AfterFrame

AfterFrame is a local-first photo workspace for photographers drowning in exported images: point it at folders scattered across drives and it unifies everything into one catalog you can browse, filter, rate, tag, and collect — while the originals stay exactly where they are. The demo library on its site shows 872 assets in one catalog; the app's own documentation screenshots show real working libraries of 5,562 assets with folder trees, EXIF panels, and AI annotation sidebars.

Under the hood it's an Electron + React (Vite, Tailwind) desktop app with a Python sidecar process and a SQLite database living inside each .afcatalog bundle. Beyond browsing, it covers the full culling-to-delivery loop: crop with a proper aspect-ratio and transform panel, text overlays with depth effects, collage batches, camera-style frames (Canon, Hasselblad), people search, and video chapters. The AI features — style-transfer repaint and auto-annotation that generates captions, tags, and location guesses — run in bring-your-own-key mode, and a bundled MCP server lets Claude Code or any MCP client drive your library in natural language.

The origin story is the point: the author states verbatim in the README that "this project was vibe-coded with Claude Code," and the commit history reads like an agentic-coding logbook — look-alike photo detection via perceptual hashing, an Electron Playwright e2e suite, and platform-specific builds (signed macOS .dmg, Windows installer) landing within days of each other. With 243 stars and commits shipping the same week it was scouted, it's one of the more serious open-source Lightroom alternatives to come out of the vibe-coding wave: downloads for macOS 12+ and Windows 10/11 are on the releases page, and there's a try-in-browser option on the site.