LightCraft Cloud

A phone app that shows the photo library your PC publishes to your own cloud storage, and lets you edit it on the phone.

LightCraft Cloud is an independent project built on LightCraft for Android, the Rust and Jetpack Compose photo editor and raw developer, which is itself built on the engine of the desktop app LightCraft. Many credits to those projects and their maintainers. It installs beside the original app (its own application id, io.github.tinytom21.lightcraftcloud).

What you need

• The desktop app lightcraft-cloud on your PC. It publishes a photo folder to cloud storage (any rclone backend: Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, WebDAV, SFTP...) and applies the edits the phone sends back. The PC stays the master copy; the phone holds thumbnails and small previews, not the originals.
• The whole project, with a diagram of how the parts fit, is explained at github.com/tinytom21/lightcraft-cloud. The PC with your master library is the home PC; other PCs keep a copy of the folders you choose.
• An Android 10 or newer phone.

Install

Download the APK from Releases: lightcraft-cloud-<version>.apk for most phones, the -armeabi-v7a one for 32-bit ARM phones. Open it on the phone and allow installing from that source when Android asks.

Connect to your library

For now the connection is a config file: export a phone-only rclone remote on the PC to a file, copy it to the phone, then pick the file, the remote and a name for the phone in the app's Preferences. Cloud library walks through it step by step, including how to limit the remote to the library folder.

Licence and credits

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option, as upstream's. Copyright notices and the third-party licences are kept in NOTICE and assets/ATTRIBUTION.md. Not affiliated with Adobe; Lightroom is a trademark of Adobe Inc.

Below is upstream's README for the app, which this one is built on.

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LightCraft for Android

An Android native open-source, non-destructive photo editor and raw developer written in Rust, built on the same engine as the desktop app, LightCraft, with a Kotlin/Jetpack Compose UI.

_{Ansel Adams, "The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942). Public domain, U.S. National Archives. Developed in LightCraft for Android.}

_{A gentle S on the RGB point curve, drawn right over the photo. Ansel Adams, 1942 (public domain).}

Color grading

_{The Highlights wheel in the Color panel's Grading. Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother" (1936). Public domain, Library of Congress.}

Before & after

The Tetons and the Snake River. Highlights −45, Shadows +38, Clarity +28, Dehaze +18. Ansel Adams, 1942 (public domain).	Migrant Mother. Shadows +42, Texture +18, split-toned grade, vignette. Dorothea Lange, 1936 (public domain).
Earthrise. Dehaze +22, Highlights −30, warmer white balance, Vibrance +22. NASA / Bill Anders, Apollo 8, 1968 (public domain).	The Blue Marble. Highlights −38, Blacks −20, Dehaze +15, Vibrance +30. NASA, Apollo 17, 1972 (public domain).

Masking

_{A radial sun-glow mask (Temp +40, Exposure +0.5) layered over a linear sky mask (Exposure −0.6, Dehaze +20). Photo from LightCraft's procedurally generated demo library.}

Presets, profiles & the Color Mixer

The Presets panel: Golden Hour at 100 %, each preset previewed on the photo. Demo library.

The 8-band Mix, open on purple. Demo library.

A 16:9 crop straightened +2.5°. Ansel Adams, 1942 (public domain).

The colour original on the left; the High Contrast B&W preset with Vignette and Grain on the right. Demo library.

Organization

The library sideways: the grid beside the views and albums. Demo library.	Square grid of the four public-domain showcase photos.
More › Info and rating: the rating, the flags and the photo's file, size and format. NASA / Bill Anders, "Earthrise", Apollo 8, 1968 (public domain).

How it's organized

The editor: the photo, and its six tools in a column at the edge. Ansel Adams, 1942 (public domain).	The library's menu: Preferences, Local storage, About and Help.
Export as, from the editor's download button (or Share › Export as…): the settings, file type, size, quality, watermark and border.

Architecture

_{How the app and the engine fit together. Generated with GitDiagram.}

Planned features

LightCraft for Android is in beta.

Area	Status
Library: views, albums (create, rename, delete, cover), filter, sort, search, select mode, justified and square grids, date segments, slideshow	✅
Import: photo picker, files (raws), camera, Share from other apps; the Gallery tab (the phone's photos)	✅
Light, Color (white balance, eyedropper), Mix, Grading, Effects, Detail, Optics, Tone Curve (+ targeted)	✅
Profiles and presets (with amount), copy and paste settings	✅
Crop (ratios, Instagram and TikTok formats), straighten, Upright, turns and flips, manual transforms	✅
Masking: brush, linear, radial, colour and luminance range (a point or an area), add and subtract, each part's menu, a colour tint	✅ · AI masks (subject, sky) ⬜
Remove, heal and clone spots	✅
Save or share: JPG, TIF, AVIF (DNG for raws) or the original; small, full or custom size; quality, naming, sharpening, colour space, metadata, watermark and border	✅
Upright and sideways layouts	✅
Lens blur	⬜ (the engine doesn't render it yet)
Community	🚫 not planned
Cloud library (LightCraft Cloud), including sending photos to the home PC	✅ see Cloud library

_{✅ works today · 🚧 in progress · ⬜ not started · 🚫 not planned}

Building Instructions

One Gradle command builds the whole app: it compiles the Rust engine with cargo-ndk and generates the Kotlin bindings.

• Clone this repository
• Make sure you have at least 3 GB of free disk space
• enter apps/lightcraft-android/android and run ./gradlew assembleRelease, or open that folder in Android Studio and press Run.

Build time dependencies:

required tools

    rustup (it installs the Rust release and Android targets rust-toolchain.toml names)
    cargo install cargo-ndk --version 4.1.2 --locked
    Android SDK (API 37) and NDK 29.0.14206865
    JDK 17 or newer

Builds are only tested on Windows 11.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option. LightCraft for Android is not affiliated with Adobe; Lightroom is a trademark of Adobe Inc.

Misc info for myself

Try to use semantic commit messages. Use feat: / fix: / chore: / docs: / etc.