Show HN: Free open source Adobe Lightroom alternative, completely local with AI

Edit4: Sorry, False Alarm: https://any.run/malware-trends/amadey/

    IP addresses
    185.199.108.133
    Hostname: cdn-185-199-111-133.github.com.

---

Virus Total: Activity related to AMADEY - according to source Cluster25 - 6 months ago This DOMAIN is used by AMADEY. Amadey is a botnet agent that appeared around October 2018 sold on Russian-speaking hacking forums. It periodically sends information about the system and installed AV software to its C2 server. It can also load other payloads to the victims' devices.

macOS download url after downloading with librewolf and rightclicking "copy downoload url": https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/f1e08a34d17fd85cd8896ba86...

Edit: i dont get this when copying direct links from the readme.md. Its just when i click them and copy the url it used to download.

Edit2: i get this too when i download the x64 exe and copy the download link from the librewolf (firefox fork) download manager https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url-analysis/u-6a55e124c22f9b...

Edit3: maybe false alarm and the botnet used the github url https://release-assets.githubusercontent.com/ to spread malware?

What advantages does this offer over Darktable, the long standing FOSS lightroom alternative?

Edit: One criticism of Darktable is that it emphasizes its "scene-referred workflow" as opposed to a "display-referred workflow" like Lightroom does, making it not a true Lightroom alternative. Seems like this also happens to be written in C++ and also uses a scene-referred workflow? Quite the coincidence. How much of the important design decisions (or implementation) are just copied from Darktable?

Is it a full clean-room implementation? I really want to see how the AI clean-room reverse engineering projects fare against legal challenges.

Supposedly clean-room implementations are legal. But they're so easy with AI - it seems like that will need to change. Or the world will come crashing down. Hard to say which is more likely right now.

This is unfortunately exactly the kind of project I wouldn't want to trust my photo management workflow to...software is cheaper than ever, thoughtful maintenance and longevity is worth much more to me.

Not that Adobe's getting my money either.

How does this compare with Gimp? Dramatically better or just a thing you do because you can.

Why are there so many of these in the last 2 days?

Pro photographer here. And I've counted at least ten of these photo editing apps that have appeared in the last year, many of them in the last few months. All of them LLM-assisted or completely vibe coded.

They definitely work but...

Unlike Lightroom or Darktable (an open source Raw editor that took years to get to a sophisticated level), they are all rough around the edges. Maybe in the future they'll get better in terms of being really refined to handle advanced photography, but right now they're hobby applications.

To me this highlights the absurdity of AI, because enormous amounts of energy is wasted on duplicating stuff and making something new.

I won't try and argue that nothing nice can come out of it, but it seems absurd to me to waste so much energy as a species this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred more of these apps in another year.

What’s the feature parity vs LR?

It's got the kind of UI that I would love pre-2024 or so but these days it just screams "AI generic" unfortunately. Documentation is fairy concise and reasonably LLM-jargon free though.

Copyrights and patents are outdated.

would love an AE and InDesign clone, theres just nothing as good as either

Given that some are now reversing all closed software using LLMs, it should be now finally worth reversing the whole of Nvidia’s closed source software, drivers and blobs, including CUDA.

No excuses this time.

Love this.