Drop in the stills off a shoot. Every frame is looked at on our own graphics cards and sorted into the sets you can actually use — by the moment it caught, described in words, not by a hash.
Nothing opens in this browser — this one takes a job and does the work on our own graphics cards in Oregon. The free allowance below is how you try it: 40 frames, no card and no payment, on the key you are issued.
This is not Poster and it is not a duplicate finder. It asks which of your own frames to use; it does not judge whether a platform will allow one.
The problem
Four thousand frames come off a day. Somewhere in there is the cover, the three for the listing, the set for the newsletter and the eight for socials — and finding them means scrolling a contact sheet until your eyes go. So the same six frames get used for everything because they were near the top, and the rest of the day's work is a folder that is never opened again.
Frames are grouped by what the model says is happening in them — the moment, the framing, the setup — not by a perceptual hash. A hash groups frames that look alike; a description groups frames that mean the same thing, which is what you are actually sorting for.
Twelve near-identical frames off one burst come back as one group with a pick, so the contact sheet is forty moments rather than four thousand frames.
Darkroom never says a frame is blocked, risky or unusable. That is Poster's job and it has its own refusals. Mixing the two would make one answer out of two different questions.
Three programs read a still in this family and they are deliberately separate. Darkroom asks which of your own frames to use. Poster asks whether a cover frame will clear a platform's rules. Dupe asks whether two listings are the same product. Each has a different refusal, and a single tool answering all three would let a soft answer on one quietly stand in for a hard answer on another.
How it works
The stills off the shoot, as they came out of the camera or the export. No naming convention, no tagging, no sidecar files.
On Tower 1's own graphics cards, in Oregon. The model describes what is in the frame — the moment, the framing, who is where — and that description is what the sorting is built on.
Groups with a suggested pick from each, and the description that put them together. A group you disagree with is obviously wrong rather than mysteriously wrong, because the reason is written down.
What it will never do
Darkroom holds your stills for the length of a job and that is the most sensitive thing anything in this family does. Here is exactly what that means.
Pricing
A frame is a frame looked at. A frame that fails to read — a corrupt file, an unsupported format — is not charged. Forty are free on every key, which is a small set rather than a shoot, and deliberately enough to see what the descriptions look like on your own pictures.
A small set, to see the descriptions on your own work.
A month of shooting, sorted as it comes in.
Years of stills nobody has ever sorted.
Flat per frame. An unreadable file is not charged, and the job report names it rather than silently skipping it. Your licence key is emailed to you within two working days of payment.
Checkout is our own bitcoin server, not a card processor. The units you buy are added to your key: buy from the Buy more box inside the program and they arrive on their own once the payment confirms, or buy here and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that box.
Questions
For the length of the job, and then they are gone.
This is the one product in the family that takes your work at all, and it is why it is the one with the shortest description of what happens to it. There is no library, no cache and no backup on our side — a job that has closed cannot be re-run without you sending the frames again, and that inconvenience is the proof.
Because a hash finds frames that look alike, and you are looking for frames that mean something.
Two frames a second apart with a hand in a different place are nearly identical to a hash and are two different pictures to you. The description is the product; the burst grouping is the part a hash could have done.
It will suggest a pick per group, on composition. It will not tell you whether that frame clears a platform's rules.
Send the shortlist to Poster for that. Two questions, two programs, two refusals.
The common still formats off a camera or an export. Anything it cannot read comes back named in the report and uncharged.
A key. One line of text, issued to you and shown exactly once — only its hash is kept here, so it cannot be looked up later and we could not tell you what yours is. Every key arrives with a free allowance already on it, which is the tier at the top of the pricing above, and the work starts the first time you send a job with that key on it.
Each job is metered in the unit named in the pricing, and a unit that fails — a file that will not read, a row the model held back — is not charged and is named in the job report rather than silently skipped. When an allowance runs out the next job is refused before any work starts, with the number it used printed on the refusal.
More units are bought in bitcoin. The checkout is a bitcoin server we run ourselves. Buy from the Buy more box inside the program and the units are added to your key on their own as soon as the payment confirms; buy from the plan buttons above and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that same box. Each payment adds its units once, to one key.
Four thousand frames usually come back as thirty or forty moments. That number is the whole product — it is the difference between a folder and a contact sheet.