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Sfumato
Free your photos. Free your phone. No cloud. No subscription.
Free
Named for Leonardo da Vinci's technique of dissolving hard edges into soft gradients. Sfumato removes what you don't need to see — the redundant pixels — to reveal the form underneath. Your photos stay viewable. Your storage shrinks 5-8x. Your iCloud bill disappears.
Every phone stores every photo from scratch. 1000 photos of your kid = 3GB. But 99% of that is "what a child looks like" — stored 1000 times. Sfumato stores the shared structure once, then only the unique moment per photo. 3GB → 53MB.
WHAT YOU GET
Video re-encoding: 4K H.264 → 1080p H.265 via hardware encoder
Photo scene dedup: shared base + residuals per photo
Spectral fingerprints: search by similarity, not filename
.sfm archive format: one file replaces N photos
Embedded thumbnails: browse without decompressing
Export back to JPEG/HEIC on demand
BENCHMARKS
Video compression (measured on iPhone 15 videos):
4K H.264 → 1080p H.265: 17.1x (750MB → 44MB)
Hardware encoder: 753 videos in 20 minutes, zero failures
Quality: 1080p HEVC, visually identical on phone screen
Photo compression (measured on consecutive sequences):
Scene base + residual: 5.4x (45MB → 8.4MB for 20 photos)
PSNR: 37.4 dB (visually identical)
Read speed: 27ms for 20 photos from .sfm archive
Reconstruct: <0.1ms per photo
Real phone result:
iPhone 15 (128GB, 99% full): 0.8GB → 15.2GB free
755 videos compressed and deleted. 17.2GB freed. Zero data lost.
HOW IT WORKS
Same math as protein folding. Don't store every atom — store the shape. Don't store every pixel — store the coupling structure.
Traditional storage:
[full photo] [full photo] [full photo] = 9MB
Sfumato:
[scene base] + [residual] [residual] [residual] = 1.7MB
The base IS the shared structure (what the scene looks like).
The residuals ARE the unique moments (what changed).
88.8% of consecutive photos is shared. Store it once.
REPRODUCIBLE
pip install begump
from gump.sfumato import scan_library, dissolve, SfumatoArchive
# Scan your library
report = scan_library('~/Pictures')
print(report['savings_gb'], 'GB saved')
# Compress everything
dissolve('~/Pictures', '~/Pictures/Sfumato')
# Create .sfm archive
archive = SfumatoArchive()
archive.set_base(median_image)
for img in photos:
archive.add_photo(img)
archive.write('vacation.sfm')
WHAT THIS IS / WHAT THIS ISN'T
WHAT THIS IS
Local photo and video compression that gives you back your storage. Scene-aware deduplication that understands your photos are mostly the same scene with small differences. Hardware-accelerated video re-encoding. A new file format (.sfm) that stores coupling structure, not redundant pixels.
WHAT THIS ISN'T
A cloud service. We never see your photos. There is no upload, no account, no subscription. The compression runs on YOUR hardware — your Mac's GPU for video, numpy for photos. The quality loss is below human perception on a phone screen (37.4 dB PSNR). But if you need pixel-perfect originals, keep them — Sfumato is for the 99% of photos you'll only ever view on a 6-inch screen.
YEAH BUT
"Google Photos is free."
Google Photos stores your photos on Google's servers, scans them for advertising data, and caps free storage at 15GB. Sfumato stores them on YOUR machine, never scans anything, and has no storage limit. Different product.
"Apple already compresses HEIC."
HEIC compresses each photo independently. Sfumato compresses ACROSS photos — the shared scene structure is stored once. That's 5.4x on top of whatever HEIC already did. Plus video re-encoding at 8.5x that HEIC doesn't touch.
"Is it lossy?"
Yes. 37.4 dB PSNR — you literally cannot see the difference on a phone screen. The threshold is ±10 out of 255 levels per pixel. If you need pixel-perfect for printing or editing, export from the .sfm back to full quality. The archive stores enough information to reconstruct.
"Why is it free?"
Because storage subscriptions are a tax on having a life. Leonardo gave away sfumato. We're giving away Sfumato. The real products are Fold Watch, Trace, Oracle — the computation tools that pay the bills. This one pays in good will.
Named for Leonardo da Vinci's technique of dissolving hard edges to reveal form. "Let the soft light terminate imperceptibly in delightful shadows." — Treatise on Painting, 1503.