Photara Media Studio

Installing

Photara is a single Windows application. It keeps its own database and downloads its AI models on first use.

1. Run PhotaraPhotostudio-Setup.exe and follow the installer.
2. Open Photara. It creates a folder called Photara Library in your user folder — this holds the database, thumbnails and AI models. Your photographs are not copied there.
3. Go to Settings → Licence and enter your key, or start the 14-day trial.
4. The first time you use an AI tool, Photara downloads the models it needs. This is a large, one-time download — allow around 80 GB of disk space and a few hours on a normal connection.

Your first scan

1. Open Settings (the gear, top right) and choose Add folder or drive.
2. Add every place your photos live. Whole drives are fine.
3. Press Rescan library. Photara reads the date, camera and size of every file. It does not open the AI models yet, so this is quick — tens of thousands of files in a few minutes.
4. Close Settings. Your photos appear, newest first.

You can close Photara at any point. A scan picks up where it stopped, and only new or changed files are read on later scans.

Background jobs

The clever parts — faces, search, transcription — are separate passes over your library. They run one at a time, save as they go, and resume if interrupted. Find them under Background jobs.

The library

The left-hand list is how you narrow things down. It is grouped so it stays short.

Browse

All memories, Photos, Videos and Favourites. The two buttons at the very top switch between Library and Studio — the editing side of the app.

Discover

People, Events & trips (automatic groupings by time and place), Places (a map), and Best photos (sorted by the quality score).

Filter

Folding sections: What it is (real photographs, with or without people, screenshots, documents, graphics), Where it came from (camera, WhatsApp, screenshots, apps), Years, Cameras & phones, Drives. They remember whether you left them open.

Manage

Duplicates, Folders, Editing queue, Library health, Background jobs and Record the screen.

Selecting several

• Click a photo's circle, or Ctrl-click to add to a selection
• Shift-click to select a run
• Drag a box across the grid
• The bar at the bottom then offers Delete, Move, Make a film and Improve videos

Viewing

People

Photara finds faces and groups the ones that look like the same person. Grouping photographs of someone taken over twenty years is genuinely hard, so expect to help it a little — it takes a few minutes and then it is done.

1. Run Find people from Background jobs and let it finish.
2. Open People. Those who appear often are shown first; faces seen only once or twice are kept separately, since they are usually strangers in the background.
3. Press Join duplicates…. Photara shows pairs of groups that look like the same person, most alike first, with both faces side by side. One click joins them.
4. Name the people you care about by clicking Add a name on their card.
5. Press Regroup. Every fragment that matches a name you have given collapses into that person — and stays collapsed next time.

Searching

The box at the top searches folders, file names and cameras. Turn on AI beside it and you can ask in plain English instead:

• photos of Yusuf in 2019 — the year and the person are understood exactly
• photos with people / photos without people
• screenshots, receipts, documents
• sharp photos at the beach — matched against what each photo shows

Whatever Photara cannot read exactly is matched against the written descriptions, the text read off the pictures, and what was said in videos. Words actually printed in a picture rank highest.

Tidying up

Duplicates

Finds exact copies and near-copies. You choose which to keep; the rest go to the Recycle Bin.

Sources

The Tidy up your library panel separates files that arrived from WhatsApp, screenshots and other apps from photos you actually took. Review a group and move or delete it in bulk.

Library health

Confirms every file is still there and can be opened. Fingerprint files then records a checksum for each, so a later run can detect a file that has silently rotted on a failing drive.

The editor

Open a photo and press E. The photo stays large; the tools live in a panel on the right. Pick a tool from the list and only that tool's controls are shown.

Two kinds of tool

• Measured adjustments — crop, straighten, exposure, contrast. Nothing is invented.
• AI tools — these generate new pixels. They run on your graphics card, take seconds to minutes, and can always be undone.

Undo, and stacking

Every step is recorded. Ctrl+Z steps back through them, including AI steps. Tools build on each other: restore a face, then add colour, then relight — each works on the result of the last, and Applied, in order lists what you have done.

Saving

Save as a copy writes a new file into your edited-copies folder, keeps the date and camera information, and adds it to the library. Your original is untouched unless you deliberately choose to replace it.

Colour & light

Fix everything measures the photo and corrects exposure, contrast, white balance and saturation. Each fix can be turned off, or run on its own with Just this, and each has its own strength.

AI polish does the same but cleans up grain and rebuilds faces first.

Restore & enhance

The everyday fix for a soft, small or noisy photo.

• Rebuild faces — reconstructs facial detail. The fidelity dial trades likeness against prettiness; keep it high for family photos.
• Enlarge — 2× or 4×, reconstructing detail rather than smoothing.
• Clean up grain & speckles — for scanning grain and compression damage.

Deep restore

A much stronger rebuild for photos that are very soft, very small or damaged. Slower, and it reconstructs fine texture rather than sharpening what is there — so faces and fabric may differ slightly from the original. Choose the output size; 1080p takes seconds, 4K can take minutes.

Old & scanned photos

Restore a scanned photo does everything at once: finds the photo inside the scan, straightens it, trims the page, removes dust and scratches, adds colour, rebuilds faces and fixes the light. Any step can be switched off.

Add colour to a black & white photo works on its own too. The colours are the model's best guess — clothes and walls come out plausible rather than accurate.

Scratch repair finds thin light or dark lines and specks that sit on top of the picture and fills them in. Turn How keen up to catch more, at the risk of smoothing real detail.

Asking for an edit

Describe the change in words: “remove the car on the left”, “make it a snowy day”, “turn the shirt blue”. Photara redraws the photo following the instruction while keeping faces steady.

Larger sizes and more steps give better results and take longer. On a smaller graphics card this is the most demanding tool in Photara — expect minutes, not seconds.

Adjusting one part only

1. Choose Adjust one part only.
2. Click the thing you mean — a face, the sky, a dress. Photara works out the whole object.
3. Click again to add to the selection, or right-click to take something out.
4. Adjust brightness, contrast, colour, warmth, softness or sharpness. Only the chosen area changes, blended softly at its edge.

Tick everything except to invert it — the usual way to darken a background or lift a subject out of it.

Erasing something

Brush over what you want gone and press Erase what I brushed. Photara fills the area from its surroundings. Works best on small, clearly bounded things against simple backgrounds — a bin, a sign, a passer-by.

For scratches and dust across a whole photo, use Old & scanned photos instead.

Putting someone somewhere else

Two different methods, chosen at the top of the panel.

Keep the real photo of them

Cuts the people out and builds a new background from your description, then blends the two. The person stays exactly as photographed, so the pose and angle cannot change. Best with a clear subject; fine hair edges can give it away.

Draw them again

Paints a completely new picture of the same person. Pose, clothes, angle and lighting are all free while the face stays theirs. Use it for portraits, one person at a time, with a clear description. Slower — a minute or two.

Bringing a photo to life

A moving clip

Works out what is near and far, then glides a virtual camera across the still. Seconds to make.

Make the face move

Animates the face in a photo of one person — a few words, a glance, a change of expression — while the rest of the photo stays still.

Turn it into 3D

Works out the whole shape of one subject from a single photo and gives you a turning clip plus a .glb file you can open in other 3D software. Only the side facing the camera is real; the back is the model's guess, so it is softer and plainer.

Doing many at once

1. Select the photos in the grid.
2. Press Batch… in the selection bar.
3. Build a recipe — for example restore, then enlarge 2×, then save as a copy.
4. Save it as a preset if you will use it again.
5. The Editing queue works through them one at a time and survives Photara being closed.

Video tools

Open a video and use the buttons in the viewer's toolbar.

Remove something from a video

1. Press the ✕ button.
2. Click the thing you want gone. Right-click marks something to keep.
3. Choose how much margin to take around it.
4. Show me what it would remove paints it red across four sample frames — check before committing.
5. Remove it. Photara follows it through every frame and paints in what was behind.

Adjust one thing in a video

Press the ⊙ button, click a person or object, then use the sliders. The adjustment sticks to them as they move. Flip it to Change everything except it for a background blur that follows the subject.

Improve videos

Select videos in the grid and press Improve videos…. Cleans up and enlarges every frame, then puts the original sound back. Slow — roughly a minute of work per ten seconds of footage.

Making films

Select photos and videos, or open an event and press Make a film. Photara picks the best moments spread across the event, favouring sharp photos and ones with people, drifts the stills so they are not static, takes the best seconds from each video, crossfades everything and can lay your own music underneath with a fade-out. Output is 1080p, saved next to your photos.

Record the screen

Films what is on screen, with the pointer, then adds narration and music.

1. Open Record the screen from the sidebar or the Studio.
2. Choose the whole screen, one window, or a region. Filming a single window keeps everything else out of shot.
3. Pick a microphone to narrate live, or leave it off and write the words afterwards.
4. Press Start recording, do the thing, then Stop.
5. Give it a name. Type a script if you want it spoken — choose from six voices — and pick a music bed.
6. Finish it. The music automatically ducks under the speech.

Letting an AI assistant drive it

Claude, ChatGPT or anything else that speaks MCP can drive Photara to film a walk-through of any software on your computer — it looks at the screen, moves the pointer, types, and starts and stops the recording.

1. Open Settings → Let an AI assistant drive Photara and switch it on.
2. Copy the token that appears.
3. Add the configuration block shown there to your assistant. For Claude Desktop that is its mcpServers settings.
4. Ask the assistant to record the walk-through you want. It can see the screen, so it can work through software it has not been told about.
5. Finish the recording in Photara with narration and music, as above.

Reaching Photara from your phone

Your photographs stay on the computer they are already on. Photara just lets you reach them — on the sofa, or from another country.

On your own network

1. Open Settings → Viewing from your phone and switch it on.
2. Choose a PIN. This is what stops anyone else on the network looking at your photos.
3. On your phone, open the address shown. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.

From anywhere in the world

Photara can set up a private WireGuard tunnel straight to your own computer. Nothing passes through anybody else's service — no account, no cloud, no company in the middle reading your library.

1. In the same settings section, choose Set up remote access. Photara installs and configures WireGuard, opens the one port it needs, and checks whether your router will allow it.
2. Add a phone. Photara shows a QR code; scan it with the WireGuard app.
3. Turn the tunnel on from your phone anywhere in the world, and open Photara's address.

Settings

Specifications

If something goes wrong

An AI tool says it ran out of graphics memory

Choose a smaller output size, or set a lower figure in Settings → Graphics card so Photara picks a smaller model.

A background job seems stuck

Open Background jobs. If it stopped, the reason is shown on the row. Jobs save as they go, so starting again never loses work.

Photos are missing after a drive letter changed

Add the new location in Settings and rescan. Library health then lists files it can no longer find, and you can forget them.

People are split into too many groups

Use Join duplicates…, name the main people, then Regroup. See People.

The trial has finished

Your library, search and viewing keep working. Only the AI tools and recording need a licence.