Cura Photo Manager

A desktop photo management application built with Tauri (Rust backend) and Next.js (React frontend).

Features

• Automated image and video scanning with metadata extraction
• AI-powered image classification using Transformers.js
• Fast thumbnail generation with caching (images and videos)
• Natural language search with CLIP
• Google Drive cloud synchronization
• SQLite database for efficient metadata storage
• Support for multiple image formats (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, RAW)
• Support for multiple video formats (MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, etc.)
• Configurable format selection for images and videos
• Video thumbnail extraction using FFmpeg

For detailed video features documentation, see the Video Features User Guide.

Tech Stack

Backend (Rust)

• Tauri: Desktop application framework
• image: Image processing and manipulation
• kamadak-exif: EXIF metadata extraction
• rayon: Parallel processing
• walkdir: Directory traversal
• rusqlite: SQLite database
• ffmpeg-sidecar: Video frame extraction
• proptest: Property-based testing

Frontend (Next.js/React)

• Next.js: React framework
• @xenova/transformers: Browser-based AI models
• react-window: Virtual scrolling for performance
• Tailwind CSS: Styling
• fast-check: Property-based testing
• vitest: Testing framework

Development Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ and npm/pnpm
• Rust 1.77.2+
• Cargo
• FFmpeg (required for video thumbnail generation)
  • See FFmpeg Installation Guide for detailed instructions

Installation

1. Install FFmpeg (if not already installed):

   • Windows: choco install ffmpeg or see installation guide
   • macOS: brew install ffmpeg
   • Linux: sudo apt install ffmpeg (Ubuntu/Debian)

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Run in development mode:

npm run tauri dev

Testing

Run frontend tests:

npm test

Run Rust tests:

cd src-tauri
cargo test

Building

Build for production:

npm run tauri build

Releases

Creating a Release

To create a complete release with all artifacts:

Windows:

.\scripts\prepare-release.ps1 -Version "1.0.0"

macOS/Linux:

./scripts/prepare-release.sh 1.0.0

This will:

• Run all tests
• Build release artifacts for your platform
• Generate SHA-256 checksums
• Create release notes from template
• Create testing checklist

Release Documentation

• Release Process Guide - Complete release workflow
• Release Artifacts Guide - Installer information
• Distribution Guide - Building and distribution
• Code Signing Guide - Code signing setup

Verifying Downloads

Users can verify installer integrity:

# Windows
.\scripts\verify-checksum.ps1 -InstallerPath "installer.exe" -ChecksumFile "checksums.txt"

# macOS/Linux
./scripts/verify-checksum.sh installer.dmg checksums.txt

Project Structure

.
├── src/                    # Next.js frontend source
│   ├── app/               # Next.js app router pages
│   ├── components/        # React components
│   └── __tests__/         # Frontend tests
├── src-tauri/             # Rust backend source
│   └── src/
│       ├── database.rs    # SQLite database module
│       ├── lib.rs         # Main application entry
│       └── main.rs        # Binary entry point
├── .kiro/specs/           # Feature specifications
└── public/                # Static assets

Database Schema

The application uses SQLite with three main tables:

• images: Stores image metadata and file paths
• tags: AI-generated content tags with confidence scores
• embeddings: CLIP embeddings for semantic search

License

[Your License Here]