The community build of RapidRAW: a fast, GPU-accelerated raw photo editor, with the best work from across its community in one place.
RapidRAW is a free, open-source raw editor by Timon Käch (CyberTimon), and a great alternative to Lightroom. RapidRoom is the same app, kept close to upstream, plus the improvements that people building on RapidRAW have made in their own forks: tested together, credited to their authors, and offered back upstream.
- Bring your Lightroom collections along: import collection sets and collections from a catalog
- Rename photos, not just files. RAW+JPEG pairs and all their sidecars move together, bursts number in shooting order, and you see every new name before anything changes, with undo.
- Reference View like Lightroom. Pin one photo next to the one you are editing, then match the look while you move through the filmstrip.
- A white balance picker you can trust. It reads the untouched raw data, averages a square or a dragged area, and shows a live preview before you click, which helps with mixed-light night shots.
- At home on Linux tiling desktops. The native title bar works with Wayland compositors like Hyprland instead of fighting them.
- Colour-managed exports. JPEG, PNG and TIFF files carry an sRGB profile, so browsers, other apps and print labs show your colours as intended.
- Sony lossless M/S and Canon mRAW/sRAW raws open correctly, without the green borders upstream still shows.
- Private and offline by default. Nothing is contacted at startup except the update check: no Google Fonts, and the cloud sign-in service loads only if you use cloud features.
- Your edits are safer. Edits are saved crash-safe, a damaged mask no longer wipes out the others, and a corrupt panel layout no longer resets your settings.
- Keyboard-friendly. You can always see where keyboard focus is when you Tab through the app.
- Reliable batch exports. Large exports no longer slip another photo into some images, and colour and luminance masks now apply correctly when exporting.
- Your keywords travel with your exports. Tags you add show up as keywords in Lightroom, digiKam, photo sites and stock agencies.
- Browse memory cards safely: read-only Card mode never writes to the card
- Star ratings you set in the camera show up in the library.
- Faster culling: rate with 0–5 and jump straight to the next photo, and filter for exactly N stars.
- Bring your Lightroom edits along: import XMP sidecars
- Pick and reject flags for culling, separate from stars: P, X and U as in Lightroom, a flag filter, and rejects that darktable, Bridge and Lightroom understand.
- Presets at your fingertips. Presets sit in the left sidebar as compact rows: hover to preview one on your photo, click to apply, and star favorites to pin them on top.
- Lights Out, Lightroom-style. Press L to dim everything but the photo, again for pure black, Escape to come back. Good for judging night shots.
- Targeted colour adjustment. Pick Hue, Saturation or Luminance in the expanded Color Mixer, then drag up or down on a colour in the photo to change just the bands it contains.
- More sliders on a laptop screen. An optional compact layout puts each slider's label, track and value on one line, so more controls fit without scrolling.
- Sony camera aspect ratios are respected. 4:3, square and 16:9 shots start with the camera framing, and you can expand the crop back to the full image.
- Lens profiles that actually fit. Distortion and vignetting from the Lensfun database are applied the way Lensfun defines them, including full frame lenses on APS-C bodies.
- Export for Instagram and print. Built-in Instagram 4:5, 1:1 and 1.91:1 presets, optional output sharpening for screen or print, and
--presetto use any export preset from the command line.
78 improvements on top of RapidRAW so far, including fixes for 18 upstream issues that are still open there. Every change, with its source and upstream status, is in the changelog.
Lightroom import is uncalibrated: global adjustments and masks are not ready for real use until full import calibration (#31 and #133) is complete. See the import instructions.
- One home for the community's work. RapidRAW has hundreds of forks, and many of them fix the same things separately. RapidRoom brings the best of them into one build that's tested against a pixel-exact regression set.
- AI-assisted contributions welcome. They're held to the same review and tests as any other change, and disclosed honestly. See CONTRIBUTING.
- Friendly with upstream. We merge RapidRAW regularly and offer our fixes back as pull requests.
- Credit where it's due. Original authors stay on the commits and are listed in CREDITS.md.
We're building RapidRoom so that an AI assistant like Claude can do everything the interface can: move any slider, make masks, try different looks on virtual copies, build and apply presets, and export for Instagram or print. You describe what you want ("too cold and flat, I'd like it moodier with warm highlights"), and the assistant makes the edit and explains what it did.
Because the full interface stays in front of you, you see every change as it happens: the sliders move and the masks appear. That makes it a tutor as well as an assistant.
- In a hurry? Ask it to get the photo as good as possible, then approve or tweak the result.
- Learning? Ask it to walk you through it: which slider to reach for first, what it does, and why. Then try it yourself and ask for feedback.
- Exploring? Ask for five or six different looks as virtual copies, and pick your favourite.
You stay in charge. Every AI change shows up in the history and can be undone, and control stays on your machine. This is work in progress: an MCP server for agents is being brought in now, followed by live control of the open photo, a RapidRoom editing skill, and an optional built-in terminal for starting an assistant right inside the app. Follow along on the project board.
There are no RapidRoom release builds yet, so build from source. You need Rust and Node.js, and on Linux the Tauri prerequisites:
git clone https://github.com/RapidRoom/rapidroom.git
cd rapidroom
npm install
npm run tauri buildFor the full feature tour, tethering, the CLI and system requirements, see the RapidRAW README.
Bug reports, fixes and features from your own fork are all welcome. Start with CONTRIBUTING. What's planned is on the roadmap; questions and ideas go to Discussions. If you maintain a RapidRAW fork and want to help run RapidRoom, open an issue. See GOVERNANCE for how decisions are made.
RapidRoom exists because of RapidRAW. If you find it useful, please support CyberTimon on Ko-fi.
AGPL-3.0, the same as RapidRAW.
RapidRoom is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by CyberTimon or the RapidRAW project. Please report RapidRoom bugs here, not upstream.