Your photos, off the camera and into order

What it does

• Built for photographers

  Imports from PTP/MTP cameras over USB and from SD cards and drives. RAW+JPEG pairs stay together as one photo, and RAW previews are extracted so you can see shots you haven't processed.

• Organised on the way in

  Profiles bind a camera or card to a folder. Sort into subfolders by date, camera, lens, file type or place, rename as files arrive, and stack bursts automatically.

• Cull and find

  A fast gallery and viewer, tags, events, titles and filters. Comparison Reject shows two frames with zoom locked together, sorted by measured sharpness, and duplicates are found for you.

• Maps and tracks

  Place names worked out entirely offline. See photos on a map, record a GPS track of your walk, place a GPS-less camera's photos on it, or feed a Sony camera the phone's position as you shoot.

• Send them on

  Export to a NAS or server (SMB, FTP, SFTP, SCP, WebDAV), to OneDrive or Google Drive, or to a USB drive. Pass-Thru sends a whole card straight to a server and keeps nothing on the phone.

• Metadata that travels

  Tags, places, titles, crops and rejects are written into JPEGs and DNGs, and into XMP sidecars for RAW — so Lightroom, Bridge and darktable see your work.

• At home on a tablet

  A tablet isn't a stretched phone: profiles stay in a side panel, frames are compared side by side, and forms spread across the screen.

• Your photos stay yours

  No account, no adverts, no analytics, no tracking. Your photos go nowhere except the destinations you set up yourself.

A look around

Documentation

• Chapter 1

  Getting started

  The welcome guide, the storage folder, the permissions Photo Flux asks for and why, and finding your way around the main screen.

• Chapter 2

  Profiles

  The five kinds of profile, the new-profile wizard, copying a profile, and everything in the profile editor.

• Chapter 3

  Importing photos

  Connecting a camera, card or drive, running an import, adding or mirroring, events, and what happens when space runs out.

• Chapter 4

  Folders, renaming and modifiers

  Sorting photos into folders and renaming them on the way in, the Creator modifier and licences, and geotagging from a track.

• Chapter 5

  The gallery

  The photo grid and its badges, sorting and filtering, stacks, selecting photos and the Actions panel.

• Chapter 6

  The photo viewer

  Viewing one photo, the EXIF overlay, the metadata screens, crop and rotate, editing, and sharing.

• Chapter 7

  Tags, events, titles and locations

  Labelling photos one at a time or a whole selection, and what each label does to your files.

• Chapter 8

  Archive profiles and albums

  Albums you fill by hand, Album Import from a card, drive or connector, and moving or copying photos into an album.

• Chapter 9

  Culling: reject, compare, duplicates

  Rejecting photos, Comparison Reject and Compare Stack, sorting by sharpness, finding duplicates and similar photos.

• Chapter 10

  The map and locations

  Nearest-place names, seeing photos on a map, moving a photo's location, and naming places yourself.

• Chapter 11

  Tracklogs

  Recording where you walked, smoothing and trimming a track, GPX files, and sharing a track as a map.

• Chapter 12

  Camera GPS link

  Sending this phone's position to a Sony camera over Bluetooth, so every photo is geotagged as it is taken.

• Chapter 13

  Metadata and Lightroom

  What Photo Flux writes into your files, XMP sidecars, rejects that travel to Lightroom, and rebuilding or rescanning metadata.

• Chapter 14

  Connectors and export

  Sending photos to a NAS, a server, OneDrive, Google Drive or a USB drive — every connector type, and exporting on the road.

• Chapter 15

  Pass-Thru profiles

  Sending a card's photos straight through a connector without keeping them, and reading the send log.

• Chapter 16

  File Monitoring

  Being told when something outside Photo Flux changes, moves or deletes one of your photos.

• Chapter 17

  Settings

  Every settings page — Display, Units, Operation, Storage Folder, Known Devices and Help — plus Tags, Locations, licences and About.

• Chapter 18

  Free and Pro

  What the free app does, the thirteen things Pro adds, the trial, and what happens if you go back to Free.

• Chapter 19

  Troubleshooting

  Symptoms and their causes: imports that find nothing, photos without locations, exports that fail, and more.

Change history

1. In developmentVersion 1.2
   • The Edit panel replaces Colour in the photo viewer's Actions. It sits beside the photo — along the bottom when the device is upright, down the side when it is turned — with Light and Colour sections, a histogram with clipping warnings, before and after, and undo. White balance gains Auto and an eyedropper, and there is a new Vibrance slider.
   • Tone curve, colour mixer and colour grading in the Edit panel: a parametric and point tone curve, eight colours to change on their own, and grading wheels for shadows, midtones and highlights. A B&W switch turns a photo black and white.
   • Effects in the Edit panel, with Pro: Texture, Clarity and Dehaze, a vignette that follows the crop, and film grain that stays the same every time the photo is shown.
   • Presets and copy/paste in the Edit panel, with Pro: save a look as a preset, or copy one photo's edits and paste them onto another or onto a whole selection.
   • Perspective and lens correction in the Edit panel, with Pro: straighten leaning buildings, or draw lines along edges that should be straight and let Guided Upright work it out; correct distortion, lighten dark corners and take out colour fringes. The crop is kept inside the corrected photo.
2. November 2026Version 1.1
   • Export processing: keep sensitive places private. On a profile or a connector, choose to take the GPS coordinates and the place names out of every copy that leaves the app. The photos in the app keep theirs.
   • Maker notes: a camera maker's private notes can hold a position too. Remove maker notes from JPEGs takes them out of JPEGs. Sharing a file that may still have them asks first, and an export's result says how many files kept them.
3. November 2026Version 1.0
   • Colour in the photo viewer's Actions: temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks and saturation, each on a slider you watch the photo change with. Non-destructive, and read and written the way Lightroom does.
   • Crop & rotate is now one editor: drag the crop and level or turn the photo in the same place, and the crop only pulls in as far as levelling needs.
   • Restore purchase on Free and Pro: if Pro you've bought, or a promo code you've redeemed, hasn't arrived on this device, it checks with Google Play straight away and tells you what it found. Most often that is a Play Store on a different Google account.
   • What's new after an update: the first time you open a build with new features, a page lists them before the app. You see each one once; an update that only fixes things shows nothing.
4. October 2026Testing builds 0.1.1148 – 0.1.1224
   • The phone's own camera as an import device: a camera button on the gallery opens your camera app, and each photo you take is imported as it is saved.
   • Contact support, under Configuration: write a subject and message and Photo Flux hands them to your own email app, with the app's details added (and your device's, if you leave that ticked).
   • Free and Pro lists every Pro feature, puts Buy Pro and Try Pro at the top, and shows your Google Play order ID once you've bought Pro. A purchase made outside the app, such as a redeemed promo code, is picked up the next time you open it.
   • Stacks: the filename filter finds photos inside stacks; a stack's tile shows its first photo you haven't rejected; Keep only this returns to the gallery; and an open stack's title bar reads Photo Stack, with its back arrow and photo count.
   • Day headings, the title bar and album counts now count photos, every frame of a stack included.
   • Card and drive imports wait until Photo location is really allowed, so a first import can't lose its photos' GPS.
   • The drawer has a title bar of its own, with a back arrow that closes it. About's View Documentation opens this manual.
   • New installs come with the predefined Creative Commons licences.
   • Fixes for Android 8: the keyboard no longer pops up when the app opens or the gallery scrolls, a double tap returns a zoomed photo to fit, and the viewer's 1:1 button fits on narrow screens.
5. October 2026Testing builds 0.1.1088 – 0.1.1120
   • Pass-Thru profiles Pro: a camera's or card's photos sent straight through a connector with folders, renaming and metadata applied, and nothing kept on the phone — just a log of what was sent, by day, place and connector.
   • OneDrive: export to and import from your OneDrive, signing in on Microsoft's own page; every upload checked against OneDrive's own record of it.
   • Google Drive: export to and import from a Photo Flux folder of its own in your Drive.
   • What to send, per connector: all files, RAW and XMP only, JPEG only, or JPEG as edited.
   • Exporting on the road: a large export on mobile data asks first, a lost connection pauses and resumes, and a dropped connection is retried.
   • Share Map Image for tracks, with the date, distance, average speed and a scale; a Speed unit setting.
   • Comparison Reject sorts by apparent sharpness, with a heatmap and "reject frames below N%".
   • Duplicate existing for connectors, and Copy a Profile in the new-profile wizard.
   • Stacks you make yourself show whether or not automatic stacking is on.
6. September 2026Testing builds 0.1.930 – 0.1.1070
   • Duplicate detection Pro: identical and look-alike photos across profiles and albums, resolved by rejecting — never deleting — and Find similar images.
   • File Monitoring Pro: told when another app changes, moves or deletes a photo.
   • The new-profile wizard, one question at a time.
   • The storage folder: one PhotoFlux folder holding Import, Albums and Tracks.
   • Known Devices, listing every folder Photo Flux may use, and Album Import's drive access explained.
   • The camera GPS link: a Sony camera fed this phone's position over Bluetooth.
   • The location stabiliser: a phone standing still no longer adds distance to a track.
   • Rescan metadata finds photos whose files have gone. Imports from subfolders. Lightroom and Photoshop exports no longer shown cropped twice.
7. 6 September 2026First testing build, 0.1.752
   • Importing from USB cameras and card readers into profiles, with folder filters, renaming, RAW+JPG pairing and RAW previews.
   • The gallery and viewer, tags, events, titles, nearest-place names, archive profiles and albums, export to network shares and USB drives, and XMP sidecars.
   • Free, with a one-off Pro upgrade and a thirty-day trial.

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