This summer, Remote for OM System will hopefully clear App Store review, and I'm already running my entire photographic life without opening anyone else's software. Camera to wall (display, really), every step, inside things I made.
There are nine of them now. Remote for OM System, Photo Batch Renamer (not on the store), Photo Culler, Photo Archive, Photo Developer, Photo Flashbacks, Photo Sandwich, Photo Refract (not on the store), Digg Photos (not public). Say them in that order and you've described what happens to a photograph: it gets taken, pulled off the card, named, culled, filed, developed, rediscovered, played with, and put somewhere people can see it. Each app is one verb in that sentence.
I did not set out to build a suite. I set out to fix one annoyance, and then the next one, for about eleven months. The circle is a thing I noticed had closed, not a thing I planned.
The shape of it all
The first commit anywhere in this is dated 3 August 2025. Two apps on the same day — the renamer and the culler, the two dullest jobs in photography, the ones that stand between the card and the work. Then it went quiet. Six commits in December. If you'd looked at the repositories that autumn you'd have concluded I'd given up.
Across all of it — the nine apps and the web front — it comes to roughly 180,000 lines of code and something like 1,900 commits over those eleven months. That's a raw wc -l number and I don't want it to sound like more than it is: measured this way, every project is bigger than the code that actually runs. But it's a fair number, the same yardstick you'd hold to anyone, and it says the obvious thing: this was not a weekend.
So, given up? I haven't :)
The circle
Here is the loop, in the order a photograph travels it. Remote for OM System is the shutter — control the camera, get the frame. Photo Batch Renamer takes it off the card and gives it a sensible name. Photo Culler is the light table: keep, maybe, gone. Photo Archive is the filing cabinet — where the keepers live and how you find them again. Photo Developer is the enlarger, the actual RAW development. Photo Flashbacks is the part that walks up to you months later and says remember this one. Photo Sandwich and Photo Refract are the play — combining frames, bending them, the stuff you do once the serious edit is done. And Digg Photos is the «wall», albeit a digital one, the place a finished picture goes to be looked at.
For a user of one
I've written these apps to suit me. After 20 years of this, with Lightroom as my one-stop shop, I'd built up opinions — and building with Claude is what finally let me act on them.
Some of the apps have real customers, and I'm grateful for every one. But the whole loop, the capture-to-wall pipeline as a single instrument — that has one serious user, and he built it. When I said at the top that I don't have much to show for eleven months besides the apps, this is what I meant. The apps are the artifact. There's no growth chart, no round of funding, no team. There's a photographer who can now do the entire thing without renting any part of it, and that photographer is me.
I've gone back and forth on whether that's a triumph or a folly, and I've decided the question is malformed. A tool for one is still a tool. The circle isn't more or less closed depending on how many people stand inside it. I also know, though, that if I'm a satisfied user of these apps, others will be too. I'm not that unique :)
I set out to leave Lightroom. I ended up building the light table, the filing cabinet, the darkroom, the enlarger, and the wall — and then, last of all, the door the picture comes in through.
The suite grew out of leaving Lightroom — that post covers the why, Building a RAW Developer the how, and Everything I Didn't Ship the why-not. This one is just the accounting.