emulsio
Terabytes of photos, under control.
A native desktop app, in Rust with no webview, that catalogues a huge photo library once, finds the duplicates and the edits and shows how you actually shoot.
A multi-terabyte library that opens at once
The scan runs once and the grid fills in as it goes. For RAW files, emulsio uses the embedded JPEG instead of decoding the sensor, and the next scan only looks at what changed.
Duplicates for you to review, never to delete on its own
Identical files, near-identical files and edits of the same shot appear in groups. You pick which to keep, and the rest goes to a quarantine with undo.
See how you actually shoot
Charts of 35mm-equivalent focal length, aperture, ISO, shutter and the use of each body and lens, so you can pick your next gear with data.
More features
Filters and collections
Filters by camera, lens, focal length, aperture, ISO and shutter, and saves any filter as a collection without moving files.
Reversible organiser
Lays files out in folders by year, month or brand with a preview, a log of every move and undo.
About the project
emulsio is for people who have been taking photos for years, have piled up a library of several terabytes mostly in a single folder and can no longer browse it. Everything is a query over the catalogue, and only the scanner and the organiser touch the disk.
It never acts on your files by itself. Removing a duplicate or replacing a photo with its saved edit moves the file to a quarantine with undo, and nothing is deleted until you empty it. A file is identified by its content, not its name.
Technologies
Rust, with an egui interface; SQLite for the catalogue, BLAKE3 and a perceptual hash for signatures, rawler for RAW files and rayon for the parallel scan.
License: MIT
Sample material shown in the screenshots:
- Various authors, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
Install emulsio
Needs Rust (stable).
The .deb package
For Debian 12 or newer and Ubuntu 22.04 or newer.
curl -LO https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/emulsio/-/releases/v2.1.1/downloads/emulsio_2.1.1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./emulsio_2.1.1_amd64.debBinary for any amd64 Linux
curl -LO https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/emulsio/-/releases/v2.1.1/downloads/emulsio-v2.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzf emulsio-v2.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz -C /usr/local --strip-components=1From source
Installs to ~/.local, with the icon and the application-menu launcher.
git clone https://gitlab.com/alteronauta/emulsio.git && cd emulsio
./build-linux.shmacOS has a script that builds the app. The details are in the README.