Kiln
a fast, native batch image processor
Details
- External ID
- 49081548
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Kiln
- Website domain
- kilnimage.app
- Launched
- July 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.505973715651135
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I was tired of outdated UIs and performance of similar tools. Nor did I want to write ImageMagick scripts every time I needed to resize/convert/watermark a folder with a few thousand images.It's a native desktop app built with C++23, Skia for rendering, libvips for image processing and my own cross-platform UI toolkit - no Electron/Qt.It allows building reusable pipelines: resize, convert, compress, watermark, sharpen, blur, rotate, flip, rename, and metadata (EXIF/IPTC/XMP) editing, chained in any order and saved for reuse. Batches run in parallel.Everything is local — no uploads, no signups/account, no telemetry, no network calls during processing.It's currently in public beta (as mentioned, no signups or accounts needed - can just download), for Windows and Linux (Wayland only). Waiting for the Apple certificate to sign the macOS dmg installer, at which point I'll post the download link for macOS.Business model: free beta now, one I've received enough feedback and the tool is mature enough - a one-time license per major version once it's out of beta. There won't be any subscriptions or telemetry ever.Would love to get your feedback, especially on missing formats/operations (e.g. RAW file formats, watch folders, a CLI) to drive the roadmap to the first official version.Cheers.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- fast native image batch processor
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a high-performance, cross-platform native desktop application in C++23 with custom Skia rendering, multithreaded libvips pipelines, and low-level OS windowing requires deep native systems programming.
What it would actually take: Requires senior C++23 systems development using Skia for GPU-accelerated 2D UI rendering, custom event loops, and cross-platform window management. The backend requires low-level multithreaded scheduling over libvips pipelines, native SIMD optimizations, color space management (ICC profiles), and meticulous memory management to process tens of thousands of high-res images without memory leaks or crashes.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: nip4 (official libvips GUI), GNU parallel
Concerns raised: Benchmarks don't measure peak memory use for large images, No benchmarks against nip4/libvips CLI
Feature requests: Pipeline composition/joining (background + foreground compositing), CLI mode, libvips smartcrop support, ICC colour management, HDR and image alpha support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 112 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #46 of 113 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 272 days after the earliest competitor.
- Fast, native Mac file manager (filters, fuzzy find, 9 MB, no Electron) · hn · 2026-07-07 · 98 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- ImageFlow · ph · 2026-09-27 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- SnappyKit · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Fast Image Tools · ph · 2026-09-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- TinyJS · hn · 2026-09-01 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser · hn · 2025-11-25 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser · hn · 2025-11-15 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- PixelKit · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.