Work with AI — Lucarne

Lucarne has a built-in MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is how AI assistants work with apps. Connect yours, and it can do in Lucarne much of what you do: find photos, sort them, try edits and look at the results, apply looks, and export. Its changes appear in the app as it makes them.

Go through yesterday’s shoot. Reject the blurry ones, pick the best five, give them a warm film look, and export them for Instagram.

What an assistant can do

Find and sort. Search the library by date, camera, lens, folder, tag, rating, or flag. Rate with stars, pick or reject, add and remove tags.
Look before it edits. Preview an edit and see the result, with its statistics, before applying it.
Edit. Change any adjustment, from white balance, tone, and colour to film, geometry, and masks. Apply presets and lookup tables, copy one photo’s settings to others, take snapshots, make virtual copies.
Select with AI. Find the subject, people, the sky, or the ground, and use them as masks.
Import and export. Add folders to the library, and export with any settings, frames and watermarks included, or with an export preset.

Connect your assistant

Open Lucarne, then open Settings and choose Connect Your AI Agent.
Choose what your assistant may do: turn Let agents edit photos on or off, and choose the Folder agents may export to.
Copy the message shown there and send it to your assistant. It sets up the connection itself, or tells you where to add it.

Lucarne works with any assistant or tool that can run a local MCP server.

You set the limits

Preview first. An assistant can look at an edit before it applies it.
Every change in the history. Each change an assistant makes goes into the photo’s history as a step of its own, and is undone like any other.
Read only, if you like. With Let agents edit photos off, an assistant can look but not edit.
Exports where you choose. An assistant exports only to the folder you choose. With none chosen, exporting is off.
Not everything is offered. Assistants are not given tools to remove photos from the library, to delete presets, snapshots, or tags, or to install AI models.

For scripts

The lucarne command also works in Terminal and in scripts, to import, search, edit, and export photos.

Lucarne lets you connect AI assistants provided by others. It does not control those assistants, their providers, or what they do, and you are responsible for the assistants you connect and the permissions you give them. Keep backups of your photos. See the disclaimer.