Obscura Flow
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Photographers

Keeping control of your own work, assignment after assignment.

Delivered images go to the client. What stays with you is a body of work that grows every year, and whose context nobody else will ever know.

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In short

An independent photographer accumulates a body of work only they can interpret. Obscura Flow structures it into projects and collections, writes the context into standard XMP sidecars, and seals verifiable archives before copying them off-site.

  • Projects with a draft, active, archived lifecycle
  • Clear separation between client work and personal series
  • Metadata written to sidecars, originals untouched
  • Archives sealed before off-site copy
  • Local use with no account and no connection

The problem only shows up after a few years

For the first three years, memory is enough. Then drives pile up, naming conventions change, and finding one specific series becomes a job in itself.

Successive drives
Each drive has its own filing logic, inherited from whenever it was bought.
File names
They carry context at first, then become unreadable once the convention changes.
Duplicates
The same series exists in three places, in three states, with no way to tell which is authoritative.
Lost context
The location, the commission, who was present: nobody else will be able to reconstruct them.

What actually changes

The goal is not to file everything at once, but to make the collection searchable and to fix what matters before it is forgotten.

Find
Full-text search, smart collections, and saved searches across the whole collection.
Prove
A manifest and a signature tell you whether a file is intact, which no drive does.
Deliver again
A client asking for a series five years later gets an answer in minutes, not days.
Pass on
A documented body of work has value for a gallery, an estate, or an institution.

Questions

Is there a free version?

Local offline use is available without a license. Online plans add quotas, sync, and advanced features depending on needs.

Are my original files modified?

No. The app is non-destructive: enriched metadata is written to XMP sidecars, never into the original files.

Can I import a Lightroom catalog?

Yes. Lightroom Classic catalog import (.lrcat) preserves originals, ratings, captions, color labels, keywords, collections, virtual copies, and stacks without changing your Lightroom catalog.

Can it handle large archives?

Yes. SQLite cataloging, virtualized galleries, and parallel processing remain usable on tens of thousands of images.

What happens if I stop using Obscura Flow?

Your originals never left your disks, and metadata is written to XMP sidecars, a standard format other tools can read. Archives remain packages accompanied by their manifest: nothing depends on the application still being installed.

How do I get the application?

Public downloads are not open yet. Releases are published on GitHub Releases and access can be arranged case by case: describe your context through the contact page.

Continue

Photo catalog

Collections, keywords, and search across a full collection.

Lightroom alternative

What sits alongside your development tool.

Photo backup

Setting up a real 3-2-1 rule.

Decision

Build an archive that stays understandable.

Tell us about your context before the public opening of downloads and commercial offers.

Book a meetingRead the documentation