English | 简体中文
A local-first photo workspace for browsing, editing, and managing large photography libraries.
AfterFrame is built for photographers who work with thousands of exported images and want a fast, visual tool to browse, organize, crop, add text overlays, and experiment with AI-powered style transfer — all without leaving one app.
Download the latest .dmg from Releases.
macOS only (Apple Silicon). Signed with an Apple Developer ID. If a build isn't notarized yet, macOS may warn on first launch — right-click the app and choose Open, or allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security.
The core of AfterFrame — a catalog-based workflow that keeps your originals on disk and everything else indexed and fast.
- Catalog-based workflow — one
.afcatalogper project - Import pipeline with automatic metadata extraction and preview generation
- Two preview tiers: fast 512px thumbnails always, plus optional 2000px HD previews (toggle in Settings → Library, off by default to save disk)
- Optional RAW source indexing and matching by filename
- HEIC / HEIF support — originals are transcoded to JPEG on demand so iPhone photos display everywhere (lightbox, editor, collage) at full resolution
- Unified background-activity dock: imports, previews, annotation, and AI jobs all report progress in one place and can be cancelled
- Bilingual interface (English / 简体中文) — switch live in Settings → General
- Local-first: your files stay on your drives, nothing is uploaded
- Grid, tiles, justified, and waterfall layout modes
- Sort by imported time, captured time, rating, or name
- Smart collections and manual folders
- Full metadata inspector: EXIF, camera, lens, exposure, dates
- Star rating system (imports Lightroom XMP ratings)
- Virtual-scroll gallery that handles 10,000+ images smoothly
- Full-text search across filename, camera/lens, and AI annotations (caption, detected text/OCR, tags) — find photos by what's actually in them
- Faceted filter bar: camera and lens, ISO / aperture / focal-length ranges, capture-date range, and star rating — combined live
- Tag filtering: click any tag in the inspector, or pick from a searchable tag list (server-side search, scales to thousands of tags)
- On-device face detection and ArcFace grouping — photos and face embeddings stay inside the local catalog
- Review and name suggested groups, choose a cover, merge matches, or move incorrectly grouped faces
- Select and delete multiple incorrect groups at once; deleted groups stay excluded from later rescans
- Filter the gallery by person or open every matching photo directly from the People view
Demo portraits are AI-generated and do not depict real people.
- Crop with preset aspect ratios, rotation, and flip
- Text Overlay with system fonts, solid/gradient fill, stroke, shadow, background, opacity, and snap-to-center guides
- Depth-aware Text — on-device CoreML depth inference (Depth Anything V2) lets text sit behind subjects in the scene, iPhone-wallpaper style. Bring your own model via the model picker; preference is persisted
- Stickers — extract subjects from any photo with one click (VisionKit on macOS 14+), save to a per-catalog library with optional outline and shadow, then drop them as image layers on any other photo. Stickers share the same depth, opacity, and rotation controls as text layers
- Collage maker with 8 layout templates, adjustable gap/padding/border-radius, background color, and high-res export. Per-cell pan and zoom with snap-to-center alignment guides, precise zoom slider, and trackpad pinch sync — drag any cell to reframe, swap two cells by dropping one on the other
- Frame — brand-aware camera watermark frames driven by EXIF. Pick from 20+ presets (bottom bars, dual-logo, and vertical side-strip layouts), rendered with real brand logos and colors for Hasselblad, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Leica, Fujifilm, Lumix, and Ricoh, plus a clean generic set. Adaptive light/dark contrast, a logo color picker (original / black / white / grey / gold), text and margin scaling, and export at the original resolution
- Index video files alongside photos — each clip is probed for duration, dimensions, and codec on import, and a poster frame is generated automatically
- Gallery cards show the poster with a duration badge; hover to scrub a keyframe filmstrip without opening anything
- Full playback in the lightbox via a custom player (play/pause, scrubber, volume, fullscreen, spacebar)
- Automatic on-the-fly H.264 proxy for codecs the OS can't decode natively (e.g. 10-bit HEVC), so clips still play back
Bring your own API key. AfterFrame does not bundle or proxy any AI service — you connect your own provider and all requests go directly from your machine to the API.
- Supports Gemini, GPT Image, Jimeng, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — manage providers and per-provider model defaults in Settings → AI Repaint
- 25 built-in style prompts (oil painting, anime, watercolor, ink, concept art, and more)
- Side-by-side and stacked before/after comparison
- Version history for every repaint
Generate a caption, tags, and a location guess for your photos with your own LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint). As with AI Repaint, requests go directly from your machine to the API.
- Annotate one photo, a multi-selection, a whole folder, or every un-annotated asset — all as tracked background jobs with live progress
- Optional auto-annotate on import
- Bilingual tags (English / 中文), with configurable tag count and caption length
- Hand-edit per-photo tags — remove a wrong one or add your own (with the same tag search)
- Results power Search & Filter above; HEIC / RAW inputs handled
AfterFrame embeds an MCP server, so any AI agent — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or anything MCP-compatible — can drive your library in natural language while the app runs:
"Import the photos on my Desktop" · "Find the vertical shots from last month and show them to me" · "Crop these to 4:3 for Xiaohongshu" · "Tag everything that has no tags yet" · "Export this collection at 2048px JPEG"
- 17 tools: search (full-text + EXIF facets), thumbnails the agent can actually see, import, crop, export, tags/ratings, collections, AI annotation & repaint jobs, deletion — plus job control
- Two-way selection bridge — select photos in the app and say "these"; the agent's picks get highlighted and scrolled into view right in your gallery (
show_in_app) - Visible & cancellable — agent-started work appears in the same background-activity dock as your own, with live progress and a Cancel button
- Local-only — the server listens on
127.0.0.1:41706while the app runs; same BYOK privacy stance as everything else
Connect an agent (AfterFrame must be running):
# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http afterframe http://127.0.0.1:41706/mcp
# Codex CLI
codex mcp add afterframe --url http://127.0.0.1:41706/mcpWorking inside this repo? Nothing to do — the bundled .mcp.json connects Claude Code automatically. Other MCP clients (Claude Desktop etc.): add a remote HTTP server with the same URL.
Then just ask: "Find my photos of California and show them in the app."
The full interface in 简体中文 (switch live in Settings → General):
- macOS (Apple Silicon)
- Python 3.10+ (for the sidecar service, development only)
- Node.js 20.19+ or 22.13+ (development only)
# Install frontend dependencies
cd apps/desktop
npm install
# Start dev server
npm startcd apps/desktop
npm run dist:mac # rebuild sidecar, then package + sign (Developer ID)
npm run dist:mac:release # also notarize — set APPLE_ID / APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD / APPLE_TEAM_IDThe .dmg will be in apps/desktop/release/. Requires pyinstaller (pip3 install pyinstaller) for the sidecar step. Signing uses the Developer ID Application certificate in your keychain; dist:mac:release additionally uploads the build to Apple for notarization.
apps/desktop/ Electron + React desktop app (embedded MCP server in electron/mcp/)
services/sidecar/ Python backend (SQLite catalog, metadata, AI repaint)
RESOURCES/ AI style prompt libraries, design assets
docs/ Screenshots and developer docs
Edit ~/Library/Application Support/afterframe/ai-styles.json to add or modify style prompts. Changes take effect on restart.
[
{ "id": "my-style", "name": "My Style", "prompt": "Transform this photo into..." }
]This project was vibe-coded with Claude Code.
For implementation details, see docs/developer-setup.md.