A folder of photographs goes in.
A book you would show someone comes out.
Colophon reads the folder, drops what would weaken the album, lays out every spread, and hands you a draft you can argue with. It runs on your machine, it has no account, and the finished PDF goes to whichever print shop you like.
Free and open source, GPL-3.0. macOS today, Windows next.
One run
on 48 spreads across 12 chapters, in under a minute, with every discarded frame listed and explained.
- scan
- analyse
- curate
- compose
- export
A 21 × 21 cm album, composed from a holiday folder, untouched by hand.
What it guarantees
An auto-layout is judged on its worst spread.
So the constraints are written as code and checked by a linter that fails the build, rather than left as good intentions. The composer will never:
- put a portrait photograph in a landscape cell, or the reverse
- let a detected face touch a cropped edge, closer than 4 % of the frame
- place two near-duplicates, or two shots of the same scene, on one spread
- open a chapter on a weak frame, or run five spreads without a breathing page
- repeat the same template four times in a row
- retouch a single pixel of your photograph
Ten counters check the finished album and refuse to pass if any of them trips. When a correction keeps coming back, it becomes a new counter.
The Sort view
It tells you what it dropped, and why.
Every discarded photograph is shown, grouped by the reason it lost its place: too soft, near-duplicate, another shot of the same scene, too small to print at this size, panorama that does not fit the page.
Next to each one sits the frame it lost to. One click puts it back in the book.
This is the part nobody else shows you, and it is the part that makes automatic curation something you can trust rather than something you have to check.
Printing
A plain PDF, at 300 dpi, that any print shop accepts.
No partner you have to use, no watermark, no logo, no barcode of ours on your book. Fonts are embedded, the bleed follows the shop’s own profile, and the preview shows the page at its trimmed size rather than promising a margin the guillotine will take.
Before you send anything, a preflight check runs: pagination, bleed on each edge, colour space, embedded fonts, effective resolution cell by cell, safe zone. Every message names the spread and the cause in plain language and tells you the gesture that fixes it.
Nothing ever fails silently, least of all on the last screen of the journey.
colophon --prevol --profil cloudprinter -o my-albumWhat it does not do
No account, no cloud, no telemetry, ever.
There is no server to send your photographs to. Pull the network cable and everything still works, the export included. The one call Colophon makes is a question at launch, to GitHub, about whether a newer version exists; it carries nothing of your photographs and nothing of your album, and Preferences turns it off.
The album is a folder on your disk with a readable JSON file in it, which you can repair in a text editor. Your original photographs are read and never modified.
Get it
Two commands, today.
Signed binaries are not published yet. Building from source takes a Rust toolchain, Node 20, and a couple of minutes.
-
cargo build --releaseBuilds the engine and the command line.
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./target/release/colophon ~/Pictures/holidays -o album --format carre-21Composes the album, then writes album.json and a preview PDF next to it.
Requirements and the full walkthrough are in the repository’s README.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
Can I print it wherever I want?
Yes. The output is a standard PDF at 300 dpi and there is no printing partner this software needs you to use. Print it at a shop, at a lab, or at home.
Do my photographs go into a cloud?
No. There is no server. Colophon works with the network switched off, and it will keep working the day this project stops being maintained.
Is this AI?
No model, no prompt, no cloud inference. Perceptual hashes for duplicates, a sharpness measure, exposure, and face detection so heads do not get sliced. All local, all explained, all overridable. If an AI mode ever ships it will use your own key, stay optional, and never decide anything by itself.
Why not just use InDesign or Scribus?
Because they start from an empty page, and the empty page is not the hard part. Choosing 150 photographs out of 600 and placing them so the book reads is the hard part. If you would rather design every spread by hand, InDesign is the better tool and this one is not trying to replace it.
What about my HEIC files?
Read natively through the system decoder, ImageIO on macOS and WIC on Windows. Nothing to install.
How do you make money?
Not from this. The software is free and stays free, and so does the full-resolution PDF export, offline and without an account. An optional way to order a printed copy may come later, for people who would rather click once than deal with a print shop. If it never arrives, nothing here changes.
Windows? Linux?
Windows is next, and it is a real port rather than a checkbox. Linux compiles and runs from source today; what is missing is a signed package and someone to test it on more than one distribution.
CMYK, layflat, hard covers?
Not yet. Colour space and binding live in the printer profile, so they arrive one profile at a time, when a real print shop asks for them.