Arcana · for image and sound archives

Search what your pictures show.

Arcana reads every image and sound in a folder with a vision–language model. You find files by describing them, see the whole collection as a map, and build moodboards and stories from it, all on your own machine.

Windows installer · CPU and GPU builds · runs offline

01 · Map

The whole collection, laid out as a map.

Each file gets a position, and similar files sit together. Arcana groups them into clusters and names each one, from its own word list or from your subfolder names.

You browse by looking at regions, and a prompt lights up where its matches live.

Where a prompt lands

9,359 Midjourney images, laid out and clustered by Arcana · 24 clusters under 8 names · CLIP ViT-B/32 · click a name to hide it

03 · Moodboard

Find by palette and by texture.

Choose a reference and Arcana returns the images closest to it in colour palette, in texture, or in both. The palette row brings other subjects in the same colours, and the texture row brings the same kind of surface in other colours.

Moodboard reference

Closest palette · same colours, other subjects

Closest texture · same surface, other colours

04 · Colour transfer

Carry one picture's colours onto another.

LAB transfer matches the colour statistics of a reference in a few seconds. ModFlows, a learned colour-flow model, carries the palette with finer local detail.

Both write full-resolution files to Arcana's output folder.

After colour transfer Before colour transfer
Before After
Colour reference
Colours from

05 · Latent mixing · in development

Mix photographs inside the model's own representation.

The Alchemy tab mixes a picture with up to three materials from your collection. One of its methods works in the token grid of DINOv2, which turns a photograph into 32 × 32 tokens of 768 numbers each, and a representation autoencoder draws the mix back as a picture.

Mixed in the tokens, two materials stay one surface at every step of the way. A crossfade of their pixels shows both at once, like a double exposure.

20 photographs · one closed loop in DINOv2 tokens · decoded by a representation autoencoder · 2 min

06 · Story

A sequence of sentences becomes a sequence of pictures.

Write a few scene descriptions. Arcana picks the image from your collection that best matches each one, in order.

Inject Poetry then passes each chosen image through a diffusion model guided by its sentence, drawing the frame closer to the words.

Inject Poetry is powered by Stability AI

  1. Frame 1, from the collection Frame 1, after Inject Poetry

    1A dark cave opens in the rock.

  2. Frame 2, from the collection Frame 2, after Inject Poetry

    2Water moves slowly over the stones.

  3. Frame 3, from the collection Frame 3, after Inject Poetry

    3Lichen spreads like a map across the stone.

  4. Frame 4, from the collection Frame 4, after Inject Poetry

    4Light breaks through amber.

  5. Frame 5, from the collection Frame 5, after Inject Poetry

    5The clouds turn gold at dusk.

Adjust the palettes

The same five frames, each moved toward one shared palette by Arcana's colour transfer.

  1. Frame 1, palette adjusted
  2. Frame 2, palette adjusted
  3. Frame 3, palette adjusted
  4. Frame 4, palette adjusted
  5. Frame 5, palette adjusted

07 · Agent · MCP · in development

Ask an agent for a moodboard, and it works through your archive.

Arcana offers your archive to an AI agent over MCP, as one tool that takes the same commands as Arcana's command line. The agent surveys a dataset, searches it for several ideas at once, builds a board with sections, notes and a palette, recolours pictures, and lays the board out as a page.

It edits only boards it made and copies of yours, and undo takes back each batch it sends. With the app open, its boards appear in the Moodboard tab as it works.

Given the theme disintegration, an agent built this board from the textures dataset. It follows the Bardo Thödol's dissolution of the elements, sets fragments from Artaud, Baudelaire, Dōgen, Rilke, the Heart Sutra and Ikkyū beside the photographs, and fades each spread further than the last.

Spread 1 of 8Spread 2 of 8, i · earth sinks into waterSpread 3 of 8, ii · water sinks into fireSpread 4 of 8, iii · fire sinks into airSpread 5 of 8, iv · air sinks into consciousnessSpread 6 of 8, v · the clear lightSpread 7 of 8, viSpread 8 of 8

01 / 08 title

Made by an agent through Arcana's MCP server · 16 photographs from the textures dataset · 6 sections · 10 notes · laid out by the agent

08 · Your marks

ON1 Photo RAW rating system integration.

Arcana reads the sidecars ON1 Photo RAW leaves beside your photographs, and Adobe .xmp files too. Star ratings, colour tags and capture dates narrow the map and limit what a prompt returns.

Your sidecars stay exactly as you left them. Arcana reads them and writes nothing back.

What's marked

Yellow · 631

Captured 2024-02-08 to 2025-02-17

09 · Sound

Search recordings by description.

Point Arcana at a folder of field recordings and ask for distant thunder. CLAP places each clip on the same kind of map, with a spectrogram for every result.

  • Mel spectrogram of axioms flute

    axioms flute8 s

  • Mel spectrogram of axioms key1

    axioms key18 s

  • Mel spectrogram of V1

    V18 s

  • Mel spectrogram of GetGoing bass1

    GetGoing bass18 s

  • Mel spectrogram of GetGoing angelic-synth

    GetGoing angelic-synth8 s

  • Mel spectrogram of natural_attunement_reel

    natural_attunement_reel8 s

Each clip as Arcana shows it · mel spectrogram, low pitches at the bottom

10 · Local

Your files stay where they are.

Arcana reads your media in place. The models run on your own computer, and the index lives in one data folder that survives uninstalling.

New photographs from last weekend's shoot are added in the time it takes to encode them, and the rest of the index is reused.

Your photographs

Pictures\Photos2026\…

read in place · 631 files

Arcana's data folder

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Arcana

  • databasesvectors and features index_textures_image.pklfeatures_textures_palette.npzfeatures_textures_style.npz
  • latentsthe map latent_space_textures_image_2d.pkl
  • bundlesa portable copy textures_image.arcana
  • modelsdownloaded once
  • outputtransfers, stories, boards

Get Arcana

Arcana for Windows

The installer carries everything Arcana needs. The GPU build adds CUDA for NVIDIA cards, which makes indexing with the largest encoder faster and Inject Poetry about 29 times faster.

Buy the installer Source on GitHub

Checkout opens with the first release. The source is free for non-commercial use.