A web app for a Raspberry Pi with a camera in a small fixed booth: put a model in, open the page on your phone or PC, and shoot. Lighting, camera settings and framing stay the same, so every model gets a consistent photo without setting everything up again. Focus stacking merges several shots into one sharp image in the background.

Shot with a Raspberry Pi 3B and the HQ Camera (5-50 mm varifocal, manual focus) in a black booth. Both are 8-frame stacks with the halo-free method: manual exposure 97 ms (~1/10 s), gain 1.0, white balance locked, so all frames are identical. Processing on the Pi 3B took 132 s and 176 s.

Chaos Chariot, painted by Michael Timmermans.

Skaven Verminlord, painted by Michael Timmermans.

Each source frame of the Verminlord is sharp at one depth only; the stack combines them:

At 100 % — a single frame (focused on the base) next to the stacked result:

The whole studio in one browser window — live preview with crop frame, clipping warning and focus check on the left, histogram in the middle, capture controls on the right. Works on a phone too.

Camera — most-used controls on top, ⓘ on every setting	Stacks — queue, reprocess, download, upload	Gallery — view, download, multi-select delete
Jobs — stacking and uploads in the background	System — Pi stats, logs, reboot / shut down	Settings — updates, USB disk, Google Drive, NAS

A closed box keeps the light and background identical for every model: the camera looks in through the front, the Pi sits on the back, and the walls are painted with Black 3.0. The 3D-printable parts are on Thingiverse: thing:7416432.

The booth, closed	Open front, Pi at the back	Lit interior, Black 3.0 walls
HQ camera looking in	Pi 3B, power HAT and USB disk	Tilt bracket with locking knob

• Live preview with grid, histogram, clipping warning and a 100 % focus check
• Every camera control in the browser, with presets that load at boot
• Photos, video, and focus stacking — manual, or an automatic lens sweep on autofocus cameras — with a halo-free method made for black backdrops
• Crop to a tall or wide frame before shooting
• Fast captures: saving, compressing, stacking and uploading run in the background
• Storage on the SD card or a USB disk; upload to Google Drive or a NAS
• Gallery with multi-select, System tab with Pi stats, logs, reboot/shutdown
• Updates from the web app; runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B

On a Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm or newer), as your normal user:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MichaelTimmermans/MiniatureStudio/main/install.sh | bash

Or from a clone:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/MichaelTimmermans/MiniatureStudio.git
cd MiniatureStudio && ./install.sh

The installer:

1. installs the system packages from apt-packages.txt (picamera2, Flask, OpenCV, ffmpeg, rclone, cifs-utils, nfs-common, …);
2. clones the app to /opt/miniaturestudio (or uses your clone);
3. builds focus-stack from vendor/focus-stack (a git submodule) — roughly a quarter of an hour on a Pi 3B;
4. installs a small root helper for mounting a USB disk or NAS;
5. installs the miniaturestudio systemd service (starts at boot).

Then open http://<hostname>.local:8000.

• In the web app: Settings → Check for updates → Install update. The app restarts by itself.
• Or in a terminal: miniaturestudio-update (--check to only look).

Updates follow the main branch via git pull. New system packages, a new focus-stack version or a new mount helper are picked up automatically. Opening the page while the app restarts can briefly show "focus-stack missing"; the page retries by itself.

• Hardware — tested setup, lens and aperture, the 3D-printable booth, supported cameras, Raspberry Pi 3B notes
• Camera settings — starting settings for miniatures, presets, preview vs. photo
• Focus stacking — manual stacks, lens sweep, the halo-free method, tips
• Cropping — tall or wide models
• Storage and upload — file names, gallery, USB disk, Google Drive, NAS
• Speed — what runs in the background
• Troubleshooting — System tab, logs, common problems

Raspberry Pi 3B, Raspberry Pi HQ Camera (IMX477) with a 5-50 mm C-mount varifocal lens, in a black booth — the 3D-printable parts are on Thingiverse: thing:7416432. A USB webcam (Sony IMX179) works too. Details and other cameras: Hardware.

MIT — see LICENSE. The bundled focus-stack is © Petteri Aimonen, also MIT (see vendor/focus-stack/LICENSE.md).

This project was developed with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant.