Manoni is a fast, simple photo browser, culler & editor — light enough to stay smooth on a weak laptop, simple enough to stay out of your way.
Browse
→
Cull
→
Edit
→
Export
For photographers who shoot a lot and work on a modest machine. Manoni is built to cull a big batch fast, make quick but real edits, and hand back clean copies — and to stay out of your way while you do it.
Click a tool on the right-hand rail to open its panel — click any card below to see exactly what it does. Every edit is non-destructive, with undo, redo and a live histogram.
Text and logo overlays share one layer stack, reordered from the … chip beside the selection · undo / redo · live histogram · before / after compare · dark & light theme with an accent colour · an English & Polish interface, with Georgian one download away.
A virtualized thumbnail strip — thousands of files stay smooth — beside a nested folder tree. The arrow keys walk the strip; Enter keeps a photo and Backspace rejects it, each into its own folder. Nothing is deleted: culling only moves files, and Ctrl+Z undoes any move.
A filter is a saved slider preset — one click applies the whole look. Save a photo and its edit is pinned as “Last” for the next shot. Export a filter group to a small .mnf file and share your looks between machines and friends.
Three ways to save, at full resolution — overwrite the open file (Ctrl+S), drop a numbered copy into a subfolder beside the photo (Ctrl+E), or Save as… a JPEG / PNG / WEBP wherever you like. Only the first one replaces a file. Metadata is kept, stripped, or converted to sRGB for the web per your choice.
Browse and cull without reaching for the mouse. The Help button in the top bar opens a tabbed guide covering all of it.
Translated the interface, or built a filter group you love? Post the file on Manoni’s Discussions board — and pull down what others have shared. Everything imports with a double-click, or from an Import button.
Manoni speaks English and Polish out of the box; Georgian is already on the board, waiting to be downloaded. Export your own translation from Settings as a small .mnl file and post it — untranslated lines fall back to English, so even a partial pack is useful.
A filter group’s … menu saves it to a small .mnf file. Share a look you built, or load one a friend posted.
Download a shared file, then double-click it — Manoni installs it. Or use Import: Settings for a language, the Filters panel for a group. To share back, export the file and open a new post.
Including the ones that don't flatter Manoni. Every question has its own link — hover a question to grab it.
Because Manoni is not code-signed, and Windows SmartScreen warns about every unsigned program it hasn't seen before. It's a "we don't know who wrote this" warning, not a virus warning.
A code-signing certificate costs a few hundred dollars a year. SignPath Foundation gives them to open-source projects for free — I applied, and they turned me down for now, because the project is too new to show the public track record they ask for. Windows itself asks for no such thing; SignPath does, because it gives the certificate away.
So the honest answer: the warning goes away once enough people use Manoni for it to qualify. Until then, click More info → Run anyway — or don't take my word for any of it, and read the next answer instead.
Don't trust me. Check.
Every release from 1.2.0 onward is built on GitHub's servers from the public source — not on my machine, where I could have quietly slipped something in. You can open the build that produced your exact file, read the workflow that made it, and read every line of source that went into it. (The two oldest releases still on the page, 0.9 and 1.1.0, predate that workflow and were built by hand. Take the current one.)
Or skip all of that and build it yourself: Python 3.14, pip install -r requirements.txt, run it. Manoni's own code is pure Python — no compilation step. One dependency, tkinterdnd2, does ship a compiled Tcl extension for drag & drop; if that bothers you, it's the one piece to look at. More on how releases are built →
No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no ads.
Manoni sends exactly one request to the internet in its entire life, and only if you click Settings → About → Check for updates: it asks GitHub what the latest release number is and compares it to yours. It does not check at launch, it does not check in the background, and it sends nothing about you or your photos.
One honest footnote: at launch Manoni opens a socket on 127.0.0.1 — your own machine, talking to itself — so that opening a second photo reuses the window you already have instead of starting a second copy. It listens on loopback only. Nothing goes out.
Free, and there's no catch. No trial, no watermark, no locked features, no "Pro" tier, no subscription, no account. GPL-3.0 open source.
I wrote it because Lightroom wouldn't open on my old laptop. It scratched my own itch — giving it away costs me nothing.
Yes. GPL-3.0 restricts what you may do with Manoni's source code if you redistribute a modified version — it says nothing about the photos you edit with it. Those are yours. Use it in a business, charge for the results, no licence to buy and nobody to ask.
Two answers, because two different things are going on.
Editing: no. Every slider, crop, filter, text and logo is non-destructive — they live in memory and are only written when you choose to save. There are three saves, and only one replaces a file:
| Save a copy · Ctrl+E | A new, numbered file in a subfolder next to the photo. The original is untouched, and an earlier copy is never overwritten. |
| Save as… · Ctrl+Shift+S | The same, but you pick format, quality, name and folder. |
| Save · Ctrl+S | Overwrites the open file. No backup. Manoni asks you to confirm first, and offers to save a copy instead. |
Culling: yes — and this is the part to know. When you mark a photo as a keeper or a reject, Manoni moves the original file into the folder you chose for keepers or rejects. That's the point of culling — it's how a folder of 1000 shots becomes a folder of 60. But it does mean the file leaves where it was. Nothing is deleted, it's a move, and you pick both folders yourself.
No catalog to build, no import step, and no sidecar files scattered next to your photos. You point Manoni at a folder and it shows you the folder.
To be exact, because "no database" would be a lie: Manoni keeps one SQLite file — a thumbnail cache, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Manoni\Cache — so a folder you've opened before comes back instantly. It holds thumbnails, not a record of your library; it never sits next to your photos; and you can delete it any time at the cost of one slower redraw.
This is the deliberate difference from Lightroom. The catalog is what makes Lightroom powerful — and it's also what makes it heavy.
Not yet — and I'd rather say so here than have you find out after the download. Manoni currently opens JPEG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, GIF and TIFF.
RAW is on the roadmap as an optional add-on, because the library that decodes it is bigger than the whole rest of the app. Shipping it by default would break the one promise Manoni makes: that it opens instantly on a weak machine.
For a lot of people, honestly, yes. For some, honestly, no.
What it does: cull a folder fast with two keys · tone and colour, including an 8-band colour mixer with dedicated skin and gold controls · remove a blemish or a stray object · crop, straighten, mirror, fix keystoning · one-click filters you can save yourself · text and logo watermarks · strip GPS and camera data before you post · resize a whole folder, subfolders included · record your slider, filter and crop edits as a macro and replay it over a whole folder.
What it doesn't: RAW, tethering, printing, HDR merge, panorama stitching, local masks beyond the retouch brush — and there's no catalog. Batch work covers resizing and the recorded edits above; it does not stamp a watermark across a folder for you. If you need what's missing, you need Lightroom, and I'd tell you so.
That's the entire reason it exists. Manoni is Python, Tkinter and Pillow — no GPU requirement, no .NET, no Electron, no Chromium. It opens in about a second on the nine-year-old machine I wrote it on.
Some effects genuinely are slow, so Manoni puts a coloured dot next to the sliders that cost you — denoise and grain are the heaviest, then sharpen, vignette, and the colour-mixer bands. Leave the dotted ones alone and everything stays instant.
The installer is Windows-only, yes. The code is pure Python with no Windows-only dependencies, so it will very likely run from source on macOS and Linux — but I don't test it there, and I'm not going to claim it works. A Mac build is on the list, not on a date.
Download the Setup.exe from the releases page and run it (see the SmartScreen answer). It installs into Program Files, so Windows will ask you for administrator rights.
To uninstall: Settings → Apps, like anything else. Your photos are never in the install folder, so nothing of yours leaves with it. Two things stay behind on purpose, and both are safe to delete by hand: your settings in %APPDATA%\Manoni, and a thumbnail cache in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Manoni\Cache.
It ships in English and Polish. Any other language is a JSON file: open Settings → General → Add your language, and Manoni generates a template with every string in the app for you to fill in.
Translate one and send it, and it ships with the next release with your name on it. Georgian is already on the board.
Manoni