A row of `photos` kept the frame's own FileSystemFileHandle, and reading the catalogue handed them all to the page at once. Measured on a catalogue of 504290 frames, 458103 of them with a handle, opening the library left the JS heap at 133MB while the browser process held 5.7GB and the renderer 2.1GB: handles are not the page's heap, so nothing ever asked the collector to run, and the rescan's own reload of the catalogue every thirty seconds piled one such reading on the next until the tab was out of memory. No row keeps a handle now. The catalogue is read a few thousand rows at a time — the four and a half gigabytes of live handles came from asking for all of them at once — and a frame's file is asked of its folder's handle when it is drawn or opened, `fileHandleFor`. `reconnectPhotosForFolders` no longer writes handles back into the frames, which is what put them there. 504290 rows read in chunks peak at 1.4GB and settle at 1.1GB, against 8.0GB in one read before.
RecipesCam web — self-contained stack
A Docker-hosted web build of RecipesCam. Everything it needs is in this folder: move it to another machine, run two commands, and the app is up. It does not need the React Native project around it.
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build
# → http://localhost:8090
What runs where
| Service | Image | Role |
|---|---|---|
frontend |
nginx:1.27-alpine (built by frontend/Dockerfile) |
Static SPA + /api/ reverse proxy |
api |
node:22-slim (built by backend/Dockerfile) |
Accounts + saved recipes, SQLite on ./data |
frontend resolves api through Docker's embedded DNS and proxies /api/* to
it — that is why the API container is named api and why it is not published on
the host. Only ${WEB_PORT:-8090} is exposed.
Photos never leave the browser. The CanvasKit render pipeline (grade, frame, watermarks, JPEG encode) runs in the visitor's tab; the API only stores recipes as JSON.
Layout
docker-compose.yml the stack
.env.example WEB_PORT
data/ SQLite (created on first run, gitignored)
backend/ Fastify + better-sqlite3 API, own Dockerfile
frontend/ Vite + React + CanvasKit SPA, own Dockerfile + nginx.conf
shared/ vendored copies of the app's types + utils (see below)
src/engine/ skiaShim.ts (CanvasKit) + exportEngine.ts (render pipeline)
+ session.ts (localStorage/IndexedDB studio persistence)
Vendored files
frontend/shared/{types/index.ts,utils/*.ts} are byte-identical copies of
src/types/index.ts and ten src/utils/*.ts files from the React Native
project (@shopify/react-native-skia is aliased to src/engine/skiaShim.ts in
vite.config.ts + tsconfig.json, so those files compile unchanged):
cinemaShader colorUtils defaultRecipes exifWrite frameUtils jpegDpi
paramDefs recipeShare skiaImage toneShader.
The landing page needs no CDN: frontend/public/assets/fonts/*.woff2 are the
seven self-hosted faces behind the three font groups the Themes menu offers
(Plus Jakarta Sans / Inter / JetBrains Mono, Fraunces / Be Vietnam Pro /
Courier Prime, Be Vietnam Pro / Space Mono — all SIL OFL, pulled from Google
Fonts, vietnamese + latin + latin-ext subsets), and
frontend/public/assets/samples/s*.jpg are the six placeholder negatives the
film strip, preset tester and QR card show (swap them for real graded stills
whenever we have them). Its one foreign request is the QR image from
api.qrserver.com, which degrades to an empty slot offline.
When the app changes one of them, copy it back in — the renderer is only "parity" for as long as these stay in sync:
cd <repo>/docker/frontend/shared/utils
cp <repo>/src/utils/<name>.ts .
Operations
docker compose logs -f api # API log
docker compose restart api # after backend/src changes (rebuild: --build)
docker compose down # stop; ./data survives
Backup is the ./data folder — that is the whole database.
Checks
curl -s http://localhost:8090/api/health # {"ok":true}
curl -sI http://localhost:8090/ # 200, index.html
Then open the UI, drop a photo in, and confirm the preview shows the picture and
EXPORT downloads a JPEG that opens. The preview going solid black while the
export still reports a plausible size is the one failure mode worth knowing: it
means the CanvasKit GPU surfaces lost their shared GrDirectContext (see
frontend/src/engine/skiaShim.ts), and with no GPU the raster fallback renders
the same pipeline correctly, just slower.