dalica

Dalica

Status: 0.1, an organizer preview. Dalica 0.1 browses the photos in your own folders: you can star, caption, tag, rotate, hide and re-date them, and captions, tags and dates are written into the photo files without touching their pixels. Editing (the edit view, Auto Fix, effects, Save), export, slideshows, albums, people, places and search come in later releases. What 0.1 can and cannot do yet is in docs/whats-new.md; where the work stands is in docs/roadmap.md. Packages for Linux, Windows and macOS appear on the Releases page once a maintainer publishes them.

A fast, local-first photo organizer with simple editing, written in pure Rust.

Dalica shows every photo in the folders you choose in one continuous, scrollable light table. You can star, caption, tag and album your photos, name the people in them and put them on a map. Fix a photo in one click, play with effects, and make slideshows, collages and exports. There is no library to import into, no account, and nothing changes your photos' pixels unless you explicitly save.

Dalica faithfully re-creates the layout and workflows of a classic desktop photo organizer. Its look is the muted dark grey of the Craft apps (LightCraft, PhotoCraft), so it sits naturally beside them.

How it works

• Your folders are the library. Dalica watches the folders you pick (Tools → Folder Manager). New photos appear on their own, and moving or renaming in Dalica moves or renames on disk.
• One light table. Every folder and album is a section in one long, scrolling view. Clicking a folder on the left jumps to it and selects it.
• The Photo Tray gathers photos from anywhere (Hold). The big buttons at the bottom (Export, Collage, Slideshow) act on what is in the tray.
• Edits never destroy anything. Crop, Auto Fix, tuning and 27 effects are stored as a recipe next to your photo. The original pixels change only when you Save, and even then the original is kept and can be restored.
• Your work is portable. Stars, captions, tags, albums, faces and edits are written to small, readable sidecar files in each folder and to standard metadata. The central index is only a cache.
• Private. No account, no telemetry. Face recognition runs on your machine.
• Built for agents. Every action is a command with a stable id, available from the UI, the keyboard, a CLI, a local control channel and an MCP server. AI agents can drive the real app and see the result.

Documentation

Doc	What it covers
docs/product.md	what Dalica is, principles, scope
docs/ui-layout.md	the window: regions, sizes, behaviour
docs/organizing.md	folders, import, albums, stars, tags, people, places, search, file operations
docs/editing.md	edit view, tools, tuning, effects, undo, batch edit
docs/viewing.md	slideshow, full-screen preview, photo viewer, video
docs/creating.md	export and collage
docs/menus-and-shortcuts.md	full menu tree, keyboard shortcuts, context menus, preferences
docs/data-model.md	what is stored where; Save/Revert; scanning; file operations
docs/design-system.md	colours, type, metrics, icons, widgets
docs/architecture.md	crates, layering, commands, threading, automation
docs/development.md	building, testing, xtask, performance budgets
docs/process.md	how we build Dalica with AI agents
docs/control-protocol.md · docs/mcp.md	driving Dalica from scripts and AI agents
docs/security.md · SECURITY.md	threat model, hardening rules, reporting vulnerabilities
docs/contributing.md · docs/assets.md	contribution rules, asset and licence policy
docs/parity.md	feature-by-feature tracker
docs/roadmap.md · docs/status.md	milestones, honest status, current task

Building

Rust 1.98 (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml), and on Windows the Windows SDK for its resource compiler (rc.exe). More in docs/development.md:

cargo run --release -p dalica                    # the app, on your default library
cargo run --release -p dalica -- --demo          # a generated demo library, no personal photos
cargo run --release -p dalica --features heif    # with the HEIC decoder (release builds leave it out)
cargo xtask ci                                   # the gate every change passes

How releases are built and published: docs/releasing.md.

Contributing

Humans and agents follow the same rules: read AGENTS.md first. In short: pure Rust, clean-room (match behaviour, never copy assets or code), never crash, never lose a photo, everything is a command, and cargo xtask ci green before every commit.

Credits

Dalica's architecture, design tokens, widgets and agent-driven development process follow LightCraft and PhotoCraft by the ArtCraft team (MIT OR Apache-2.0). Dalica may reuse their code; code, docs and rules adapted from them are listed in NOTICE.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option (the same licence as PhotoCraft): LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE.