window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world

Chrome introduced a new API, window.showDirectoryPicker() that allows the user to grant access to a directory on their computer and allow a website to read/write everything inside.

Examples that have been thrown around are a local-first notes app, where you can grant it access to a folder full of Markdown notes, and you own the data rather than it being squirrelled away in some cloud service.

The other day I was getting nostalgic about Apple’s Aperture UI and wondered whether Claude could create a similarly-themed UI. I asked it to also use window.showDirectoryPicker.

Here’s the result:

It reminds me of using Lightroom to view local files, but it’s a webpage! You can also create folders within the app and move photos into them, and it all happens on your filesystem.

It doesn’t stop there though. Imagine whole photo & video editing apps using this: powerful UIs in your browser, but working with source files on your filesystem. People are already building WebGPU video editors in the browser—I really hope they also take advantage of new local-first storage opportunities like this.

To take this prototype further, I asked Claude to create a simple compositing app inspired by Apple’s Shake. Sure enough, here’s a little node-based compositing app where you can draw a polygon and get it composited on top of your source image.

All of this without a single line of hand-written code.

It’s an amazing world we’re living in!