Hey everyone,
Like many of you, my hard drives are a chaotic mess of FITS files spread across countless folders from different imaging sessions. Trying to find "that one good Ha sub of M31 from last year" or the right flat frames for a specific optical train was driving me crazy.
So, I decided to build a solution: Astro Web Indexer.
It's a free, open-source tool than runs on your computer or, even better, on your NAS/file server. It scans your image folders and gives you a modern web interface to browse, search, and manage all your astro data. It’s particularly useful for shared or remote observatories, but also for any astrophotographer looking to track their imaging sessions over time without getting lost navigating filesystem folders.
The motto is: Stop navigating folders. Start exploring your sky.
📷 preview.png
My favorite feature is the "Smart Frame Finder". You can click an icon on a light frame, and it will automatically find all matching calibration frames (darks, flats, bias) based on rules you can control, like temperature (e.g., ±2°C), exposure, FoV, and more. It can also find other light frames of the same target to help you stack more data.
Here are some of the key features:
📱 Web-Based: Access your image archive from any device on your network (PC, tablet, phone).
🔎 Fast Search: Instantly filter your entire archive by object, filter type, exposure and observation date.
🧠 Smart Frame Finder (SFF): Finds matching calibration frames or similar light frames with tolerance-based rules.
🌘 Moon phase calculation: Calculates moon-phase for each frame.
✨ AstroBin CSV session importer: Select your files for a session and get a pre-formatted CSV ready to paste into AstroBin's session importer!
💾 Duplicate Management: Finds content-based duplicates (even with different filenames) and helps you clean up your archive.
🗃️ Download files: Bulk download functionality with ZIP compression
It's built with Docker, which means it's a self-contained package that's easy to set up on almost any system (Windows, Mac, Linux, QNAP, Synology…)
This is the very first public beta release (v1.1.0), and I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. I want to know what you think, what features you'd like to see, and any bugs you might find.
You can find the code, installation instructions, and the downloadable files on GitHub: https://github.com/michelegz/astro-web-indexer
Thanks for checking it out, and clear skies!
Michele