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Run the studio

Start it with krites studio, or on a Mac double-click Krites. The studio is krites' primary surface: a local, single-user web UI over your shoots.

First run

Nothing needs running first. On a fresh install the studio writes your default config before it starts, as every krites command does. See Getting started.

Launch it

krites studio

krites starts a localhost-bound web server and prints the URL to open. By default it picks a free port; pin one with --port:

krites studio --port 8733

There is no --shoot flag

Unlike the CLI commands, the studio isn't scoped to one shoot. It opens onto a library of shoots and you pick one in the UI, so krites studio --shoot DIR fails with unknown flag: --shoot. Add a folder with Browse… on the Shoots page, as below.

On macOS, double-clicking Krites (or running krites launch) does the same and opens your browser for you. If a studio is already running it reuses that one rather than starting a second.

Add a shoot from the studio

On the Shoots page you can register a new shoot without typing a path: press Browse… to pick its folder of originals. On a desktop (macOS, or Linux with a display) that opens your system's folder chooser; in a headless or remote session it's a folder browser inside the studio that walks the server's directories. You can still type or paste an absolute path into the field.

What you can do there

  • Work the cull grid: confirm, override or reject verdicts across thousands of frames. It stays fast because only the previews on screen are rendered. It lays out as justified rows by default (uncropped frames, shot order kept); the Rows / Grid toggle switches to a dense uniform grid and remembers your choice.
  • Inspect a frame in the loupe, straighten, crop and develop it, and remove objects. Before / after wipes a divider between the untouched original and your edits. The Faces strip shows a zoomed crop of every detected face with its eye state, ringing the ones that read as blinking, so you can see why a frame was flagged rather than only read it. Focus peaking (or O) glows the in-focus edges green over the frame, showing which plane the cull judged sharp. The Why … panel maps the reasons: each is a chip, and a reason tied to a face (a blink) drops a pin on that face. Hover a chip to light its pin, or a pin to light its chip. Whole-frame reasons (soft focus, exposure) stay chips.
  • Hit lights-out (the Lights button, or press L) to dim the chrome and let the frames fill your attention; press L again to bring the lights back up.
  • Work in bulk: shift-click or ⌘-click to select a range, then keep, maybe, reject or star-rate the whole selection at once. In the loupe, Select burst grabs every frame in a cluster so you can reject the also-rans in one go. A pace HUD in the footer tracks how many frames you've reviewed and your frames-per-hour.
  • Ask which one to pick: with several frames selected, Review sends them to the AI critic as a single call, so it weighs them against each other and returns a best-of-set read ("the second is the pick, and here's why") alongside each frame's own critique. It runs in the background (tracked in the bell, surviving a reload, cancellable), and every frame keeps its own saved review. It's off until you configure a provider. The images leave your machine, so krites says so the first time and asks again for more than ten frames. Reviewing one frame at a time stays in the loupe.
  • Survey the bursts: a full-screen sweep, one cluster at a time, where you crown each burst's keeper (click it or press its number) and its siblings drop to maybe. Skip moves on without deciding; Esc ends the survey.
  • Review your output: the Exported toggle flips the grid to the rendered files in export/ (click one to inspect it full-screen), so you can check the final deliverable without leaving the studio. Toggle it off to return to the cull.

None of it touches your originals. Edits are records, rendered only on export.

It keeps running after you close the tab

The studio is a server, not a page, so closing the browser leaves it running. A studio started by the macOS app or krites launch runs detached, so it keeps going when you close the terminal too. Stop it with Shut down krites in the studio's settings.

The same applies to long jobs: closing the tab does not cancel a cull, an export or a batch review. They keep going, and reopening the studio reattaches to them. To actually stop one, cancel it from the UI.

Restarting the studio does lose a running job, because the list of jobs is held in memory. The studio tells you a cull was interrupted rather than silently forgetting it, but it can't resume one; run it again.

It cannot be shared over a network

The studio binds loopback only and refuses to start on anything else: not 0.0.0.0, not a LAN address, not a hostname. It is single-user, with one session credential per launch and no accounts. Running krites on a server so a team can cull together is not a supported configuration, and there is no setting that makes it one.

The CLI and the studio are interchangeable

They read and write the same shoot files through the same engine. Cull from the CLI and review in the studio, or the reverse, mid-shoot, without exporting or importing anything.

See the studio command reference for the full flag set, and the studio API reference for what the UI is doing underneath.