Picto

A desktop application for aggregating, organizing, and browsing large image and video collections. Picto downloads media from online sources via subscriptions, stores everything in a local library, and provides powerful tools for tagging, searching, and managing your collection. It is not a sharing platform — everything stays on your machine.

What Picto Does

• Download & aggregate — subscribe to artists, tags, or feeds across dozens of sites (Pixiv, Gelbooru, Danbooru, Twitter/X, DeviantArt, Patreon, and more). Picto fetches new content automatically on a schedule.
• Organize — folders, smart folders, tags (with namespaces), star ratings, and color-based search. Drag and drop between folders, bulk-tag selections, and auto-tag with AI.
• Browse — waterfall, justified, and grid layouts. Full-screen media view with zoom/pan. Strip view for reading comics and image sequences. Duplicate detection with visual similarity matching.
• Import — drag files or folders into the app, or point Picto at a directory to watch for new content.
• Everything local — libraries are self-contained folders on disk. No cloud, no accounts, no uploads.

Documentation

The user manual and feature documentation live in the docs/ directory:

• docs/pbis/active-alpha/ — current alpha backlog and feature specs
• docs/pbis/archive/ — completed feature specs

Development

Picto is built with Electron + React + a Rust core (via napi-rs). The Rust backend handles SQLite, image processing, and all heavy lifting. The frontend is a React app with canvas-based rendering for the grid.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+
• Rust toolchain (stable)
• Yarn

Setup

yarn install
cd native/picto-node && yarn install && cd ../..

Run in development

yarn dev:electron

Build the native addon

cd native/picto-node && ./node_modules/.bin/napi build

Quality Gates

Alpha blocking gate:

yarn gate:alpha

Packaging

Local package:

yarn alpha:package

Local smoke test:

yarn alpha:smoke -- --platform local --report artifacts/alpha-smoke/local.json