jaap14/darkroom-log repository overview

⁠Darkroom Log

Self-hosted darkroom printing log and analog photo library, built for Immich integration.

Each print page records full exposure data (shutter / aperture / ISO / lens), tags, every print session you've made of it (paper, enlarger, lens, exposure, dodge/burn notes), and chips for any album the print belongs to so you can jump straight to that album from the print itself.

Albums double as public, shareable galleries — each gets its own URL with a custom branded header, optional slideshow, and pinch-zoom on every photo. No login required for viewers.

Source: https://github.com/jaapjan14/darkroom-log⁠

Immich compatibility: actively run in production against Immich v3.2.0 (upgraded 2026-09-13, audited clean against this image). Talks to Immich entirely through its REST API (asset/search/album/tag endpoints), so it isn't tied to Immich's internal ML/vector-search backend — the v3 migration (pgvecto.rs → VectorChord) needed no changes on Darkroom's side. Not tested against Immich versions older than v3. Note: Immich v3.2.0 formally deprecated the "flat" search endpoints this app's Immich integration is built on, with removal planned for a future Immich v4 — no impact today, but a v4 upgrade will require a search-layer rewrite here.

⁠What's new in v1.5.114–117

Security hardening plus a handful of fixes.

• Breaking: APP_PASSWORD (or PASSWORD_HASH) is now required. The server refuses to start if neither is set, instead of silently falling back to a built-in default password. If you already set one, nothing changes.
• Patched dependency DoS advisories in express, body-parser, qs and multer.
• Fixed: the "+ Album" picker didn't move the album you'd just added to back to the top until a page reload. It now updates immediately. Removing, reordering and renaming also keep the Albums tab's "Recently updated" sort current. The picker's Immich-albums tab is now sorted by most recently updated too.
• Fixed: the Analog tab's Sort button did nothing, and the Prints tab could get stuck on "Loading..." when Analog was the default tab.

⁠What's new in v1.5.109–113

Renamed the Library/Immich tabs to match what's actually in them, plus a mode-toggle and Prints sort cleanup.

• Renamed tabs: Library → Analog, Immich → Digital — the old names didn't reflect content. "Analog" is film work exclusively; "Digital" is digital-camera work (organized into Immich's native albums), once cleared of redundant film-scan albums now covered by this app's own Albums tab.
• New Print/Analog mode toggle in the header — swap which of Prints/Analog opens first and reads first in the tab bar, since the right default depends on whether you're printing or working through scans that day. Persisted, so it's a one-time flip.
• Prints tab's Sort is now a compact dropdown at the end of the search bar instead of an always-visible button row, matching the Analog tab's existing pattern.

⁠What's new in v1.5.104–108

Library tag-add bug fixes plus a dedicated title regenerate button.

• Fixed: pasting a multi-word tag list into a "+ tag" input shredded every tag into single words — the paste handler split on any whitespace instead of just commas. Multi-word tags (e.g. "black and white film") now paste correctly, and slashes are stripped from Library tags to avoid Immich's nested-tag-hierarchy parsing (f/2 → f2).
• Fixed: a tag could silently fail to link with no error shown — the server now verifies each tag-link write actually succeeded against Immich's real per-item result before reporting success, instead of assuming success whenever the request didn't throw.
• Fixed: the Library tags row often needed a manual page reload to show a just-added/removed tag — it now updates from the write the client already knows succeeded, instead of immediately re-reading Immich (whose read-after-write isn't always immediate).
• New: dedicated "regenerate" button for just the suggested title — get a fresh title idea without re-running the whole caption/tag generation.

⁠What's new in v1.5.102–103

Two Immich-tab fixes: a smarter Album picker sort, and Immich albums that had gone blank when opened.

• "Add to Album" picker now sorts most-recently-used first — with enough albums accumulated, finding the right one when filing a photo was getting tedious. Reuses the existing "last updated" sort already used for the main Albums grid.
• Fixed: Immich albums appeared empty when opened, despite showing a correct photo count — as of Immich v3.1.0, GET /albums/:id stopped inlining an assets array (only assetCount comes back now). This app's Immich-albums proxy now separately fetches the asset list via Immich's search/metadata endpoint and merges it back in, so opening an album shows its photos again.

⁠What's new in v1.5.101

Library-tab title and tag editing, AI-suggested titles, and a public-album timezone fix.

• Library-tab title and tag editing — the "Generate" button's suggestions can now actually be saved on Library photos, not just Prints: a new title edit and tag add/remove path writes real Immich tags and a manual title entry, separate from the Prints-only fields.
• AI-suggested titles — the Tag & Caption generator now proposes a short, evocative title for untitled photos alongside its tag suggestions.
• Public album date fix — photo dates/times on public albums could render several hours off from the actual capture time; fixed a local-vs-UTC timezone mismatch in the date formatting.
• Library search results no longer wipe to "No recent uploads" when re-entering the Library tab after filtering by a Lens/Camera/City/State chip.

⁠What's new in v1.5.95–100

A one-click Tag & Caption generator for posting photos to Lomography, Flickr, and Instagram, plus a desktop layout fix.

• Tag & Caption generator — a new "Generate" button in the photo detail view (both the Prints and Library tabs) produces four copy-ready outputs per photo: a Standard Caption, a Lomography tag string (kept under its 123-character limit), a Flickr tag list, and a 3-line Instagram post (title / gear line / 5 hashtags). Camera, film, developer, lens, and format are pulled straight from your logged metadata; an AI pass ranks your existing tags by how likely someone is to actually search for them, and suggests a handful more for anything visible in the photo that isn't tagged yet — shown as "+" chips you can add to the photo's real tags, never applied automatically. Works even on untagged photos, generating a full tag set from the image itself. Requires an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in your container environment.
• Fixed a desktop-only layout bug where the info panel could grow taller than the visible area with no way to scroll down to see it.

⁠What's new in v1.5.80–94

A mobile-first rework of the Library toolbar, plus a new Film Type filter and several Immich v3 migration fixes.

• Library toolbar rebuilt for mobile — the search bar is back to just a search box and a "Sort" chip. Tap the search box to reveal Camera/Lens/State/City/Film dropdowns, the People avatar picker, and a Text/Smart search-mode toggle; tap Sort to reveal sort options and maintenance actions (full sweep, thumbnail refresh) — instead of a row of cramped buttons.
• Film Type filter — filter the Library by film stock, alongside the existing Camera/Lens/State/City dropdowns.
• People filter now includes unnamed faces — browse a detected-but-untagged face in Darkroom before naming it in Immich.
• "Last Edited" sort — a third Library sort option, separate from Upload Date and Date Taken, surfaces what's recently been republished.
• Real-time reconciliation for Immich v3 — republishing an already-printed/albumed photo (Immich v3 assigns a new UUID on every republish) now updates prints/albums and restores the correct Upload Date immediately, instead of waiting on a periodic background script.
• Fixes: archived photos no longer leak into Library search results; an album-embed loading hang specific to Chromium browsers on the same LAN as the server is resolved; an intermittent stale/duplicated Library listing after viewing an album is fixed.

⁠What's new in v1.5.76–79

Reliability fixes for album browsing and the Library grid, plus a forum-friendly share size.

• Library grid no longer goes "wonky" after viewing an album — returning to the Library from an album could occasionally show a stale or duplicated set of photos, most often while albums were being edited. Both the deterministic cause (the album lightbox overwriting the Library's dataset) and an intermittent async-render race (a slow fetch repainting the grid after you'd already navigated back) are now fixed, so the grid always reflects the real library on return.
• Add to Album dedupes by name — typing the name of an existing album in the "+ Create" box now adds the photo into that album instead of silently spawning a duplicate.
• Leica Forum share size — a new share preset caps the long edge at 2048 px (≤2.4 MB) so any aspect ratio, including full squares, stays under the forum's upload limits.
• Upload-date sort default restored — the Library again defaults to Upload Date with a full sweep and a working Load More, instead of a narrow 7-day window.

⁠What's new in v1.5.62–74

Album management and a fix for stale thumbnails after uploads, on top of a round of performance work.

• Rename albums — a ✎ Rename button in the album toolbar. Renaming changes only the display name by default; you're asked per-rename whether to also update the public /album/<slug> URL, so existing share links and embeds don't break unless you choose to change them.
• Sort albums — a Sort dropdown on the Albums tab: Recently updated (default), Recently created, Name (A–Z), or Photo count. Your choice is remembered. Albums now track a last-updated time, bumped on any edit.
• Thumbnail refresh — thumbnail URLs are versioned by the asset's Immich updatedAt, so re-uploading or replacing a photo refreshes its thumbnail automatically instead of leaving a stale one cached. A ⟳ Thumbnails button manually forces a refetch when needed.
• Faster everywhere — gzip/brotli compression on all responses (app shell, thumbnail JSON, and assets ship far smaller) and a server-side LRU cache for slideshow display variants, so repeat slideshow plays are smooth from the first viewing.
• Slideshow pace readout — an optional in-app badge shows live elapsed/target timing while a slideshow plays.

⁠What's new in v1.5.60–61

A focused pass on mobile / cellular performance — browsing the library and public album galleries on a phone (5G) is now fast and smooth, with no dead taps or skipped photos. (v1.5.61 adds post-release hardening: a type-agnostic fallback so the fullscreen viewer never breaks on video/RAW originals, library queries filtered to images, and a few nav-feedback refinements.)

• Instant photo viewing on slow connections — the library detail view, Prints detail, and public album viewers now paint a lightweight, screen-sized image immediately and stream the full-resolution original in behind it, instead of blocking on a multi-megabyte download. Opening or paging through photos no longer feels dead on cellular, and a slow metadata fetch can no longer blank or "fail" the photo.
• Fullscreen prev/next, no jump — on mobile the fullscreen viewer leads with a connection-adaptive display variant (fills the screen right away, then sharpens) and prefetches the neighbouring photos, so prev/next is instant. A 350 ms nav guard means one tap advances exactly one photo (no more ghost-click skipping). Desktop keeps the plain high-res path.
• Public album grids ~20–30× lighter — gallery thumbnails now load Immich's small thumbnail (~16 KB) instead of the ~600 KB preview, so a shared album opens fast on mobile data.
• Filtered-library sorting fixed — applying a tile filter (e.g. a lens model) and then switching Upload date / Date taken no longer empties the grid; the filtered results sort client-side instead of falling back to a broken re-filter.
• Slideshow display variant — slideshow images are server-resized via sharp at a connection-adaptive width (960 / 1280 / 1920 px), fixing black frames on poor wifi where the full original used to fail to decode. Originals still power the lightbox + pinch-zoom.

⁠What's new in v1.5

• In-Albums chips on every print and Recent photo — see at a glance which Darkroom albums each image is in; click to jump straight to the album.
• Public album detail view — tapping a thumbnail in /album/<slug> opens a library-style two-column layout with EXIF (description, date, camera, lens, location), separate from the fullscreen Ken Burns slideshow.
• Pinch-zoom fullscreen viewer — public album fullscreen is now image-only with 1×–5× pinch, pan-when-zoomed, double-tap toggle, swipe-down to close. Trackpad two-finger swipe-up also closes.
• Album metadata API — expanded /api/public/photo/:id returns full EXIF (make, model, lens, focal length, shutter, aperture, ISO, date, city/state/country) for the public viewer. GPS lat/long never leave the server.
• Mobile Load More smoothness — fixed cumulative scroll drift across multi-page library loads; fast-path append now keeps the DOM above untouched.
• Session arrow-key fix — opening "+ Session" no longer leaks left/right arrows into print navigation, so sessions can't accidentally land on the wrong print.
• Lazy-loaded albums — opening a print or Recent photo before visiting the Albums tab no longer silently shows zero album chips; albums fetch on demand.

See CHANGELOG⁠ for full version history.

⁠Quick start

services:
  darkroom:
    image: jaap14/darkroom-log:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      APP_PASSWORD: change-me
      SESSION_SECRET: generate-with-openssl-rand-base64-24
      IMMICH_URL: http://your-immich-host:2283/api
      IMMICH_KEY: your-immich-api-key
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./music:/music   # optional, for slideshow background music

docker compose up -d

Then open http://localhost:3000 and sign in with APP_PASSWORD.

⁠Configuration

⁠Volumes

⁠Tags

• latest — current release
• vX.Y.Z — pinned release

⁠Highlights

• Split-grade and single-grade darkroom workflow with session history per print
• Immich library browser with combined text + CLIP search, person/face filters, and chip-based filtering
• Public album galleries with branded header, Ken Burns slideshow, and iframe-embed support
• A+ security score: CSP without unsafe-inline, login rate limiting, HSTS, full security headers
• Mobile/PWA: install to home screen, swipe gestures, no browser chrome