Ingest Studio

Ingest Studio · Coming Soon · v0.1

Photos.Videos.Under control.

A media catalog for creative studios that turns the mess of cards, drives and sidecars into one searchable library — synced across every device, ready to deliver as galleries or a portfolio, and entirely yours on your own hardware. You keep editing in Lightroom, Capture One or DaVinci; Ingest Studio takes care of everything around it.

$ ingest serve --nas /media/photos --tailnet studio
indexed 3,421 assets · 24 projects
listening on 127.0.0.1:9090 · tailscale 100.x.x.x
OK ready

What it does

Built for everythingbetween the camera and the client.

Catalog

One library for photos and video

RAW photos, ProRes clips, log footage and the XMP sidecars from your editor of choice all live in the same library, where you can search, tag and version them as a single collection — without giving up the tools you already use to edit.

Organize

Projects, not folders

Each project keeps its own assets, metadata and exports together, so you can archive a job, branch it for variants or hand it off to someone else without anything bleeding into the next one.

Sync

1 device or 100. Same catalog.

Pair a workstation with a single code and the catalog — every tag, every sidecar, every version — shows up everywhere within seconds, even after long stretches of offline work.

Deliver

Pro

Galleries clients actually use

Send your client a private link they open without signing up, control watermarks, expiry and access from your end, and watch any selection they make flow straight back into the catalog you're already curating.

Show

Pro

Your portfolio, from your catalog

Tag the work that should be public and Ingest Studio publishes it to your own domain — no second CMS to maintain, and the output is cache- and CDN-friendly from the start.

Plan

Later

Digital storyboards

Block out the shots you want to capture before the shoot and let the resulting assets fall into place afterwards — the catalog already knows what you've got.

Scale

From a Mac mini under your deskto a studio of 100 workstations.

Ingest Studio doesn't have to grow into a multi-user setup because it already starts there. The same catalog server happily runs from a Mac mini under your desk to a studio with twelve workstations attached, and adding a new station is as simple as pairing it with a code, the way you'd set up a Sonos speaker. Drop a device offline and the catalog won't notice — and adding more machines never triggers a tier upgrade, you simply plug them in.

Run anywhere

Your hardware.Your rules.

One binary, three deployment shapes — install on the hardware you already own and stay in control of your archive. No cloud account required.

01

Self-hosted

Mac mini

One-click installer

Ideal for studios with up to six workstations attached — Apple Silicon recommended for the best ML performance on visual search.

02

Self-hosted

NAS

Synology · QNAP · TrueNAS

A container-based deployment that sits right next to your existing storage and reuses the disks you already own.

03

Self-hosted

Linux box

Single binary or Docker

Scales horizontally with read replicas once your catalog outgrows a single machine.

For developers

One catalog.Many surfaces.REST in between.

The catalog lives on the server — Postgres alongside the originals on disk. Every workstation, every gallery and every portfolio request flows through the same REST boundary, so there are no direct database connections, no shared filesystem mounts and no glue code wedged between surfaces.

Catalog · Serverpostgres + originalsREST + Sync · N devicesMac miniStudio MacField LaptopURL tokenGalleriesCustomerREST · read · CDNPortfolioPublicComingStoryboardLater · v1.x

Click any node to zoom in.

Open core

Solo is free.Pro is on the way.

Free · MIT

Solo

The single-user core of the catalog — ingest, projects, search, sidecar sync — all open-source and running on a single machine. No license server, no telemetry, no upsell.

  • Single-user catalog
  • Multi-format ingest (RAW, video, sidecars)
  • Projects & exports
  • Self-hosted, MIT-licensed

Subscription · Coming Soon · v1.0

Pro

Pro adds multi-user catalog access, customer galleries, a public portfolio and digital storyboards on top of Solo. It will ship as a subscription — pricing and rollout details land closer to v1.0, so drop your email below to be the first to hear.

  • Multi-user catalog access
  • Customer galleries
  • Public portfolio
  • Digital storyboards
  • Priority support

Sign-up opens later. Until then, follow the project on GitLab.

Roadmap

What's now.What's next.

  • 01SoloNowSingle-user catalog, projects, self-hosting
  • 02Multi-Device SyncNextPair-by-code, sub-second propagation
  • 03Customer GalleriesNextURL-token access, selection workflow
  • 04Public PortfolioLaterCustom domain, CDN-ready
  • 05StoryboardsLaterPlan shots before, attach assets after