Castroom

Invent a person.
Photograph them forever.

Castroom is a Mac app for making pictures of somebody who does not exist. Write down who they are once, and every picture after that comes back as the same person. Keep the ones you want and turn them into slideshows.

A saved person in Castroom, with the pictures kept of them.

The same person, a hundred pictures later

You write down who somebody is once, and after that it is locked. Every generation sends those exact words and their reference pictures, so the face that comes back is the face you kept last week, not a cousin of it.

Their look is a separate thing and it stays free to change, because what somebody wears is not who they are. You can adjust a scar, a jawline or skin on a saved person too. Ask for a different sex, a decade of age or a different ethnicity and the change is refused by name, because that is a different person and you would be handing the model two of them.

A person's picture library, every picture the same face.

You type an instruction, not a form

There are no fields to fill in. You write what you want in your own words, and a model folds it into the person's look, the place you picked and any recipe you reused. What you type usually argues with one of those, and settling that argument is the whole job: gluing the sentences together just hands the picture model a contradiction and lets it decide.

The prompt is a result, not an input. Nothing asks you to approve words before they have made anything. The words appear next to the pictures they produced, because those are the evidence about whether they were right.

Four candidate pictures from one run, with the words that made them beside them.

Every button that spends money says what it spends

The figure is on the button before you press it. Each run is kept with what it cost, which model drew it and how many goes each picture took, and a ledger adds the lot up. A refusal costs nothing and the record says so.

Nothing else in the app shows a price. A number that is always on screen is furniture, and it stops being read.

The log of runs, each with what it cost.

Pictures become slideshows, and slideshows go to your drafts

Write a script or have one written, break it into slides, and fill each slide from pictures you already have or by making something new. A fill tells you which pictures it reused and why it chose them.

Export the frames, or send the set straight to your own TikTok drafts. It never posts. You add the sound and the caption and press post yourself.

A slideshow storyboard with its slides filled in.

It runs on your Mac, and nothing leaves it

One app and one process. No account, no sign in and no server of ours. You bring your own keys for the image and text models, they are held in the Keychain, and each one is only ever sent to the provider it belongs to.

Castroom keeps the database and the pictures in a folder it manages, so there is no path to set and nothing to rescan. There is no analytics, no tracking and no crash reporting. Nothing about you or what you make reaches us, because there is nothing of ours for it to reach.

Nothing is picked for you

Every step that produces candidates ends in front of a person. No best of, no scoring, no picture chosen by default and nothing quietly promoted because a model liked it.

Deleting is ordinary too. Pictures, people, places and recipes can all go. What is protected is that it is never accidental and never silent: a deletion says what it removes, and the record of what a run made and what it cost outlives the pictures.

What it deliberately does not do

Each of these was specified at least once and then cut. None of them needs a rewrite to add later.

Tell me when it is out

It is a Mac app, it is not finished, and there is nothing to download yet.