Azimuth Photo

01 — THE LIBRARY

50,000 photos feel like fifty.
Here are 36 real ones — filter them.

This is the author's Selected Landscapes collection, straight from the live catalog — real files, real EXIF, real Elo. Filters compose, counts answer instantly, and every frame opens in the loupe below.

02 — THE LOUPE

A canvas, not a modal.
Keyboard-first. Try the keys.

Metadata, Elo ranking, and a histogram computed live from the pixels stay beside the image. Use ← → to move, P pick / X reject / U clear, and L for lights-out — when it's just you and the photograph.

03 — RANKING, NOT RATING

Pick the best one.
That's it. That's the interface.

This is Refine, running the real Elo update right here in the page. Click your favorite — the winner takes rating from the frames it beat, a fresh contender steps in, and the standings shift live. In the app, every pick also propagates through visually similar photos.

04 — SEARCH

Two engines, fused.
These results came from the real ones.

Metadata and semantic embeddings, fused into one ranking and answered entirely on your own machine. The results below were produced by the live archive's search engines against this collection; pick a query and watch the frames reorder.

WHY IT EXISTS

Google Photos owns your library.
Lightroom was never its home.
Take the best instincts of both.

FROM GOOGLE PHOTOS

An instant timeline you can fall into. Semantic search — “sunset over water” just works. Nothing to file, nothing to tag.

FROM LIGHTROOM CLASSIC

A real folder tree. Pick / reject culling, stacks, a keyboard-first loupe, filters that compose, and density you can feel.

FROM NEITHER

Elo photo ranking. Quick this-or-that picks teach the archive which photos are your best — you just tried it above.

47,781photos in the author's own working archive

0 BYTESuploaded to anyone else's cloud

$0forever — open source, self-hosted, yours

BUILT IN THE OPEN

It began as a weekend toy that asked
“which photo is better?”

Three years and 2,304 commits later, that toy is a darkroom with a physically-modeled film emulation engine — and then, at 182,688 lines, it was gutted back down to a core you can hold in your head. The whole history is a Factorio-style development log: every idea, trade-off, benchmark and near-disaster, with live demos you can play with and screenshots captured by running the actual software at each point in time.

2,304commits, from a 228-line script to a darkroom

0.06%of the catalog was irreplaceable — the rest was deleted

53real film scans behind the emulation engine

READ THE FIELD LOG →

FIND YOUR BEARING

Your photos are your own.
The app ships empty and hungry.

Runs on your own hardware — computer, NAS, or server. Everything you just used was real: real frames, real catalog data, real math.

GET STARTED ON GITHUB

50,000 photos feel like fifty.Here are 36 real ones — filter them.

A canvas, not a modal.Keyboard-first. Try the keys.

Pick the best one.That's it. That's the interface.

Two engines, fused.These results came from the real ones.

Google Photos owns your library.Lightroom was never its home.Take the best instincts of both.