Teaching an AI to Develop My RAW Photos: A Self-Hosted Linux Pipeline

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to answer a specific question: could an AI agent do the boring, careful parts of my photography workflow — the parts I actually skip because they take too long?

Not “make my photos look good” in the Instagram-filter sense. I mean the tedious, correct-but-thankless work: pulling the right RAW off my server, applying the exact lens-correction data for the exact lens I used, denoising only the frames that need it, keeping the EXIF intact, filing everything under the right date, and getting a print onto photo paper without fighting a driver. The stuff a careful darkroom tech would do and a busy human never quite gets around to.

So I built it. A local, self-hosted pipeline where Claude Code can reach into my Immich library, pull original Canon CR3 RAW files, develop them in darktable with camera- and lens-specific corrections, retouch in GIMP, print on a networked Canon photo printer, and push finished JPEGs back into Immich as new assets — all driven through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Lensfun on Linux Colorado

Teaching an AI to Develop My RAW Photos: A Self-Hosted Linux Pipeline