Bukaake

The ultra-fast, transparent, and distraction-free photo viewer for Windows.
Reviving the desktop-immersive magic of the classic Google Picasa Photo Viewer with modern stroke-free frosted glass.

Pure transparent desktop immersion: softly dimmed wallpaper background, centered floating controls, and zero bulky borders.

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💡 Why Bukaake?

Most photo viewers on Windows today are slow to launch, cluttered with heavy toolbars, or trap your pictures inside thick, distracting window frames. Some even force you to pay for extra codecs just to open photos from your iPhone!

Bukaake revives what made Google Picasa Photo Viewer so beloved, supercharged with modern Windows 10 & 11 design:

• 🪟 Zero Distractions: Truly borderless and translucent. Your desktop wallpaper stays softly dimmed in the background while your photo takes center stage.
• ⚡ Auto-Hiding Controls: Relax and enjoy your photos in peace. The second your mouse stops moving, all buttons and titles gently fade away.
• 🚀 Instant Launch: Opens in the blink of an eye and uses almost no RAM. A single ~5 MB portable file—no installation needed.
• 🖱️ Smooth Navigation: Zoom like butter with your mouse wheel right into the fine details, click-and-drag to pan, and flip effortlessly through folders with your arrow keys.
• ✍️ Vector Typography & Markup: Add scalable text overlays with 8-point handles, dynamic shadows, rounded fills, pen, and highlighter without external editors.
• 🗑️ Stress-Free & Safe: Send bad photos straight to your Windows Recycle Bin with Delete—easily restore them if you ever change your mind!
• 📸 Built-in Snip & Record: Take instant screenshots of any monitor or region, or record video clips with crisp audio right from the app.

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⚡ Highlights at a Glance

Superpower	Why It Matters
🪟 Desktop-Immersive Transparency	Translucent dimmed background lets your desktop show through without heavy borders.
🖼️ Native Desktop Wallpaper	One-click Win32 wallpaper setting with automatic PNG caching and format transcoding.
⚡ Sub-10ms Launch & Standby	Instant tray daemon with automatic memory trimming down to ~8–15 MB RAM.
📷 49+ Formats & Camera RAW	Native iPhone HEIC/HEIF (100% free), 24+ RAW camera formats, and 3D VFX textures.
✍️ Vector Typography & Crop	Vector text engine with 8-point handles, dynamic shadows, laser-guided crop, pen & highlighter.
📸 Integrated Screen Snipper	Multi-monitor crosshair capture with instant clipboard copy and auto-saved PNGs.
🎥 Hardware GPU Screen Recording	Direct3D 11 & WGC zero-copy capture (<2% CPU) with tactile click sounds, visual halos, cursor toggle & H.264 MP4.
🏪 Microsoft Store & Portable	Distribute as a zero-install ~5MB portable executable or install via Microsoft Store Desktop Bridge MSIX.
🗑️ Safe Recycle Bin Deletion	Win32 Recycle Bin integration (Delete to trash, Shift+Delete to shred).
🎨 Stroke-Free Frosted Glass	Dual theme engine: Deep Obsidian Dark Mode & Frosted Slate Light Mode.

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✨ Feature Deep Dive

🪟 1. Picasa-Style Transparent Immersion

When you open any picture, Bukaake softly dims your surrounding desktop wallpaper with zero blur artifacts, giving your photo center stage without boxing it inside an opaque window frame.

• 75% Viewport Ceiling: Images comfortably fill up to 75% of your screen so your desktop remains visible.
• Elevated Control Dock: Floating toolbars stay elevated safely above your Windows taskbar.
• Auto-Hiding Controls: Move your mouse to bring up controls; stay idle for 2.5 seconds and all chrome fades smoothly to 0% opacity.
• Interactive Return-to-Start: Hover over the titlebar app icon in Mode 1 to reveal a back arrow, cleanly closing the image and resetting/centering window bounds back to start.
• 1-Click Desktop Wallpaper: Set any photo, cropped composition, or edited canvas directly as your Windows desktop wallpaper via native Win32 APIs, with automatic PNG caching for non-standard formats to prevent grey desktop glitches.

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📷 2. Comprehensive Format Engine & Camera RAW

Bukaake natively opens 49 image formats with zero external dependencies, codecs, or paid Microsoft Store extensions.

• Everyday Web     : PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, SVG, BMP, ICO, TIFF, AVIF
• Apple Ecosystem  : HEIC, HEIF, HIF, HEIFS, HEICS (Fully hardware-accelerated, free)
• Camera RAW       : ARW, CR2, CR3, NEF, NRW, DNG, RAF, RW2, ORF, PEF, SRF, SR2
• 3D & VFX Art     : OpenEXR (.exr), Radiance HDR (.hdr), DDS, TGA, QOI, PNM, PPM, PGM

• Instant Embedded Previews: Camera RAW files open instantly (~15ms) from high-speed embedded previews.
• Full Sensor RAW Develop (Q): Press Q or click the sensor icon to unpack full uncompressed sensor Bayer data with unclipped dynamic range. Powered by a zero-base64 binary streaming pipeline and off-thread browser rasterization (img.decode()) with a dual-theme ambient glowing loading beam across the titlebar.
• EXIF Telemetry Drawer (I): Press I anytime to inspect detailed camera telemetry: camera body, lens model, focal length, aperture ($f$-stop), shutter speed, ISO, and GPS location.
• 5-Slot Predictive Prefetch: Photos in your current folder pre-load silently in the background for zero-latency arrow navigation.

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📸 3. Screen Snipping & Desktop Recording

Capture and share anything on your screen without launching heavy third-party software.

📸 Precision Screen Snipper & OCR Capture Modes: Snip your Full Screen, Active Display, or drag any Custom Region. Native Screen OCR: Extract text from any on-screen region instantly using native hardware-accelerated Windows.Media.Ocr. Spatial geometry analysis preserves line wraps, stanza breaks, and paragraph indents. Loupe Color Eyedropper: Zoom into details with a 9x9 magnified pixel grid to inspect and copy exact HEX and RGB color values in one click. Smart Alignment: Live coordinate crosshairs and dimension badges. Direct Clipboard Delivery: Automatically copies snips or OCR text to your clipboard (CF_DIB / Unicode text) for instant pasting (Ctrl+V). Timestamped Auto-Save: Clean PNG files automatically save to your Pictures/Screenshots folder.

🎥 Hardware GPU Screen Recorder Zero-Copy VRAM Pipeline: Desktop frames capture directly into Direct3D 11 GPU textures via Windows.Graphics.Capture with sub-2% CPU overhead and zero RAM round-trips. Hardware H.264 & AAC MP4: Streams hardware-accelerated .mp4 video directly through Windows Media Foundation IMFSinkWriter with instant finalization. Visual Click Highlights & Tactile Audio: Projects zero-input-lag amber/sky halo ripples visible to WGC, with punchy 48kHz synthesized mechanical click audio transients. Dynamic Cursor Visibility: Dynamically include or exclude the system mouse pointer from recordings via hardware WGC compositing. Sample-Accurate Audio: Mixes WASAPI system loopback and microphone inputs at 48kHz stereo with a contiguous sample-accurate clock—zero drift or lag. Space Saver & Collapsible Settings: Toggle ~75% storage savings with 30 FPS profiles, calibrate audio sync (±200ms), and organize recording preferences in stroke-free accordions. Dedicated Overlay Window: Isolated transparent window (snipper.html) hosts crosshairs, selection bounds, and recording pills with zero desktop redraw flash. Clean Borderless Capture: Windows 11 default yellow capture border is completely suppressed.

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✍️ 4. Vector Typography, Markup & Precision Crop

Quickly add text captions, mark up screenshots, or adjust composition with built-in creative tools:

• Precision Typography Engine (T): Add rich, draggable vector text with center-anchored scaling and 8-point handles. Features font sizes up to 600px with quadratic precision, scroll-wheel sizing, unified tabbed popovers for soft shadows and rounded background fills, and magnetic laser guides for flush center and edge snapping.
• Freehand Pen & Highlighter (D): Draw sharp annotations or mark lines with translucent ink. Features curated palettes, stroke thickness sliders, and multi-step Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y).
• Laser-Guided Crop (C): Standard aspect presets (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 4:3, Freeform) featuring dynamic magnetic guides that snap directly to image centers and edges.
• Universal Enter-to-Commit: Press Enter to immediately apply and commit changes across Text, Crop, and Drawing tools.
• Real-Time Color Filters (E): Adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Exposure, and Temperature on-the-fly with 60 FPS GPU-accelerated rendering.
• Alitken & Cathet Companion Bridges: One-click workflow to transfer photos to Alitken for advanced image editing, or hand off OCR extracted text directly into Cathet for instant editing.

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🎨 5. Stroke-Free Dual Theme Engine

Designed from the ground up for modern Windows aesthetics:

• Zero-Stroke Policy: No ugly 1px border outlines or lines on windows, buttons, or floating bars. Depth is created purely through frosted glass fills and multi-layered ambient drop shadows.
• Deep Obsidian Dark Mode: True deep obsidian dark (rgba(6, 7, 10, 0.92)).
• Soft Slate Light Mode: Elegant daytime palette eliminating harsh pure-black borders in favor of soft obsidian slate (#242938).

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⚡ 6. Native Windows Performance & Portability

• Sub-10ms Launch via Tray Standby: Keeps Bukaake pre-warmed in your notification tray. Double-clicking any image opens instantaneously.
• Windows 11 DWM 1px Border Elimination: Seamless frameless geometry achieved by preserving native WS_THICKFRAME, retaining rounded corners, drop shadows, and acrylic transparency without white outline artifacts or window resize flash.
• Win32 Subclassing & Smooth Maximize: Subclasses WM_NCHITTEST and SC_SIZE to prevent edge-click jump on dialogs, and intercepts titlebar double-clicks (WM_NCLBUTTONDBLCLK / SC_MAXIMIZE) to smoothly transition into Mode 2 transparent fullscreen without DWM maximize flash.
• Automatic Memory Trimming: Uses Win32 working-set trimming to shrink idle background memory down to ~8–15 MB RAM.
• Multi-Monitor Position Memory: Restores to your preferred monitor and window coordinates without annoying screen-jumping.
• 1-Click Shell Association: Make Bukaake your default photo viewer for 49 formats under HKCU without annoying UAC permission prompts.
• True Portability: A single standalone executable. Move bukaake.exe to a USB drive or secondary SSD—file associations self-heal automatically on launch.
• Microsoft Store & Desktop Bridge (MSIX): Native runtime channel detection via Win32 GetCurrentPackageFamilyNameW, declarative file associations, automatic Store background updates, and zero registry modifications.
• Built-In Self-Updater: Background GitHub Releases checks with in-place executable updates via self-replace.

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⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts

🧭 Navigation & Zoom	🎨 Creative Tools	⚙️ Window & System
Key Action Left / Right Previous / Next photo Up / Down Zoom In / Zoom Out (Picasa) Mouse Wheel Zoom anchored to cursor Middle Click Pan image canvas F Fit image to window 1 100% actual size (1:1) , / . (or L/R) Rotate 90° Left / Right B Toggle background checkerboard P Toggle pixel art crisp mode	Key Action T Toggle Typography & Text Tool D Toggle Pen & Highlighter C Toggle Precision Crop E Toggle Color Adjustments H / V Flip Horizontal / Vertical Q Full Sensor RAW Develop I Toggle EXIF Info Drawer Enter Apply & commit active tool Ctrl + Z Undo action / stroke Ctrl + Y / Ctrl+Shift+Z Redo action / stroke	Key Action ? Keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet Ctrl + O Open image file Ctrl + S Save / Export active image Ctrl + C Copy image to clipboard Ctrl + V Paste image from clipboard Alt+Shift+S / PrtScn Capture / Record Screen Delete Move to Recycle Bin (safe) Shift + Del Permanently delete F11 / Enter Toggle Fullscreen Mode Esc Cancel tool / Close / Standby

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💻 System Requirements

Component	Minimum Requirement	Recommended
Operating System	Windows 10 (64-bit, Version 19041+)	Windows 11 (64-bit, Version 22H2 or newer)
Processor (CPU)	Intel Core i3 / AMD Ryzen 3 / ARM64	Intel Core i5 / AMD Ryzen 5 / Snapdragon X Elite
Graphics (GPU)	DirectX 11 capable GPU (Direct3D 11 & WGC)	Dedicated GPU or modern integrated graphics
System Memory (RAM)	512 MB (~8–15 MB background standby)	2 GB+ (for high-resolution Camera RAW sequences)
Storage / Runtime	~10 MB free disk space	Single standalone portable .exe (~5 MB)
Dependencies	None. Zero external codecs, DLLs, or runtimes required.

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🚀 Quick Start

🏪 Option A: Microsoft Store (MSIX)

Install directly from the Microsoft Store (Listing ID: 9N964R72X9JS) for seamless automatic background updates, sandboxed reliability, and declarative Windows default app handling.

⚡ Option B: Standalone Portable Binary (~5 MB)

1. Download the latest binary from the Releases Page:
   • For standard 64-bit PCs: bukaake-vX.Y.Z-x64.exe
   • For ARM devices (Surface Pro, Snapdragon X): bukaake-vX.Y.Z-arm64.exe
2. Run the file directly. No installer, no registry bloat, no administrative privileges required.
3. Click the Settings (gear icon) in the toolbar and select Register Associations to set Bukaake as your default viewer.

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🛠️ Building From Source

Prerequisites: Node.js 18+, Rust (stable), and the C++ Build Tools for Windows.

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Crlyzd/Bukaake.git
cd Bukaake

# 2. Install frontend dependencies
npm install

# 3. Launch with interactive Control Center
.\run.ps1
# or run with standard dev command:
npm run tauri:dev

View Developer Scripts & Build Commands

• npm run dev — Run local Vite dev server on http://localhost:3000.
• npm run tauri:dev — Launch Tauri v2 desktop application with live reload.
• npm run build — Production bundle validation for frontend assets.
• cargo check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml — Fast backend type-check.
• npm run bump — Atomically synchronize versions across package.json, Cargo.toml, and tauri.conf.json.
• .\run.ps1 (Option [7]) — Interactive Microsoft Store MSIX packaging and multi-architecture bundling.
• powershell scripts/package-msix.ps1 — Automated MSIX Desktop Bridge staging, manifest templating, and bundle packaging.
• powershell scripts/generate-store-assets.ps1 — Synthesize high-DPI Windows Store visual assets from icon.png.

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💖 About the Creator & Support

Bukaake is designed and developed with ❤️ by Kaleksanan Bagus.

If you love using Bukaake and want to support independent, high-performance desktop software:

• 🌐 Official Website: bukaake.kaleksananbagus.com
• 🌐 Creator Portfolio: kaleksananbagus.com
• 🎨 Companion Editor: alitken.kaleksananbagus.com
• 🐛 Report a Bug or Suggest a Feature: Feedback Form or open an Issue.

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🙏 Acknowledgements & Open-Source Credits

Bukaake is built on top of an incredible ecosystem of open-source projects, high-performance libraries, and Windows platform technologies:

⚡ Core Engine & Runtime

• Tauri v2 — Next-generation, memory-efficient desktop application framework.
• windows-rs — Native Microsoft Win32 and WinRT bindings for Direct3D 11, WGC, OCR, and Media Foundation.
• window-vibrancy — Native Windows Acrylic composition effects.
• self-replace — Safe in-place binary executable replacement for self-updating.
• rfd — Native Rusty file dialogs.

📷 Imaging & Media Pipelines

• LibRaw — Industry-standard camera RAW unpacking and Bayer demosaicing engine.
• image-rs — Fast native image format encoding and decoding.
• heif-oxide — Pure Rust ISO/IEC 23008-12 ISOBMFF container parser for HEIC/HEIF photos.
• kamadak-exif — Comprehensive camera metadata and EXIF extraction.
• cpal — Cross-platform audio library powering WASAPI loopback and microphone capture.
• arboard — Native Win32 clipboard integration (CF_DIB / CF_HDROP).

🎨 Typography & Design System

• Inter by Rasmus Andersson — Modern, crisp user interface typography.
• JetBrains Mono by JetBrains — High-contrast monospace font for camera specs and EXIF telemetry.
• Remix Icon by Remix Design — Minimalist, neutral monochrome SVG iconography.

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📄 License

Bukaake is open-source software licensed under the GPL-3.0 License.
Distributed without warranty in the hope of bringing back fluid, beautiful, and distraction-free viewing to the Windows desktop.