Configuration

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The shoots home#

A single directory under the user's profile holds everything machine-local and provisioned at runtime. It is ~/.shoots on every OS — deliberately uniform, so no environment variables need to be set on end-user machines.

~/.shoots/
├── bin/                          Downloaded external tools
│   ├── shoots(.exe)                the CLI binary itself (installer target)
│   ├── exiftool/13.59/             pinned version, checksum-verified
│   └── libraw/<version>/           dcraw_emu, the neutral RAW developer
├── models/
│   └── clip/vit-b32-int8-2/        clip-image-encoder.onnx
│                                   keywords.json
│                                   aesthetics.json
├── profiles/                     Your learned rating profiles (*.json)
├── match/                        Preference-learning duel databases
│   └── <profile>.db                every duel you have judged — not recomputable
├── develop/                      The develop predictor's own working files
│   ├── profile/export.json         your fitted style profile
│   ├── feedback.jsonl              every (predicted, kept) pair ever recorded
│   └── export/                     the training dataset, and one dir per shoot
│       └── shooting/<shoot>/         export.jsonl · prediction.json
│                                     refine-state.json (what `schedule` last saw)
├── triage/                       Marks from `cull --mark` / `rate --mark`
│   └── <shoot>-<digest>.jsonl      pending decisions, until a sidecar writer takes them
├── labels/                       Your label vocabulary per editor (*.json)
├── cache/                        Regenerable: thumbnails, RAW previews
├── logs/
│   └── schedule.log                the daily `schedule run` transcript
└── config.json

On Windows the same tree lives at %USERPROFILE%\.shoots.

profiles/ is the one directory you write to yourself. Drop a linear-embedding profile JSON there (as emitted by shoots match train) and it becomes selectable as shoots rate --profile <filename-without-.json>. See Rating profiles.

labels/ is the other directory you write to yourself — see Label sets below.

develop/feedback.jsonl is the one file that cannot be rebuilt at any price. It records what photographs looked like the day they were developed, and re-reading them now cannot recover that. develop clean never touches it, --all or not.

Everything else is regenerable: delete the tree and shoots setup rebuilds the tools and models, develop init the dataset and the profile.

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Environment variables#

Locations#

# Portable: keep everything on an external drive
export SHOOTS_HOME=/Volumes/Field/shoots-home
shoots setup

Derived-value cache#

The cache holds derived numbers only — measurements, embeddings — never image data, which is why ~150 MB covers a 100,000-frame catalog. See shoots cache.

External tools#

# Use the system exiftool during development
export SHOOTS_EXIFTOOL=/usr/local/bin/exiftool

# Use RawTherapee with a neutral profile as the develop baseline
export SHOOTS_RAW_DEVELOPER=rawtherapee-cli
export SHOOTS_RAW_DEVELOPER_ARGS='-Y -q -o {out} -p neutral.pp3 -c {in}'

The default args already target dcraw_emu: -w -W -o 1 -q 0 -T -Z {out} {in} — camera white balance, no auto-brighten (so the true scene exposure survives), sRGB output, TIFF.

Mirrors#

Point these at an internal artifact server for an air-gapped or bandwidth-limited studio. Checksum verification still applies — the pinned SHA-256 hashes live in the binary, not in the mirror, so a hostile or corrupt mirror cannot substitute content.

export SHOOTS_TOOLS_BASEURL=https://artifacts.studio.internal/shoots/tools
export SHOOTS_MODELS_BASEURL=https://artifacts.studio.internal/shoots/models
shoots setup

Diagnostics#

Build-time only#

SHOOTS_VERSION and SHOOTS_AUTHOR are not runtime environment variables. They are substituted into the bundle at build time (packages/cli/tsup.config.ts and scripts/build-binary.ts) from the root package.json. Setting them in your shell has no effect on an installed binary.

GitHub API#

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Label sets#

cull --mark and rate --mark record what a photograph is — reject, select — never a colour. The colour is chosen when the mark is written into a sidecar, from a per-editor label set.

The defaults match a stock English Lightroom / Bridge install:

They are defaults rather than a standard on purpose. xmp:Label is a standard field holding free text: Lightroom and Bridge colour it only when the string matches an entry in your label set, which is localized. Override it in ~/.shoots/labels/<editor>.json:

{
  "reject": "Rosso",
  "select": "Verde"
}

Partial overrides merge over the defaults, so remapping one label leaves the rest alone. Unknown keys and empty values are rejected outright, before anything is written — a shoot half-labelled in the wrong vocabulary is worse than an error.

<editor> is the --editor id — acr or rapidraw. Switching editors later means editing one file, not re-culling.

The defaults differ by editor, because the editors do. Lightroom matches a label by name against a localized set, so acr defaults to Adobe's English colours (Red, Green, Yellow, Purple) and an Italian install wants an override. RapidRAW stores the label as a color:<name> tag against a fixed enum, so rapidraw defaults to its five lowercase names (red, green, yellow, purple) and overriding it means choosing a different colour, not translating the same one.

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Pinned versions#

Current pins (they move with releases):

Each is installed into a version-scoped directory (bin/exiftool/13.59/), so upgrading shoots fetches the new version alongside the old rather than clobbering it. shoots doctor reports what is actually resolved.

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Runtime prerequisites#

shoots doctor checks both.

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Working without external tools#

shoots degrades rather than failing where it reasonably can: