viberoom

Viberoom is a RAW photo manager and non-destructive editor you can drive by hand or by agent. Edit with the full develop UI in the browser — or tell Claude Code "reject the blurry ones, warm up the sunsets, export the picks" and it happens through MCP, REST, or plain JSON sidecar files.

• 🧾 Non-destructive, always. Every edit is a readable photo.CR3.vibe.json next to the original. Delete the sidecar, get your pixels back.

• 📷 Real RAW. LibRaw decoding (CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG, …) plus JPEG/PNG/TIFF/HEIC.

• 🎛️ The whole develop kit — in the UI and the API. WB, tone, curves, HSL, color grading, LUTs, sharpening/NR, lens & perspective corrections, heal/clone, grain — and local masks: gradients, luminance/color ranges, brushes, AI subject/sky masks. Everything the API can do is reachable from the interface, and vice versa.

• 🤖 Bring your own agent. The app is a PWA that exposes its tools to whatever agent your browser provides, via WebMCP — it no longer launches an agent of its own. Outside the browser, viberoom-mcp drives it from Claude Code.

• 🗂️ DAM things. Ratings, flags, labels, keywords, collections (smart too), stacks, dupes, history, snapshots, virtual copies, multi-folder catalogs.

• 📥 In and out. Card ingest, tethered capture, HDR & pano merge, ML enhance (viberoom[ml]), XMP interop, batch everything, color-managed export (sRGB → ProPhoto) with watermarks and soft proofing.

Setup from source

Nothing else. LibRaw and the image codecs arrive inside the rawpy and Pillow wheels, so there's no Homebrew/apt step and no compiler needed for the web app.

git clone https://github.com/RatulMaharaj/viberoom.git
cd viberoom

uv sync                                  # backend deps into .venv (uv installs Python if missing)
pnpm --dir frontend install
pnpm --dir frontend build                # typechecks, then writes frontend/dist

uv run viberoom                          # UI + API → http://127.0.0.1:8423

Open it, point it at a folder of photos. That's it — no database to provision, no config file.

Optional extras:

uv sync --extra ml     # AI subject/sky masks, face detection, ML enhance
                       #   (onnxruntime + rembg; weights download on first use)

Other ways to run:

uv run dev             # hacking: backend --reload + Vite (:7666 "ROOM" → :8423 "VIBE")

If something's off: pnpm build failing on syntax that looks fine usually means Node is below the Vite floor (node -v), and a uv sync that resolves oddly usually means an old uv (uv self update). The frontend must be built at least once — without frontend/dist the backend serves the API but no UI.

Related MCP server: rawtherapee-mcp-server

Run it as a PWA (no backend)

The frontend is also a standalone progressive web app: it reads your photo folder straight off disk with the File System Access API, decodes RAW with LibRaw compiled to WebAssembly, and develops on the GPU. Nothing is uploaded — there is no server to upload to. Sidecars and thumbnails are written back into your own folder and its browser-local cache.

• Chrome or Edge, on desktop. Safari, Firefox and every browser on iOS lack the File System Access API; the app says so up front rather than failing halfway in.

• Install it from the address-bar install icon to get a standalone window.

• Offline. A service worker precaches the app shell, and the LibRaw wasm is cached the first time a RAW is decoded, so a second visit works with no network at all.

• Updates ship by pushing to main: the host rebuilds and deploys the static site, and open tabs get a "a new version of Viberoom is ready" prompt instead of silently running last month's build.

What works in the browser

Browsing, rating, flagging, EXIF filtering and sorting, RAW decode and thumbnails, the whole develop panel, crop and straighten, and export to JPEG or PNG. The GPU renders tone, colour, HSL, grading, blurs, clarity, dehaze, lens corrections, geometry, LUTs and masks — checked against the Python engine at the float32 noise floor across 89 parity cases.

RAW decoding matches the desktop app closely: Apple DNG differs by 1 part in 65535, Canon CR3, Sony ARW and Nikon NEF by around a hundredth of that.

What needs the Python package

Some of this is a browser limit; most of it is simply unbuilt. The app never guesses — a photo whose edits it cannot draw shows the original with a badge, and export refuses by name and reason rather than writing a file missing your edits.

The short version: the only permanent limits are the ones that need a process or a USB device. Everything else is work someone has not done yet.

Hosting it

The build is a static site — no server, no functions, nothing to run. wrangler.toml points Cloudflare at the built files and turns on SPA routing, so /edit/<id> survives a reload. Cache headers live in frontend/public/_headers, beside the app, so they travel with it.

On a host without an SPA setting of its own — Netlify, for instance — add /* /index.html 200 to frontend/public/_redirects. Do not ship both: Cloudflare serves the shell and the catch-all rule then matches that too, which it rejects as an infinite loop.

Leave Root directory empty, so the paths below match wrangler.toml:

Cloudflare treats a repository containing wrangler.toml as a Workers project and runs wrangler deploy, so the config uses [assets] rather than the older Pages key — a static site is served the same way either route.

Only a subpath deploy needs VITE_BASE — / is the default and is what a domain root wants:

VITE_BASE=/viberoom/ pnpm --dir frontend build   # e.g. GitHub Pages

Let an agent drive

claude mcp add --transport http viberoom http://127.0.0.1:8423/mcp

The MCP server is mounted on the viberoom server itself — just a URL, no paths to keep in sync. ~45 tools, from list_images to update_recipe (the workhorse merge-patch) to render_preview — which returns the rendered image, so the agent can look at its own edits and iterate. Then just talk:

"Open ~/Photos/shoot-42, reject anything blurry, rate the keepers, warm the sunset shots by 500K with +0.3 EV, and export all picks at quality 85."

Prefer HTTP? Everything is REST under /api/v1 (docs at /api/v1/docs):

curl 'localhost:8423/api/v1/images?rating_gte=4&flag=pick'
curl -X PATCH localhost:8423/api/v1/images/<id>/recipe \
  -d '{"tone": {"exposure": 0.5}}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Prefer files? Edit the .vibe.json sidecar directly and POST /library/scan:

{
  "rating": 4,
  "flag": "pick",
  "recipe": {
    "whiteBalance": { "temp": 6500 },
    "tone": { "exposure": 0.5, "clarity": 15 },
    "masks": [{ "type": "radial", "center": [0.5, 0.4], "radiusX": 0.3,
                "radiusY": 0.25, "adjustments": { "exposure": 0.6 } }]
  }
}

The full recipe grammar (every param, range, and the pipeline order) is one call away: GET /api/v1/recipe/schema — or the get_recipe_schema MCP tool. The math is Lightroom-like, not a clone.

Is it actually correct? (benchmarks)

viberoom-bench keeps the pipeline honest, cheapest check first:

uv run viberoom-bench regress    # 26 recipes vs a pinned baseline; the CI gate.
                                 #   catches a 0.5% exposure drift in <1s
uv run viberoom-bench chart      # 24 ColorChecker patches, mean dE2000
uv run viberoom-bench pack       # ~260 MB CC0 RAW pack (X-Trans, Foveon, CRAW…)
uv run viberoom-bench compare --against libraw darktable
uv run viberoom-bench auto       # degrade → recover → score, no dataset needed
uv run viberoom-bench reference --inputs raw/ --references expertC/

compare treats libraw as an oracle (a no-op render must match its neutral decode: 53–55 dB PSNR on Bayer) and darktable as a reference (different rendering philosophy, so dE 5–14 means "same neighbourhood", not "bug"). auto degrades an image by a known amount and scores the recovery — exact ground truth, no dataset (wb mode is the real pass/fail; --strategy auto is diagnostic only). reference scores auto-adjust against expert retouches — if auto isn't beating noop, it's making things worse. viberoom-bench datasets lists where the big datasets live and what each one proves.

Development

uv run pytest                     # backend
pnpm --dir frontend build        # frontend typecheck + build

State lives in <library>/.viberoom/ — a disposable SQLite index (sidecars are the source of truth) and the preview cache. Exports land in <library>/exports/ unless you pick another folder.