solas - the first commit

before

"solas" existed before it had a git history, in what i'd called a 1.0 version. Realistically it was not that - it was a a somewhat working prototype that did most of what I wanted it to do, in a way that was much more restrictive than I wanted it to do it, with a UI that was far less clear than I was happy with, with code that wa (presumably) far more complicated and randomly written than it should have been.

Everything that follows in this diary is, the skeleton of which a Claude agent compiled based on git history and its own memory, is the result of a non-coder who had a very specific job that they needed done in their Lightroom to Instagram workflow, which wasn't serviced elsewhere.

what the app already did

The functionality of 1.0 is similar to what exists today:

• Add individual photos, whole folders, or a drag-and-drop selection.
• Read JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC and HEIF.
• Set a matte width and colour for a whole batch, or for one photo.
• Build a caption out of editable text, separators and existing metadata.
• Place that caption, and an imported logo, on the image or in the matte.
• Save presets, exclude individual photos from a batch, and export to a chosen folder or beside each source.
• Preserve sRGB, Display P3 or the source colour profile.
• No accounts, no analytics, no network.
• Signed for local development only.

solas 1.0:

the name

Solas is the Irish word for light. Light goes into cameras. Much better than the original name - PhotoFramer.

The product is called Solas now but the Xcode target, the scheme, the Swift module, the source directory and the bundle identifier are all called PhotoFramer, because that was the name before it had a name worth keeping. Renaming them would have broken things that I, as the human in the equation, didn't know enough about to anticipate or fix.

So the two names stay. Written down as a decision rather than left as an accident. The Blue Harvest to my Star Wars.