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Each sync pass spent 0.8-2.0 s of CPU and 1.0-5.4 s wall on the upload snapshot of the reference catalog (24k images, 18,871 faces), ahead of the rest of the pass. The upload itself had been crop-less since the crops moved to the face shards. The cost was in how it got that way. The backup API copied all 158 MB of the catalog, 96 MB of it the ~5 KB JPEG crop on every faces row. Then `UPDATE faces SET crop = NULL` rewrote 18.9k rows and freed their overflow chains, and VACUUM rebuilt the file again. That wrote the catalog about three times over to upload 50 MB. The snapshot is now built rather than copied. An empty file attaches the catalog, creates each table from the catalog's own sqlite_master and fills it with INSERT ... SELECT, with faces.crop selected as NULL. Indexes, triggers and views follow, and user_version, application_id, page size and the WAL header flag are carried over. It all runs in one transaction on the snapshot's connection, so the catalog is read as of one moment and concurrent writers are serialised, not raced, as the backup API did. The build journal is in memory with synchronous off, because the file is scratch that is rebuilt every pass and quick_check'd before upload. Foreign keys are off on that connection. The bundled SQLite enables them, and then a multi-row INSERT into images scans images for children of each new row (shadowed_by is a self-reference with no index), which cost 1.2 s alone. Measured on a .backup copy of the reference catalog with catalog_bench, old and new binaries back to back on a loaded machine: before best 1.0-5.4 s wall, 0.84-1.98 s cpu, 49.8 MB after best 0.40-2.1 s wall, 0.39-0.96 s cpu, 50.4 MB With the machine quiet the new build takes 0.31-0.43 s. What a receiving device gets is unchanged. It is the same schema, the same rows and a NULL crop, which is what 0.16.0 already uploads and merges. The merge reads only a remote face's box and model (merge::match_faces) and never writes a local crop. No device adopts a downloaded catalog as its own, and a fresh one takes faces and crops from the shards. There is no schema bump, so older builds still merge it. NFR-R2 backups keep using the backup API and keep their crops. Tests: the snapshot matches the catalog in schema, row counts, pragmas and WAL header. A leftover file is replaced. Merging a crop-less snapshot carries a confirmed name across by box and leaves the local crop untouched, and does so idempotently.
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, colour label, person and whether the file is here. Ratings, colour labels, keywords, collections and a trash that survives a crash mid-operation. Card ingest. Bursts fold. The same RAW catalogued twice — a dated folder and a backup beside it — is found, proved the same, and folded onto one copy with the spares in the trash. 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, straighten and correct converging verticals, spot repair, and local adjustments over masks the model draws — click a subject or a category, then paint, subtract a gradient or keep only where two selections agree, 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.
From the keyboard, and with its manual. Rating, flagging and labelling
have keys in the grid and in develop, as do zoom, undo and stepping through a
shoot in develop, and none of them is keyboard-only. The help sheet (F1, or
? in develop) lists every key and gesture, generated from the code that
binds it, and links them to the sections of the manual that show them — the
manual ships with the application and opens offline.
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 both, 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
0.16.0, twenty-four tagged releases in. 191 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 rendering, HDR merge and focus stacking, importing a Lightroom or darktable catalog, translations beyond the launch screen, 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.
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.