Photonkeeper

Gets 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.

macOS 14 or later · Windows 10 (1809) or later

Works with the DWARF 3 and the DWARF Mini. Both have been run against real data — the DWARF 3 by me, the Mini by an owner who put the whole round trip through it. A DWARF II's own archive reads too — file it in with Archive → Import from an Existing Folder. I've never had a II in front of me, so importing straight off one, or sending sessions back to it, is untested rather than ruled out. If yours doesn't behave, or anything about it confuses you, tell me at support@chryse.co.uk — screenshots welcome.

What it does

Imports everything new off the telescope, SHA-256 checksumming each file as it copies rather than in a second pass.
Works over the cable or over your own Wi-Fi network — Telescope → Connect over Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi imports and verifies; sending sessions back and freeing the card need USB.
Sends sessions back to the scope — filtered by target, date, exposure or gain — hashing on the way out and reading back to confirm.
Frees onboard storage, but only for sessions it has just verified against your archive.
Files M 42, M42 and NGC 1976 as one target instead of three folders.
Shows you the night, not just a row about it: the stacked picture the telescope writes beside every session appears when you select it, with the exposure, gain, filter and date underneath. Space enlarges it, and the arrow keys walk a target's nights.
Keeps two telescopes' work apart — calibration frames are filed per telescope, so a second DWARF can't overwrite the first one's darks, and Archive → Group Archive by Telescope gives each scope a folder of its own with a tick rather than a migration.
Brings across your stills, videos and panoramas as well, if you ask, checksummed like everything else and filed under a _media folder.
Moves sessions that went into the wrong archive to the right one — Move to Another Archive — keeping everything it knows about them, and clears the records of sessions you deleted in the Finder or Explorer behind its back.
Re-checks the whole archive for bit-rot later, remembers what it found, and can fetch damaged files back off the telescope.
Asks the other half of that question too — not just whether a frame has changed since it was imported, but whether it still opens as a frame at all.
Imports a whole card, or just the sessions you pick out of the list.
Removes sessions from the archive when you ask — to the Trash or the Recycle Bin, never straight out, and to a holding folder inside the archive on network drives, which have no Trash of their own.
Every operation has a dry run that shows exactly what would happen first.

Session folders are never renamed and nothing inside one is ever altered — all the organising happens in the directories above them.

Try it without a telescope

Both apps have a demo mode with sample data and a separate sample archive, so you can watch the whole round trip work before pointing it anywhere near your own sessions. Telescope → Try Demo Mode.

Screenshots

A target's sessions listed with dates, exposures, sub counts, sizes and a green verified column. — Sessions grouped under one target, with every one checksum-verified against the archive.

A dry run listing every file that would be copied, with sizes, before anything happens. — Every operation can be dry-run first. This is the whole list, before a single byte moves.

The archive sidebar listing targets with session counts and total integration time. — Your archive by target, with session counts and total integration time.

Requirements

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, Apple silicon or Intel — or Windows 10 version 1809 or later, x64 or ARM64.
A DWARF 3 or DWARF Mini. Over USB for everything; over your own Wi-Fi network for importing and verifying.
Somewhere to keep the archive — an external drive is fine, and it's remembered even if you move or rename the folder.

The two are the same app and the same archive format: a drive written by one is read by the other, checksums and all. The Mac app is in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese, following whatever language your Mac is set to; the Windows app is in English for now. Help → Photonkeeper Help is a manual inside the app that names every command the way your own menus do.

Privacy

Photonkeeper collects nothing about you. There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no account to make, no licence to check and no tracking of any kind, and no third-party code in the app at all. Nobody, me included, learns what you photograph or when.

Your archive, its manifests and checksums, and a handful of small settings all stay on your own machine. The Mac App Store and Microsoft Store versions make exactly one kind of network connection — to your own telescope, on your own network. The Mac App Store build has the version check compiled out of it; the Windows build never had one written, because the Store handles updates. Copies downloaded from this page before Photonkeeper moved to the App Store add that one check, once a day, and it can be turned off.

Read the full privacy policy, which spells out every connection the app makes, exactly where your data lives, and what happens if you email me.

Get in touch

Bugs, confusion or feature requests: support@chryse.co.uk. If something went wrong, the Activity pane's Log keeps one, and every run writes one into your archive as well — Save… from the Log, or the newest file in _journal/logs/, is the single most useful thing you can send.