Lunelis

A photo library for Windows that runs entirely on your own PC. Lunelis catalogues the photos and videos you already have - on local drives, USB drives and network storage - without moving, renaming or changing them, and gives you what you need to look after a large collection for the long term.

No accounts, no cloud, no subscriptions. Originals are never touched, and nothing is deleted behind your back.

Install

1. Open Releases and download Lunelis-vX.Y.Z-setup.exe from the newest release.
2. Run it. It installs for your Windows account only (no administrator rights) into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Lunelis, adds Lunelis to the Start menu and to Settings > Apps, and asks a few setup questions: your photo folders, where the catalog lives, the tray and start-with-Windows, and optional AI models.
3. Lunelis keeps itself up to date from Settings > Updates. You never run the installer again.

Prefer no installer? Download Lunelis-vX.Y.Z-windows.zip instead, unzip it into a folder of its own and run Lunelis.exe; a Welcome window asks the same questions. Lunelis isn't code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen asks once per version: More info > Run anyway.

Requirements: Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. The full walkthrough is in Getting started.

What it does

Area
Cameras	JPEG, HEIC, PNG, WebP and RAW from Sony, Canon (CR2 and CR3), Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung and DNG, plus MP4 / MOV video. RAW+JPEG pairs are shown as one photo.
Browse and find	A fast grid with a timeline, filters, full-text search, smart albums, a map, On this day, and Ask your library ("sunset on a beach, 2024").
Rate, cull, organise	Stars, labels, flags, full-screen culling with compare, albums, events, nested tags, scene tag suggestions from a model on this PC. Everything is written to standard XMP sidecars.
Edit	Non-destructive: light, colour, tone curve, crop, lens corrections, noise reduction, masks (including AI subject and sky), retouch, virtual copies, My look, colour-managed export with presets.
Create	13 tools: animations, collages, batch copies, contact sheets, timelapses, slideshow videos, before-and-after, prints, focus stacks, star trails, median stacks, panoramas, HDR.
Videos	Playback with trim to a new file; Sony S-Log3 clips shown with a built-in look or your own LUTs.
Bring photos in	Memory-card, phone and USB-stick import, verified twice, with Autopilot (burst covers, scene tags, event name, draft album) and Review your shoot to undo any step. Google Takeout exports are read with their albums and dates, and reviewed before anything moves.
People	Faces found and grouped on this PC, named once, merged when one person was split in two.
Clean up	Exact and near-duplicates with keeper rules, damaged-file checks and timelapse detection.
Migrate	A nine-step wizard that brings a scattered library (drives, NAS pools, Google Takeout) onto one drive as Library\Photos and Videos\Year\Day\Photos / Videos / Timelapse. A dry run first; every copy read back and compared; originals kept until you release them, then held in Trash until you empty it; an accounted-for report that checks every source file before anything is released. Resumes after a power cut, waits for a sleeping NAS or a full disk.
Keep safe	Catalog backups, verified photo backups, quarantine instead of deletion, rolling integrity checks, a sensor dust map per camera.
Share at home	A family gallery: an album on phones and TVs on your home network, never the internet.

How to use each part is in the wiki; moving a whole library onto one drive is in Migrate and consolidate.

Screenshots

Edit - non-destructive, with filters, masks and a tone curve.	Midnight - one of three themes (Graphite, Midnight, High contrast).
Create - 13 tools that make new files and never touch the originals.	Duplicates - every copy verified byte for byte before it can be set aside.
Migrate - one tidy library from many drives, previewed before anything moves.

The screenshots show a made-up demo library (docs/_tools/demo_library.py), not real photos.

Privacy

Everything runs on your PC. Lunelis has no account and sends nothing anywhere, with three exceptions: the update check against GitHub Releases (on by default, off in Settings > Updates), and two you switch on yourself - the optional AI model downloads, and map tiles from OpenStreetMap. The family gallery is reachable only from your home network.

Run from source

py -3.13 -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt -e .
python -m pytest
python -m lunelis

Python 3.13 and PySide6 (Qt 6), a SQLite catalog, rawpy (LibRaw), PyAV, OpenCV and onnxruntime. Tests never touch real data. Building Lunelis.exe and the installer, the repository layout and the extension points are in For developers; the engineering notes and the gotchas are in CLAUDE.md.

Where things live

• The program: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Lunelis (or wherever you unzipped it).
• Your library data (catalog, thumbnails, backups, central sidecars): %LOCALAPPDATA%\Lunelis, or the folder you chose. Never inside your photo folders and never inside the program folder.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.