Rendon

The problem it solves

Every app around here eventually needs a picture: an icon for its desktop shortcut, a placeholder photo, a puzzle image, a reference sheet for a video. Each one talking to an image model directly means the same plumbing written three times, and a model change means fixing it in three places.

Worse, six months later nobody remembers how a given image was made. The generation is cheap. The record of how is what has value.

What it does

Rendon is a small library and a matching local web service. An app asks for a preset, like icon, photo or illustration, and Rendon decides which provider and model back it. Retuning a preset is a one-line change here and every app picks it up.

Every image lands with a JSON sidecar recording the prompt, model, settings and parent images, and a gallery page shows what has been made. The sidecars are the source of truth: delete the index and nothing is lost. It can take reference images, so an existing photo can be edited or a person placed into a scene, and it can import photos you already have, one at a time or a whole folder, so they carry the same provenance.

The push now is steady supply. Jigger is in daily use and its owner gets through puzzles faster than new photos arrive, so the next pieces are a request queue for pictures made by hand and a public-domain source that records the licence alongside the image.