Most editors want your photographs imported into a library of their own first. LaRay does not have a library. It has sources: places you point it at once, and browse and open photographs from after that.
The kinds of source
- On iPhone, iPad and Mac — Files. Any folder the Files app or Finder can reach, iCloud Drive included. Access is granted to the folder once, and kept, so the app can still open it next week without asking again.
- On Android — a granted folder. Your camera folder, a folder on an SD card, anything the system folder picker offers. It is the permission Android actually honours across restarts, so a folder you added today is still there tomorrow.
- On Windows — any folder on disk.
- Everywhere — an S3-compatible bucket. AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or a MinIO server of your own. Endpoint, keys and bucket are set in the app, with a connection test before you save.
Each kind draws its own setup screen, so adding one is a couple of taps rather than a form to understand. On first launch LaRay creates the source for this device’s own storage, empty until you add a folder to it — and if you remove it, it stays removed.
Keys stay in the keychain
A bucket’s secret key is stored in the system keychain, never in a settings file. Settings files end up in backups; a keychain is designed not to leak.
Browsing is looking
The browser is a grid of thumbnails, because a photograph is recognised by looking at it. One tap opens a photograph; the only things drawn that are not photographs are the folders you walk through. On remote storage, thumbnails come from the storage where it has them, rather than downloading every original to make one.
Import from Photos
There is one photograph no folder can reach: one that lives only in Google Photos or iCloud Photos, with no local file behind it. For that, Import from Photos — on iPhone and Android only — copies the photograph into the app and edits the copy. Importing the same photograph twice gives you the same copy, and the edit you already made on it.
These copies are scratch space and are cleared the next time the app starts, so an edit made on an imported photograph does not outlive the session. Whenever the photograph is in a folder, adding that folder as a source is the better answer: it costs no storage, and nothing is ever copied.
Nothing is written over the original
Wherever the photograph came from, it is opened to be read. An export is a new file, and it is
refused if it would land on top of the photograph it came from. A result from
Pixel Studio is saved beside the original under a new name —
-pixels on the end — where the storage allows writing, and to your photo library or a
location you choose where it does not.