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; a photograph that is only on the server opens on its thumbnail with the download's progress over it. 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. Nineteen declared operations, those that read one pixel fused into a generated shader rather than run a pass each, plus the neighbourhood work that cannot be: clarity, texture, dehaze, capture sharpening, noise reduction, lens correction. Every edit works on the scene as the camera recorded it — linear, highlights beyond white included — and one Tone Mapping step, last, after sharpening and noise reduction, fits it to the screen, with a contrast and a white point of its own; a spectral film stock takes its place when one is chosen. 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. A mask's sliders add to the photograph's, the film's among them, so a sky can be burned in on the print as a darkroom printer would. Hot and dead photosites are mended before the demosaic, with nothing to set. Focus peaking and a raw histogram for judging what is recoverable. Presets, a click away in a menu at the foot of the tool rail, with a collection shipped in the application — everyday corrections, and a look for each measured colour, cinema and black-and-white stock — and Lightroom presets imported as looks that leave a photograph's own corrections alone. XMP sidecars other editors read. A linear DNG larger than one GPU texture — a stitched panorama twenty thousand pixels wide — opens, develops and exports at full size.

Panoramas. Select the frames, align, untick any frame to leave it out and the rest re-align at once, 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 — into albums: named export folders on this machine or on the server, never inside the library, which remember the photograph behind each file and sync between devices as collections do.

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; folders are chosen through the portal, but no Flatpak has been built to prove it

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

0.19.1, thirty tagged releases in. 193 numbered requirements in scope, 85% 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 beyond the export of an oversized DNG, 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 a Flatpak actually built and run in its sandbox. 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.