Introduction

Corydalis is a simple application to help manage offline (as in non-cloud) collections of RAW and processed pictures. It doesn't replace your RAW processor (e.g. Adobe Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab, Capture one, Darktable, etc.) but instead acts as a companion to it, giving a parallel view on all your files.

Corydalis is also an image viewer, designed to work across and understand your entire photo collection; the desktop-only viewers (e.g. Geeqie) are folder-based, not collection-based. Corydalis allow searching based on various criteria across the collection, and filtered viewing of images along the same lines.

Originally, I wrote it as I'm not able to keep post-processing up with the amount of RAW pictures I take; additionally there is a lot of cruft accumulating over time. It evolved to be an image viewer as I needed one that both understands the entire collection, and can serve (as a web application) the pictures stored on your storage to desktop and mobile clients - I want the ease of viewing/browsing pictures in a browser, without having to upload my photos to the cloud.

Corydalis should be mostly independent of the actual file types and the program used to process the raw files, although maybe I do make some assumptions and I'm just not aware of it; its only requirement is that ImageMagick (used to generate the downscaled images for web viewing) supports the "processed" image format (which in the vast majority of cases will be JPEG, so the point is moot), and that exiftool can extract metadata from your images. For movies, ffmpeg is used as well for some simple tasks.

See the installation guide file for how to quickly run and see Corydalis' output; the application only writes to its own static/tmp directory and the 'cachedir' directory as specified in the configuration files. Pointing that key to an initially empty directory ensures that it will not clobber anything.

The application itself is a web server - the allowed users are stored in an sqlite database in the db/ directory - and is designed to be run close or on the machine that hosts the files (walking the file system over NFS or Samba will a long time); it can be run directly on the NAS if it's a Linux machine.

Once started, navigate to the host/port setup in the configuration file, and explore the classification of folders. Note that not all organisation of files/folders is supported, see the manual.

Demo site

There is a demo site at demo.corydalis.io, using a few pictures from my own collection; you can use this to see approximately what Corydalis does and how does it look like.

Features

  • file-type independent (customisable extensions for raw files, processed files, sidecar files, etc.), as long as ImageMagick and exiftool can work with the files (parse EXIF data, process the files, etc.).
  • independent of the program that edits the files.
  • tracks files also for panorama/HDR outputs (multiple raw files combined into a single output file).
  • computes list of unprocessed files, orphan sidecar files, etc.
  • view the output/processed files, with navigation facilities allowing the browsing of the entire collection (requires a recent browser with HTML5 support; tested on Firefox, Chrome and partially Safari).