Photonkeeper
Smart Telescope Archiving
Only for Mac
$4.99
Mac
Import a night off your DWARF, verify every byte, and free the card. New in 1.12: a check that your archived frames still open, and deletions that work on a NAS.
Photonkeeper moves imaging sessions off a DWARF 3 or DWARF Mini and into a proper archive on your own drive — and puts them back byte for byte identical, so the telescope can still megastack and restack them.
Session folders are never renamed and nothing inside one is ever altered. All the organising happens in the directories above them, so what goes back is exactly what came off.
THE ROUND TRIP
Import, send back, megastack on the telescope, import again to pick up the new restacked output, then free the onboard storage. Everything else in the app exists to make that loop safe to run on hundreds of gigabytes of data you cannot re-shoot.
WHAT IT DOES
• Imports everything new off the telescope, SHA-256 checksumming each file as it copies rather than in a second pass — or just the sessions you pick out of the list.
• Sends sessions back, filtered by target, date, exposure or gain. Every file is hashed on the way out and read back off the telescope and hashed again. A mismatch fails the session; it is not a warning.
• Frees onboard storage, but only for sessions it has just verified against your archive, behind a confirmation naming the count, the bytes, and the free space before and after.
• Files M 42, M42 and NGC 1976 as one target instead of three folders.
• Re-checks the whole archive for bit-rot later, remembers what it found, and fetches damaged files back off the telescope when the session is still there.
• Brings in data you copied off the telescope by hand, before you had this app.
• Removes sessions from the archive when you ask — to the Trash, never straight out.
• Every operation has a dry run that reports exactly what would happen, produced by the same code that does the work.
OVER WI-FI
Import and verify work over Wi-Fi, using the address your telescope shows in its own app. Sending sessions back does not: the telescope's file service refuses writes and reports no free space, so a restore over the air could neither write nor know that what it wrote would fit. The app says so plainly rather than disabling a button and leaving you to guess.
TRY IT WITHOUT A TELESCOPE
Demo mode fabricates a sample telescope and a separate sample archive, so you can watch the whole round trip before pointing anything near your real data. It runs the same copy engine, hashing and verification as the hardware path, so what it shows is what the app does.
SAFE WITH SHARED AND NETWORK STORAGE
Half-written work is staged and only renamed into place once its bytes are known to be right, and the archive index lives outside the archive, so keeping it on a NAS is safe even with more than one Mac using it.
PRIVACY
Nothing is collected. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no account, no tracking, and no third-party code in the app at all. It talks to your telescope and to nothing else.
REQUIREMENTS
• macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon or Intel
• A DWARF 3 or DWARF Mini, connected over USB or on your Wi-Fi network
• Somewhere to keep the archive — an external drive is fine, and it is remembered even if you move or rename the folder
Photonkeeper is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to DwarfLab. DWARF is a trademark of its respective owner.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
**Deleting from an archive on a NAS.**
Photonkeeper sends everything it removes from your archive to the Trash, so a
mis-click is never final. Network drives have no Trash, and macOS refused the
deletion rather than making it permanent — which left Delete from Archive and
Remove Failed Subs unavailable on exactly the kind of drive an archive tends to
live on.
They work now. On a drive with no Trash, deletions go to a `_deleted` folder
inside the archive itself, keeping the folder each session came from so you can
drag it back. It is a move, not a copy, so it is instant however large the
session is. The space comes back when you empty it — Archive → Empty Deleted
Items, which says how much it will destroy and is the one thing in Photonkeeper
that cannot be undone.
That folder has a row of its own in the sidebar, so the place your deleted
sessions go is somewhere you can look. It says what is in it, and
right-clicking gives you Show in Finder and Empty Deleted Items.
**Check that your frames are still frames.**
Archive → Check Frames Are Readable, next to Verify, because it is the other
half of the same question. Verify proves your files are the ones that were
imported. This one asks whether they will still open — a session that turned
into zeroes on the drive has a checksum like anything else and passes Verify
for ever.
It opens every frame rather than a sample, and reads only enough of each to
answer, so a whole archive is a matter of seconds where verifying the same one
takes hours. It only reports: a frame that will not open is not something the
archive can mend from itself.
**DWARF II archives.**
A DWARF II names its folders differently from a DWARF 3, and Photonkeeper
understood almost none of them — most of a II's sessions landed under _other
with no target, exposure, gain or binning. They now read properly: on the
archive this was tested against, 50 of 51 sessions, and all 26 sets of darks.
This was done against a copy of a II's card rather than the telescope itself,
so Archive → Import from an Existing Folder… is the route it has been tested
on. Connecting a II, or sending sessions back to one, is untested rather than
ruled out.
**The sessions list says more.**
Three things Photonkeeper had already recorded and was not showing you. The
Filter column has been a column of dashes since it was written, though your
frames have carried the filter all along — it shows now. Hovering the Subs
column tells you how many frames the telescope took and how many its own live
stack kept, and the gap between the two is what the night cost you in cloud,
wind and satellites. And exposures the telescope writes as fractions, like the
1/400 of a solar session, are read at last, so those sessions have an exposure
like every other.
**The Log has levels, and somewhere to live.**
Everything, Normal or Problems, chosen in the Log header and remembered between
launches. Everything adds a line per file, which is the level you want when you
are working out what an operation is actually doing; Problems leaves only what
went wrong, now in orange. Every line is timestamped, and ten times as many are
kept on screen as before.
Each run is also written to a file inside the archive as it happens, so a run
that ends badly still leaves something to read. The last twenty are kept. Copy
and Save… sit next to the filter, for sending one to somebody.
**Statistics and Activity, without the scroll.**
They sat under the target list, which on a large archive put them a long way
below the fold. They are now near the top of the sidebar, where two rows that
describe the whole archive belong.
Statistics also gains a row of cards under the heatmap counting sessions per
telescope, so an archive holding more than one body says which of them shot
what.
The developer, Dale Forster, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Dale Forster
- Size
- 1.2 MB
- Category
- Photo & Video
- Compatibility
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Mac
- Languages
English and 2 more
- English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Dale Forster

