Garnet

A free, open-source digital asset manager (DAM) for a wide variety of asset types including image, video, audio, 3D models and animations, and more. The base install is a working DAM for any media type you drop into it: cross-format organization, search, preview, metadata, and built-in editing. Garnet is offline and local, operating as a surface over your local files. No proprietary library format, no forced ingestion, no cloud, no accounts. It indexes and operates where files already live.

I built Garnet as a media-first companion to one of my favorite and most personally important apps, Obsidian. Obsidian is a fantastic tool with a wonderful local-first philosophy, and I use it to manage all of my active documents and non-media files. But, as one might expect, it wasn't the right shape/feature fit for managing and editing media files -- of which I have a lot through my personal and professional projects in game and software development, music and video production, and photography.

Rather than investing time, money, and complexity into a variety of esoteric media tools (or at least, more than I already had) for the simple work of managing, previewing, and performing basic edits on my files, I designed Garnet as the simple surface layer over all of that content.

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Core Features

Garnet's base install is a basic multi-format DAM: it catalogs, previews, searches, lightly edits, and batch-processes a wide variety of media formats, operating as an index over wherever your files already live. Nothing is copied into a proprietary library; Garnet works in place.

Catalog & Browsing

Register any number of folders as library roots and Garnet indexes them in place, tracking files across moves and renames by content hash and rescanning automatically as the folders change on disk.

• Paginated grid or list view; group by folder, format, source, or date, and sort by any column
• Filter by format, size, and modified-date range; full-text search on filename and path
• One-click type views: Images, Videos, Audio, Models, Animations, Other
• Tag assets and filter by tag; pin any root or subfolder to the sidebar; organize work into Workspaces
• Open a loose file ad-hoc (Ctrl/Cmd+O): point Garnet at any file outside your library and get its full preview and editor surfaces without adding it to the catalog

Previews & Quick-Look

Inline, zero-config preview for every common media type, with cached thumbnails throughout the grid.

• Images, video, and audio play inline; a loopback media server keeps video and audio reliable on Linux
• 3D models (glTF/GLB, OBJ, STL, PLY, FBX, USD) render in an interactive WebGL viewer with triangle, vertex, mesh, material, and bone counts
• Skeletal animations play back with a scrub timeline

• A details panel surfaces native metadata like image dimensions, EXIF (camera, lens, exposure), and audio tags: alongside your own tags
• Thumbnails for images, videos, 3D models, and .blend files (extracted from the embedded preview)

Image Editor

A non-destructive editor that previews on the original at full resolution (GPU-accelerated) and only writes pixels when you save.

• Adjustments: hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, temperature, and tint
• Luminance curve: a draggable monotonic spline driving a live lookup table
• Geometry: crop (aspect-ratio presets + rule-of-thirds guides), resize, rotate, and corner-round
• Hold \ to peek the original, full undo/redo, and a choice of save-as-new or overwrite

Automations

Build reusable batch pipelines and run them across many files at once: base steps (convert, resize, and rename with token patterns) plus steps contributed by plugins. Runs in parallel with live progress in the footer, and pipelines save as named presets.

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Plugin Features

Plugins add per-format depth on top of the base: new editing features, specialized automations, and even Workflows that offer totally unique UI/UX for plugin-typed Workspaces. Each is first-party, compiles into the app, and is toggled on or off from the in-app plugin manager. Garnet ships with two today.

3D Texturing

The full toolset from Packi, woven in as a workspace with tabbed tools.

• Pack: channel pack / unpack / swizzle with per-channel source selection and invert, live preview, and presets for common conventions (Unreal ORM, Unity mask maps, RMA, Godot ORM, and more)
• Adjust: normal-map operations like flip green (DirectX ↔ OpenGL), height-to-normal, blend (RNM), and normalize
• Preview: a 2D tiling preview and a 3D PBR material preview
• Size: texture info, VRAM budget across 16+ GPU compression formats, and the full mip chain
• Contributes Flip Green / Normalize steps to the base Automations pipeline

Music Library

A catalog-backed workspace that organizes your indexed audio into an album-artist → album → track tree with album-cover browsing and a built-in player.

• Native Rust audio engine (Symphonia + Rodio) for reliable, high-quality local playback: including Hi-Res and FLAC
• Docked transport with a play queue and a waveform rendered from precomputed peaks
• Reads embedded tags and cover art; per-track quality badges (format, bit depth, sample rate)

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Stack

• Runtime / Package Manager: Bun
• Desktop Framework: Tauri 2 (Rust backend)
• Frontend: React 19 + TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind CSS 4 + daisyUI 5
• State Management: Zustand 5
• Library DB: SQLite via rusqlite

Stack mirrors Packi for code reuse and a consistent offline/local ethos.

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Development

# Install Rust + Bun + system deps, then install JS dependencies
make setup

# Run in development mode (Tauri + frontend hot reload)
make dev

# Build installer for the current platform
make build

# Quality
make lint typecheck test

The library SQLite file lands at $XDG_DATA_HOME/garnet/library.sqlite (or the OS equivalent); logs go to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/garnet/logs/.

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License

Covered under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later): see LICENSE.md.

Beyond that, I only have one rule: First, do no harm. Then, help where you can.

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Financial Support

If you have some cash to spare and are inspired to share, that's very kind. Rather than sharing that kindness with me, I encourage you to share it with your charity of choice.

Mine is the GiveWell top charities fund, which does excellent research to figure out which causes can save the most human lives for the money, and puts their funds there.

Their grant to the Against Malaria Foundation was shown to deliver outcomes at a cost of just $1,700 per life saved.