OpenLight Studio is a non-destructive RAW processor and photo catalog with a built-in MCP server. Edit by hand, ask in plain words, or let Claude cull and grade a whole shoot — every change stays undoable.
Tauri v2 · Rust · React 19 · SQLite · rawler
Intro
OpenLight Studio catalogs, culls and develops your photos where they already live — folders, NAS shares, cloud buckets, Immich and Google Photos — without ever touching the originals.
One Rust pipeline in linear Rec.2020 float renders the viewport, the MCP previews and the full-resolution export, so an agent sees exactly what you see. Every agent call is one undoable history step, logged in the photo's provenance.
Edits live in the catalog and an .olxmp sidecar. Originals are never overwritten.
SQLite catalog on your disk. MCP listens on loopback only, behind a bearer token.
Claude, Antigravity, Ollama, LM Studio, OpenAI, Gemini — pick a provider, or plug in a CLI.
MIT licensed. Read the code, file an issue, ship a pull request.
Features
Lightroom-class develop panels, Photoshop's everyday adjustments, and automation that runs on one photo or the whole catalog.
No import step. Add a folder, a network share or a cloud account and browse it in place. Immich albums page in 250 at a time; ratings and flags sync both ways. Duplicate copies between any two sources with SHA-256 verification.
White balance, tone, presence, parametric and point curves, 8-band colour mixer, Point Color, 3-way grading, detail, vignette, crop & straighten.
"Select the castle" traces an edge-snapped mask. "Remove the people" heals each outline from a matching nearby area. Or press S and click.
Linear, radial, luminance, colour range and AI outlines with add / subtract / intersect, feather and edge shift. Every panel tunes inside a mask.
Upright Auto / Level / Vertical / Full / Guided, lens distortion, auto chromatic aberration, defringe, calibration, grain, soft proofing.
Run on a selection, the current view or the whole catalog — cancellable, with results you can act on and Show in Library.
Levels, Hue/Saturation with Colorize, Selective Color, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, blur, posterize, threshold — as adjustment layers on any selection.
Streamable HTTP on 127.0.0.1:41920 or stdio. Tools for query, culling, develop, masks, retouch, export and inspection.
JPEG, AVIF, 16-bit PNG/TIFF in sRGB, Display P3 or Adobe RGB with ICC; Rec.2020 PQ HDR. Upload straight to Immich, Google Photos or cloud.
Supported storage & cloud services
Browse local folders and NAS shares in place, sync cloud folders on demand, and connect self-hosted or consumer photo libraries — without locking your RAW files into a proprietary vault.
settings.json.
🔁 Cross-source Duplicate: Copy or back up between any two sources with SHA-256 verification.
Feature demos
Interactive browser re-creations of the app's main workflows, running on real CC0 landscape and portrait photographs.
Drag the sliders, apply a profile, or switch between the Landscape and Portrait sample photos. ✦ Auto measures white balance and tone on the photo, then applies the profile's look. Applying a profile twice changes nothing; your other edits stay.
In the app, every change is a history step — ⌘Z to undo, \ for before/after, ⌘⇧C / V to copy and paste settings.
Drag the handle across the portrait or landscape shot. The same Rust pipeline renders the viewport, the thumbnails, the MCP previews and the export — what you compare is what you ship.
Geometry is applied last in one resample, so masks, removals and guides stay pinned to the content.
Click the castle, mountains, sky or lake in the landscape — or switch to the portrait and click the face, hair or foliage. In the app, the selected AI provider sees the photo with your click marked, traces the object, and snaps the outline to the photo's edges.
Each object becomes its own entry in Selections. While one is selected, every Develop panel tunes only inside it. ⌥-click subtracts; Esc goes back to the whole photo.
Measures sharpness on the main subject, clipping, noise and colour. Groups bursts by time and perceptual hash and picks the best of each, rejects blurred or blown-out frames, rates the rest 1–5 stars and adds keywords.
Turn on Auto Catalog & Culling of new photos and it runs in the background whenever a folder, drive or album gets new files.
12 photos selected
Connect Claude Code (or any MCP client) in one command. The agent queries the catalog, culls, develops, masks and exports through the same tools you use — and the open Develop view updates live.
Every mutating call is one undoable step, recorded in the photo's ai_provenance_log.
Detailed usage
A walkthrough of the everyday workflow. The full reference lives in the README and the guide/ folder.
Download a release for your platform, or build from source with Node 20+ and stable Rust.
npm install npm run tauri dev
The catalog lives in ~/Library/Application Support/org.openlight.studio/. Set OPENLIGHT_DATA_DIR to use another folder. Release build: npm run tauri build.
The Library sidebar groups sources under Library, Folders and Cloud & services. Press ＋ on a group to add one. There is no import step — opening a source picks up new files.
smb://nas.local/photos, afp://, nfs:// or https:// (WebDAV). A dot shows if it is connected.settings.json.openlight-studio --import ~/Pictures/Iceland # headless, recursive
Select photos, open Auto › Catalog & Culling on the Library's right bar and press Run. Review the results list, then filter by rating, flag, label or keyword. Use Find blurred subjects and Find duplicates to clean up further. Open a photo full-size in the viewer with ← → to step through.
Open a photo in Develop. The right panel has five tabs:
Pick a provider in Settings › AI & MCP (API keys go to the keychain, or read from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENROUTER_API_KEY). Then type in the ✦ AI bar:
select the castle and warm it up a little remove the people on the left make it moody, keep the sky detail
Or press S and click objects. ✦ AI fine tune levels a tilted horizon first, then tunes the look.
Choose JPEG, AVIF, 16-bit PNG/TIFF, colour space (sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB) and destination: a folder, Upload to Immich, Upload to Google Photos or a cloud account. Exports carry the capture date, so uploads land on the right day. Save to Immich stacks the edit on the original.
The AI & MCP tab shows the bearer token and copy-ready configs. The green MCP dot in the title bar means the server is running.
claude mcp add --transport http openlight http://127.0.0.1:41920/mcp \ --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"
Or over stdio — it forwards to the running app, or edits the catalog headless when the app is closed:
openlight-studio --mcp-stdio
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| S | ✦ Select tool (click to trace an object) |
| Q | Spot removal |
| R | Crop |
| J | Clipping warning |
| O | Mask overlay |
| \ | Before / after |
| [ ] | Rotate 90° |
| Z / F | Zoom 2× / fit |
| + − | Zoom in / out |
| ⌘Z · ⌘⇧Z | Undo · redo |
| ⌘⇧C / V | Copy / paste settings |
| Esc | Leave tool or selection |
| Tool | Does |
|---|---|
catalog_query | Find photos by folder, rating, flag, keyword |
culling_batch_update | Ratings, flags, labels, keywords |
develop_apply_parameters | Any Develop / Advanced / Pro value |
develop_auto | Auto to a profile |
auto_run | Any of the six Auto functions |
mask_create_and_edit | Create and tune selections |
retouch_remove_objects | Heal outlines away |
ai_reconstruct_and_retouch | Denoise, super resolution |
batch_export | Render and save / upload |
photo_inspect | Preview, histogram, telemetry |
Promo guideline
A small press kit: brand, voice, the screens to capture, ready-made formats and copy, and a launch checklist.
Two interlocking rings — cyan for the light you capture, amber for the light you shape. Keep the icon on dark or neutral backgrounds, with clear space of at least a quarter of its width.
Write OpenLight Studio — one word "OpenLight", capital L. Short form: OpenLight. Never "Open Light" or "Openlight".
Headlines in a system sans (SF Pro, Segoe UI, Inter) at bold weight, tight tracking. Code, tool names and shortcuts in a monospace.
Aa OpenLight auto_run()
Light Cyan#25C6D8
Shape Amber#F6B930
AI Violet#A78BFA
Studio Dark#161616
UI Accent#0EA5E9
Click a swatch to copy its hex. Violet is reserved for anything AI (✦).
Plain, concrete, confident. Say what the feature does, not how revolutionary it is. Show the agent working rather than claiming "AI-powered".
Shoot at 2880 × 1800 (Retina 1440 × 900 window), Studio Dark theme, a real catalog of a few hundred of your own photos, no personal paths or tokens visible. Hide the dock and menu bar extras.
Sidebar with Folders, a NAS drive (green dot) and Immich connected. Stars, picks and colour labels visible on the grid.
Hero · App Store · READMEA strong landscape mid-edit, histogram and Basic panel visible, before/after split at 50%.
Feature · socialThe AI bar with a prompt like "select the castle", the traced outline and the Selections tab listing it.
The money shot · every channelRight panel mid-run with the progress bar, results list on the left showing picks and rejects.
Feature · blogTerminal with Claude Code on the left, the app on the right updating live as tools are called.
Video · launch postA tilted architecture shot with Guided Upright lines drawn, then the corrected result.
Pro audience · forumsOne idea per image: a single screen, one headline of six words or fewer, the logo. Keep text out of the outer 10% so platforms don't crop it.
OpenLight Studio1200 × 630 · Open Graph, X, LinkedIn, HN
OpenLight1080 × 1080 · Instagram, Mastodon
OpenLight1080 × 1920 · Stories, Reels, Shorts
Pair each with screen 03 or a 20–40 s screen recording of the agent demo.
OpenLight Studio is an open-source RAW editor with a built-in MCP server. Connect Claude, then: "cull the Iceland shoot, grade the picks for landscape, export for Immich." Every step is undoable. MIT · macOS / Windows / Linux github.com/rcwkan/openlight-studio
Show HN: OpenLight Studio – an open-source RAW editor that AI agents can drive over MCP Tauri + Rust, one linear Rec.2020 pipeline for viewport, previews and export, so the agent sees exactly what you see. Folders, NAS, S3, Immich and Google Photos browsed in place. Non-destructive, local-first, MIT.
I built a free, open-source Lightroom-style editor that works with Immich in place: ratings sync both ways, edits save as a stack on top of the original, and an Auto function culls a whole album (sharpness on the subject, bursts, exposure). Feedback welcome.
Hashtags, sparingly: #photography #RAW #opensource #MCP #selfhosted #Immich
Free and open source under the MIT License.