FerrumPix: bringing photo management, RAW editing and image editing together on Linux

[Bitpainter75]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on for the past few months: FerrumPix.

I’m a Linux user myself, and one of the things I was missing was a photography application that brings most of my workflow together without having to switch between several different programs.

There are some incredibly powerful photography tools on Linux already, but many of them focus on one particular part of the workflow, and some can be quite intimidating when you’re just getting started.

So I started building FerrumPix.

The idea is fairly simple: photo management, RAW development and more advanced image editing in one desktop application, with Linux as the primary development platform.

FerrumPix now has a photo library with ratings, labels, keywords and search, non-destructive RAW development, masks and local adjustments, layers, curves, HSL, color grading, retouching and LUTs. It can also work with layered PSD/PSB files and integrate with G’MIC.

There are some local AI features as well, including tagging, denoising, object removal, upscaling, object selection and depth masks. These can run locally, I don’t want someone’s photo library to require sending images to a cloud service just to use those features.

Another area that’s important to me is self-hosting. FerrumPix can connect directly to Immich and Nextcloud, so you can browse your library there, work with images locally and upload/export them back to the server.

The project is still young and there’s definitely plenty left to improve. But people have started actually using it, which has been great to see. One bit of feedback I particularly liked came from a darktable user who introduced FerrumPix during a photography course with image-editing beginners. They ended up using it during the course, and several participants apparently wanted to continue with it afterwards because they found it approachable.

For Linux there are AppImage, Flatpak, DEB, RPM and ZIP builds, as well as an AUR package. x64 and ARM64 are supported.

FerrumPix is GPL-3.0 licensed and currently has a little over 650 stars on GitHub.

Website: https://ferrumpix.app
GitHub: GitHub - Bitpainter75/FerrumPix: FerrumPix is a desktop photo management and editing application for Linux, Windows and macOS. · GitHub

If you’d like to give it a try, I’d be very interested to hear how it works for you, especially what feels good, what feels confusing, or what’s still missing from your Linux photography workflow.

[Bombilla (John)]

Welcome to the community @Bitpainter75, thanks for joining us!

[ericmarceau]

@jmarkus, this looks like it is right up your alley!

[jmarkus]

Thanks Eric looks like everything except possibly the negate/positive conversion, But NegPy does that!

[jmarkus]

Welcome to the community @Bitpainter75 - will definitely check out FerrumPix

[tkn (thom)]

@Bitpainter75

FerrumPix

I installed it just now, and it looks stunning, visually it has a strong lightroom/darktable vibe. The UI has high discoverability and is really easy to navigate.

There is an immense amount of supported languages. Is this really a one man project ?

two minor things though:

1. I think I found a minor bug in the Text utility: the cursor is one or two characters ahead of where the edit action actually is.

2. If I click ‘settings’ it wants to phone home.
   Is there a special reason for that or is it just for collecting stats about usage ?

I’m not a photographer/editor so I can’t check on quality but as far as I can see, I’m highly impressed

[Bitpainter75]

Hi,

thank you, really glad you like it!

And yes, it’s basically a one-man project. I do use AI quite a bit to help with development and especially with things like translations. Without that, supporting this many languages would be rather difficult for me.

Thanks for the hint about the Text tool too. I’ll have a look at that cursor issue.

And no worries about the connection in Settings, there are no usage stats or telemetry being sent anywhere. It simply reads the VERSION file from GitHub to see if there’s a newer FerrumPix version available. That’s all.

FerrumPix is meant to stay local and privacy-first, so I definitely don’t want it collecting usage data in the background.

Thanks again for trying it and for taking the time to send me some feedback!

Patrick

[Norm24 (Norm)]

Just installed this myself and all I can say is wow! I very much like it.

I’m not much of photographer but the wife is and I think she will very much appreciate this app.

[andreas]

Hey, welcome to the community! This looks like an absolutely fantastic piece of software. I do like to do some photography sometimes and always shoot RAW, but I’ve always felt like I can never extract the full functionality out of tools such as Darktable or RawTherapee to accomplish what I have in mind. I will definitely check out your software, it looks amazing!

[jmarkus]

Patrick, It’s like you have been reading my mind. I love it! I was wrong about the negative/positive conversions - it’s there. The settings panel is amazing, the addons, font sizes (Thank-you VERY much). I threw a 6000 image folder at it (small 1400px). I couldn’t tell if it cataloged anything, but in folder view it’s all there, thumbnails and all - wow. The cropping, gui, terminology (i don’t have to learn a new language) ALL excellent. Got the update from today. I am truly flabbergasted. Does it have the ability to apply color profiles? (for infrared Photography) Look, here is a raw file imaged from a Nikon D850 using a manual focus 50mm f1.2 ais lens, and an old piece of film also imaged from raw (kid with cone) using the negative/positive tool. The colors are super. I can’t thank you enough, and my old eyes are very happy.

[Bitpainter75]

Thanks, that is lovely to read.

On colour profiles: FerrumPix does respect embedded ICC profiles, so Adobe RGB or Display P3 images are interpreted correctly when they are opened. After that, the working space is sRGB.

What FerrumPix does not support yet is loading a custom camera profile, whether DCP or ICC. So for infrared work, the honest answer is: not properly, at least not yet.

There are a few tools that can still get you part of the way. The white balance eyedropper works from the RAW data, so you can click on foliage and get a useful starting point without having to drag the temperature slider to its limit. From there you have separate red, green and blue curves, plus the colour mixer.

That covers quite a bit of the usual infrared colour work, but a proper red/blue channel swap is still missing at the moment.

Best regards
Patrick

[ericmarceau]

Very happy, Jim, that I could bring this to your attention.

Looks like you’ve found a new Preferred App Supplier!

[jmarkus]

Patrick, I need to do a deeper dive into the included features, but I want to know where you are headed (or maybe the features are already there) For example: you mention srgb color space, and it has grayscale - might lab color be part of your plan? Are Layers, channels, blending modes, alignments something to look forward to being added. I use Photoshop’s scripting all the time via “actions”, and “automate” - thinking about including those? Does the database have an upper image limit (number of images/size of database)? Sorry, I’m just full of questions.

It appears to me you are very familiar with Photoshop, but you fixed something I have complained about for 30 years - their poor proprietary gui. You really have thought out a wonderful application, and how to intuitively get to each step. Thanks again
Jim

I imaged this tonight from a 1969 Pentax 6x7 with a smc-Pentax-67 55mm f3.5 lens shot on Ultrafine Xtreme 400 black and white film at 800 iso souped in Xtol 1+1 16 minutes 68 degrees and digitized using a Canon 5dsr. I did my usual Lightroom > Negative Lab Pro > Photoshop + some bells and whistles. And just FerrumPix. I prefer the FerrumPix results. The logo and stroke border I did add in Photoshop. This is for my “Decay” image collection.

[Bitpainter75]

Jim, thank you.

Hearing that you preferred the result over your usual Lightroom / Negative Lab Pro / Photoshop workflow genuinely made my day.

Some of the things you asked about are already there. FerrumPix has a proper layer stack with masks, groups, opacity and blend modes, as well as RGB and luminance curves. There is also automatic horizon levelling and perspective correction.

What is still missing are things like Photoshop-style channel editing, automatic alignment of multiple images or layers, and a true Actions/Automate-style system. For repeatable work, presets and batch tools already cover quite a lot: like rename, convert, resize, watermark, filters, metadata and export.

Lab colour is not part of the editing workflow at the moment. I definitely want to keep improving the colour side of FerrumPix, but I would rather not promise a specific implementation before I know I can do it properly.

The catalogue itself uses SQLite and there is no artificial image-count limit in FerrumPix. I simply have not tested it with truly huge libraries yet, so I would rather be honest about that than throw out a number I cannot back up.

And no need to apologise for asking a lot of questions. These are exactly the kinds of questions that help me understand how people actually want to use FerrumPix.

Thanks again for sharing the image and your experience with it.

[Halano]

nice one I dropped a star

[jmarkus]

Patrick, You seem to want feedback, and I thought this comparative edit had me run into a couple things that may illustrate professional workflow. I would only store images offsite as a plan b backup. I use NAS to store, and work on my image database locally. It is huge, but I can’t get to it through FerrumPix (UbuntuMATE appimage version), because I can’t tie into the smb network which the computer is attached. I can copy the files I want to work on to the local machine, but it isn’t efficient for me. If it could see the mapped drives on the cat5 network it would solve this issue for me. I see the Immich option, but it sounds a bit like Plexserver which is bloated. I’ve been using openelec for many many years (15?) no connection to the outside (my choice), tiny footprint, it’s just been a workhorse.

Another item I missed is the History palette. It is like a recording list of operations, and you can back up by simply clicking higher up on the list to an early edit. It also is handy to paint from the history brush (tied to this list) by adjusting just one area/revert by clicking the previous history state/and then just painting that adjustment (by ticking a box from the history state you want to use as a source) onto that one area. Now that I write that out I understand why some people’s eyes glaze over when I explain things.

Questions:
-Is the image database stored locally or can it be?
-Can it be optimized, and/or repaired?
-Are all the thumbnails the ones embedded in the file?
-can it generate higher quality thumbnails?

Suggestion:
-One consistent set of buttons for switching from editor, viewer/database, and other functions - or a forward and back arrow to the right of your title bar logo seems to be an unused spot.

Here is the latest edit Halloween (an American holiday) is the topic. In this case I’m not happy with either. I wanted something between the two. I am my worst critic, but both versions were edited from the same raw file, converted from a negative image. Same camera, lens and film as before.

[Bitpainter75]

Hi Jim,

Your NAS/SMB workflow makes perfect sense. FerrumPix is designed to keep the library local; it does not require Immich, Nextcloud or any external service.
On Linux the catalogue is a local SQLite database, and the images themselves always remain where they are.

FerrumPix works with folders that are mounted in the local filesystem; it does not currently browse SMB shares itself. So for a NAS library, the reliable approach is to mount the share permanently via `/etc/fstab` (or an equivalent system mount) and add the resulting local mount path to FerrumPix.

On my machine i have those lines in my fstab configuration:

//10.3.3.11/Fotos  /home/patrick/Asterix/Fotos  cifs   user,uid=1000,rw,iocharset=utf8,suid,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,x-systemd.automount,credentials=/home/patrick/.smblogin   0 0

A share opened only through the file manager’s “Network” view may not be available as a normal folder path to every application. Once it is mounted, FerrumPix should treat it like any other local folder.

There is already a catalogue cleanup option in Settings, which removes metadata entries for files that no longer exist. A proper integrity check, optimise, or full rebuild tool is not available in the UI yet, though, and that would be a sensible addition for a large library.

For thumbnails, FerrumPix creates its own 480-pixel thumbnail files and stores them in a separate local thumbnail cache. For RAW files it normally uses the largest suitable embedded preview as the source, then resizes and caches it. If there is no usable embedded preview, it falls back to rendering one from the RAW file. There is also an option to use developed RAW thumbnails instead of the embedded camera preview.

FerrumPix already has a History tab next to the Layers panel, so you can inspect and return to earlier editing states. Navigation is already designed as a simple flow: Gallery → Viewer → Editor. Double-clicking an image moves forward to the next area. The Home button
takes you one step back, from the Editor to the Viewer, and from the Viewer to the Gallery and Escape also moves back.

A number of these behaviours are configurable in Settings already:

• Gallery images can open in either the Viewer or the Editor.
• In the Viewer, double-click can either open the Editor or return to the Gallery.
• RAW thumbnails normally use the fast embedded camera preview, but edited RAWs can optionally be rendered for the Gallery instead.
• The Viewer can also render edited RAWs, and, if desired, even unedited RAWs, rather than showing the embedded preview.
• Thumbnail caching can be enabled or disabled; JPEG quality and the amount of thumbnail memory cache are configurable.
• The local catalogue can be cleaned up from Settings, removing metadata entries for files that no longer exist.
• Ratings, colour labels and keywords can optionally be synchronised to standard XMP sidecars.

Marc has already made a nice review about it with technical details:

FerrumPix: A New Kid on the Block – First Impressions

Thanks again for taking the time to write this up.
Patrick

[jmarkus]

Patrick, It’s embarrassing, but I knew it was likely that many of the things I bring up are already addressed. I’ve only had a few days to find things, and 37 years to learn Ps. Just used text, layers, rotate, flips and opacity - even many of the keystrokes are the same. I wonder how you define “few months” as you mention in your initial post. Amazing work, never-the-less, no matter how long it took.

Haven’t edited fstab in ages, but that was for a real linux box - not a virtual machine. Here goes another dive. Thank you for your patience and responses.
Jim

[Bitpainter75]

I’m really enjoying hearing what you discover while using it, so please keep the comments coming. No need to worry whether something is already there or not.
Sometimes that also tells me that I haven’t made a feature easy enough to find.

And good luck with the fstab adventure. It is the real Linux way

[tkn (thom)]

Wow! The FerrumPix version looks more detailed and richer in contrast (especially in the dark ‘dents’ in the foreground ) than the Lr>NLP>Ps version. I didn’t expect such a difference, or any difference that an ‘untrained eye’ like me would detect.