Clarity is a high-performance, local-first media management application designed to give you absolute control over your library. Unlike traditional media managers that lock your organization inside a proprietary database, Clarity's core philosophy is filesystem-first portability.
It ensures that your organization is never dependent on the app itself by using hardlinks to mirror your library's structure on the physical disk. Whether you are using the app or browsing via a standard file explorer, your files remain organized, deduplicated, and instantly accessible.
See Clarity in action:
demo.mp4
- Fast Initial Ingest: A two-phase pipeline separates filesystem scanning from intensive processing. The UI populates instantly after a scan, while heavy tasks run in the background.
- Parallel Background Processing: A multi-threaded job system leverages your CPU cores to handle hashing, metadata extraction, and WebP thumbnail generation in parallel.
- Hardlink-Based Management: Uses content-based hashing (BLAKE3) and hardlinks to ensure that your physical file structure reflects your organization.
- Intelligent Deduplication: Maintains a single canonical copy in an internal
.objectsstore. Hardlinks allow the same file to exist in multiple virtual folders without consuming extra disk space.
- Filesystem Sync: Integrated file watching automatically detects additions, moves, or deletions, keeping the database and the physical filesystem in perfect sync.
- Smart Garbage Collection: Automatically cleans up orphaned media entries when files are deleted.
- Virtualized Media Grid: Optimized to handle thousands of items with ease, using virtualization to maintain high frame rates.
- Dedicated Media Viewer: A powerful inspection tool with a dark UI, providing deep metadata insights (types, dimensions, content hashes) and instant tagging.
- Intuitive Tagging: Organize your collection with a tagging system that works in harmony with your filesystem structure.
- Portable Database: All library state, tagging relationships, and background job history are stored in a local
.media-filesystem.sqlite3database directly within your library root. Your organization moves with your files. - High-Performance Caching: Leverages SQLite's Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) mode for improved concurrency and performance during heavy background indexing.
- Integrated Thumbnails: Thumbnails are stored as BLOBs within the database, ensuring your preview cache is as portable as your media and never needs re-generation when moving between devices.
Clarity operates in a two-phase process to ensure the UI remains snappy even with massive libraries:
- Phase 1 (Reconciliation): The app scans your library. It identifies new or modified files based on metadata and updates the database immediately.
- Phase 2 (Background Jobs): Multi-threaded parallel workers pick up pending jobs to hash files, extract metadata, and generate thumbnails.
- Physical Mirroring: When you tag or review media, Clarity creates hardlinks in your
Sorted/directory, ensuring your organization is reflected on disk.
- Backend: Rust & Tauri 2
- Frontend: React 19, TypeScript, Chakra UI, and Tailwind CSS
- Database: SQLite with WAL mode
- State Management: Zustand