Why am I building Darkroom?

I’m building Darkroom because I want people who work with sensitive information to have more control over it. Local-first software is central to how I think about privacy and personal sovereignty.

That conviction developed over years. Before Darkroom, I explored several ideas and built and open sourced some of them.

Where it started

In 2015, I helped build a case management system for KrymSOS. It is called Observer. I later built other open source projects for preserving and taking snapshots of web pages.

Over time, I became interested in how investigative journalists, researchers, and OSINT investigators organized their work. Among the people whose work I saw, information was spread across documents, encrypted storage, files, and folders. Some used 20 or 30 different tools.

I could see the problem, but I did not yet grasp what would help. One idea was an evidence marketplace. I abandoned it early because of the regulatory nightmare.

What changed my thinking

There are many cases when people lose control of their working materials. A device may hold unfinished investigations, private conversations, and information about people who have trusted someone with their story or safety.

If that device is seized or compromised, the person using it may lose control over both their work and the information entrusted to them.

At this point I had a better idea of what to build. I wanted to help people organize sensitive information while making protection part of their everyday work.

Why Darkroom

Darkroom grew out of my wish to help people organize sensitive information and evidence while retaining control over it.

Encryption at rest became a requirement. So did an interface that would feel familiar to the people using it. I want privacy to be part of everyday work, and I want the tool’s protections and limits to be clear.

These are the principles guiding what I build. Behind the documents, recordings, and evidence are people whose lives can be affected by what happens to that information.