended side effect. back_one_step now swallows the gesture
while View.identity is current, reproducing the same "nothing visible
happens" outcome for both origins without threading identity_ui's private
came-from-library state through lib.rs for one screen.
Verified with tools/manual/drive.py against a private Xvfb and the debug
build: launch screen to library, Settings opened and closed, Identity
opened and closed (including Escape doing nothing while it is open),
develop opened from a cell and closed both by the back button and by
Escape. Screenshots under verify/.
DarkRoom
A non-destructive RAW photo editor and library for Linux and Android, with a GPU develop pipeline, a catalog that syncs between devices, and no account, no telemetry and no cloud of its own.
The manual shows every feature, pictured from the application itself. This page says what it is, how to get it, and what is still missing.
What it does
A library. Point it at a folder — on this machine, on a network mount, or one a Nextcloud client keeps in virtual-files mode, where a placeholder is treated as the photograph rather than as a one-byte file — or at a Nextcloud account directly. The grid is virtualised, ordered by capture time with a timeline beside it, and filtered by rating, flag, person and whether the file is here. Ratings, keywords, collections and a trash that survives a crash mid-operation. Card ingest. Bursts fold. Face detection and identity, with the index syncing between devices.
Developing. Eighteen declared operations fused into one compute dispatch, plus the neighbourhood work that cannot be: clarity, texture, capture sharpening, noise reduction, lens correction, spectral film simulation. Crop and straighten, spot repair, and local adjustments over masks the model draws — click a subject or a category, then paint, subtract a gradient, grow or shrink the edge. Focus peaking and a raw histogram for judging what is recoverable. Named presets; XMP sidecars other editors read.
Panoramas. Select the frames, align, choose a projection, fill the ragged border rather than crop it, and the composite lands beside its sources as a DNG, with a sidecar recording what it was merged from.
Export. JPEG, PNG, AVIF, JPEG XL, 8- and 16-bit TIFF, with resize, output sharpening, a naming template and a colour space — to a folder here or back into the library.
On both platforms. The same core runs on a desktop and a 12-inch tablet; the interface is one layout, tuned for a wide viewport with touch targets throughout. On desktop the develop view draws the compute pass's texture directly — no readback between the GPU and the screen.
Getting it
| Platform | How | State |
|---|---|---|
| Arch Linux | packaging/PKGBUILD — makepkg -si |
Built from every release |
| Android | The APK from each CI run, or ./docker/android/package.sh --install |
Runs on a tablet; F-Droid not yet submitted |
| Windows | DarkRoom-<version>-x86_64-setup.exe, cross-built by CI (windows.md) |
Verified under Wine only; unsigned |
| Flatpak | packaging/flatpak/ |
Manifest in tree; choosing a library does not yet work in the sandbox |
Or build it. Git LFS is required for the model weights, and the toolchain pins itself to 1.92.0:
git lfs install && git lfs pull
cargo run --release -p darkroom-desktop
Android, through the containerised toolchain (docker/android):
./docker/android/build.sh cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a build --release
CONTRIBUTING.md has the system packages, the four commands CI runs against what you send, and the shortest useful contribution — a develop operation is one YAML file, and it arrives with its controls, its place in the chain and its tests.
Where it stands
0.13.5, nineteen tagged releases in. 184 numbered requirements in scope, 84% of them claimed by code and traced to it; the rest are written down rather than merely absent.
Not built: plugins (post-v1, D12), compare and survey culling, AI denoise, tiled and progressive rendering, HDR merge and focus stacking, most of the Android platform integration beyond running, and the Flatpak's library chooser. The performance targets are half verified: the per-commit benchmark suite §8 requires exists for everything that does not need a frame — the catalog, the scan, the thumbnails — and not yet for the render path, so a regression there fails nothing. outstanding.md is the list, with the reasoning for each.
The one deliberate compromise worth knowing about before reading anything else: the Android develop view reads its frame back through the CPU, because zero-copy there needs wgpu's Vulkan swapchain and that tears a portrait window on a tablet whose panel is mounted landscape. It is debt, not a revision of the rule — technical-debt.md TD-1 has the measurements and the three things any one of which would remove it.
Documentation
docs/README.md is the index. The short version, for someone using it:
| manual | Every feature, pictured |
| gestures.md | How it is driven — generated from the code, so it cannot describe a gesture that does not exist |
For someone changing it:
| CONTRIBUTING.md | How to land a first change without reading the rest |
| requirements.md | What the software must do — the numbered register, and the decisions |
| architecture.md | How it is built — crates, the GPU pipeline, the data model, sync |
| technical-debt.md | Compromises taken deliberately, each with the condition that retires it |
| outstanding.md | What is not built, and whether that is a decision or a gap |
| code-health.md | What a contribution costs, per seam, measured |
| traceability.md | Generated: which requirement is claimed by which file |
Designs, one per subsystem: segmentation and mask editing · spot removal · panorama · faces · inference · storage and sync · catalog · display and extension · navigation · distribution · windows · benchmarks.
Licence
GPL-3.0-or-later. The photographs in the manual and the test fixtures are the author's and are there to show and test this project, nothing else. The model weights carry their own licences — models/LICENCE.md.


