Albumen MCP server

Albumen

Albumen: the open-source alternative to iCloud Photos, Google Photos and Frame.io.

The commitment is DESIGN_PHILOSOPHY.md. Read it before changing this repository.

First principle: metadata and original quality are never lost. Sources are read-only, forever. A user's archive may be their only copy.

Originals are stored bit-exact: Albumen does not recompress, transcode, or strip them. EXIF, XMP, IPTC, and GPS stay. Sidecars stay. Live Photo pairs, RAW+JPEG pairs, and Android motion photos stay. Edits are non-destructive and are stored alongside the originals. Timestamps and filenames are preserved. Every copy is checked with SHA-256 and fails loudly on mismatch. The default path never removes or alters a source. Scan, export, and upload read a source only through a read-only open. A destination inside that source is refused, and there is no override.

Albumen is an open-source photo library with the feel of classic iPhoto, built to keep working when the library is hundreds of thousands of items and multiple terabytes. You bring the storage. Agents can read the library; they do not get tools that delete or rewrite originals.

Status: early-stage. albumen-mcp is in this repository. It speaks MCP over stdio. Search, browse, and ledger are on, including metadata search (capture date, camera, lens, a GPS box, and XMP/IPTC keywords and captions). The ledger reads the library locally and lists every stored file, every on-device analysis, and every recorded destination. Export and upload are off until that process is started with --enable-export or --enable-upload. There is no delete tool. The native apps and the on-disk catalog are not built yet. Ingest copies an original plus its sidecars, preserves filename and mtime, and verifies SHA-256. It does not delete sources.

Vision

Open the library and browse by time, place, and faces the way iPhoto did: quiet, fast, and obvious. The library underneath has to be boringly careful. A photo you took in 2009 is still that file in 2039, with the same bytes, the same name, and the same time and place.

Albumen is not a hosting service. Storage stays where you put it:

• Local disk, NAS, SMB, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, and Backblaze B2, reached directly or through rclone.
• Google Drive and Dropbox through the synced folder you already have. Albumen treats that folder as a filesystem.
• An iCloud Photos download, export, or Photos library copy imports into the library you choose, with those originals kept bit-exact.

Clients:

• macOS, SwiftUI and AppKit.
• iOS, Swift, with automatic camera-roll backup.
• Android, Kotlin, with automatic camera-roll backup.

The backup apps call the same ingest path as a drag-and-drop import. They do not recompress on the way in.

Linux, Windows, and macOS are first-class for the ingest tools. albumen platform-dirs prints the native config and data directories and creates nothing. The receiver can read its password from the Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or the Secret Service, and it can write a launchd, systemd, or Task Scheduler definition. Each of those is opt-in. See docs/platforms.md.

Quickstart

Four steps from a machine that does not have Rust. No sudo, and no account. The list is scripts/quickstart.json. A check fails if that list grows past five steps or if the copy is not SHA-256 verified.

1. Install the release binaries into a directory you own. The script downloads the archive for this operating system, requires the sibling .sha256 to match, checks SHA256SUMS inside the archive, and checks a cosign bundle or a GitHub attestation when that tool is already on PATH.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jay-the-maker/albumen/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jay-the-maker/albumen/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.