Community skins and packs

Anyone can share skins with everyone who uses FolderSkin, for free. A shared set of skins is a pack; one skin on its own is a pack of one. Packs live in their own repository, folderskin-community, under packs/, and reach the app straight from GitHub, so there are no accounts and no server of ours in between. FolderSkin ships no skins of its own: packs, your own pictures and AI results are where every skin comes from.

Adding a pack

The first time FolderSkin opens, it offers packs to start your library with. After that, open Community in the app. The filters at the top are the packs' tags. Add puts a pack's skins in your library, carrying the pack's tags, and each skin's ⋯ menu says which pack it came from and who shared it. Remove takes the whole pack out again. Folders that already use one of its skins keep their icon, because the icon lives in the folder itself.

Add from a folder does the same for a pack folder on your computer, which is also how you try a pack out before sharing it.

A pack is added whole or not at all: every picture is downloaded and checked first, then all of them are saved in one go, so a dropped connection or a full disk never leaves half a pack in your library. Its skins appear in the pack's own order.

Sharing yours

From the app:

1. Tag the skins you want to share (⋯ → Tags). To share one skin, use ⋯ → Share with community. To share several, use Community → Share your skins and pick a tag.
2. Fill in the pack's name, its tags, your GitHub user name and a licence, say where the pictures came from, and tick that they are yours to share.
3. Press Connect and publish. The first time, FolderSkin shows a short code to copy and opens https://github.com/login/device; approve it once and it remembers.
4. That is the end of it. FolderSkin checks the pack against the contract below, makes you a copy of folderskin-community if you can't push to it, puts the pack on a branch in a single commit, and opens the pull request there as you, with your answers in the description.

The pull request runs the same checks the app just ran. Once a maintainer merges it, a workflow in folderskin-community rebuilds index.json and the preview, and the pack appears in everyone's Community view.

FolderSkin asks GitHub for public_repo, which is enough to fork a public repository, push to your own fork and open a pull request. It never asks to see a private repository. The sign-in is sealed on disk in FolderSkin's own folder, the same way API keys are (keys.rs), and Use another account forgets it. To take the permission back entirely, remove FolderSkin under Settings → Applications on GitHub.

Save a folder still does what it always did, for anyone who would rather handle GitHub themselves: it writes a folder that follows every rule below, ready to drag onto a pull request. You can also make a pack by hand: follow the contract and open a pull request to folderskin-community that adds one folder under packs/.

The contract

A pack is one folder:

packs/night-prints/
  pack.json
  koi.png
  fox-in-the-rain.jpg

pack.json:

{
  "version": 1,
  "name": "Night prints",
  "author": "your-github-name",
  "license": "CC0-1.0",
  "tags": ["woodblock", "night"],
  "skins": [
    { "file": "koi.png", "name": "Koi over the wave", "tags": ["animals"] },
    { "file": "fox-in-the-rain.jpg", "name": "Fox in the rain" }
  ]
}

No other fields are allowed, so a typo such as "tag" fails the check instead of being ignored.

Limits

Why 24: a pack is a themed set. Twenty-four skins fill about two screens of the library, stay quick to review on GitHub, and keep a download under 48 MB even at the largest pictures.

Pictures

Each picture is one of two kinds, told apart the same way as a picture dropped on the window:

• A finished folder on a transparent background, or on flat magenta #FF00FF, which FolderSkin cuts away. It becomes the icon exactly as drawn.
• Anything else is wrapped onto FolderSkin's folder. SKINS.md shows where the folder crops a picture, so the subject survives.

1024 px is the largest icon any of the three systems draws, so a bigger picture adds nothing.

Licences

FolderSkin is MIT licensed, and shared skins use Creative Commons or MIT:

• CC0-1.0: anyone can use them for anything. This is the default, since most skins are made with AI and CC0 claims the least over them.
• CC-BY-4.0: anyone can use them, and credits you.
• MIT: the same licence as FolderSkin's code; your name stays with them.

Share only pictures you made or are allowed to share.

Making a pack from pictures

packs make turns a folder of pictures, such as renders saved from an image model, into a pack under packs/ in a checkout of folderskin-community that already passes the checks. The commands below run from this repository, with folderskin-community checked out beside it:

cargo run -p folderskin-tools -- packs make ~/Downloads/3d-renders --dir ../folderskin-community \
  --id 3d --name "3D" --tags 3d,glossy --author your-github-name --preview /tmp/3d.png

Each picture gets the split the app makes when you add one. A finished folder, painted on magenta the way the chat prompt in PROMPTS.md asks, or on real transparency, is cut out and becomes the icon itself; anything else is artwork for FolderSkin's folder. Every picture is shrunk to 1024 px and compressed to at most 400 KB (--max-kb changes that), since a pack is downloaded by everyone who adds it: folders as WebP when cwebp is installed (brew install webp, or the webp package on Linux), which keeps the transparency at a fraction of a PNG's size, and artwork as JPEG. SKINS.md says more about the formats. The report says which way each picture went. Skins are named after their files, so name the files first or fix the names in pack.json afterwards, and --preview draws every skin as its folder in one PNG to look over. packs make never overwrites a pack: to start again, delete its folder.

Image models asked for #FF00FF often paint a steady raspberry or hot pink instead (Grok did, for the Classic Art pack). --flat-backdrop cuts away a flat background of any colour: it measures each picture's own background, removes only what reaches the edge (so a red cloak inside the folder stays), takes a soft drop shadow with it, and gives the edge the painting's colours rather than a pink rim. On a plain grey or black background it keeps to that background's own noise and never grows upward, so a dark coat or an ink line meeting the folder's edge isn't mistaken for background. Look at the --preview sheet afterwards (it's drawn on light grey, so a hole shows); a picture with no flat background still comes out as artwork.

To see one picture as the app will show it, render draws it as its folder:

cargo run -p folderskin-tools -- render ../folderskin-community/packs/3d/glass.webp --out /tmp/glass.png --size 512

Checking a pack yourself

From this repository, with folderskin-community checked out beside it:

cargo run -p folderskin-tools -- packs check --dir ../folderskin-community

It checks every folder in packs/ with the rules the app uses, and prints each problem as a sentence. Run inside a folderskin-community checkout, --dir can be left out: the tools look in the current folder by default. --max-kb holds the pictures to a smaller size than the 2 MB limit.

How the app reads packs

Community has a List and a Gallery view, and View on any pack opens it: every skin drawn as the folder it makes, with its name, before anything is added. Refresh reads the list from GitHub again. A pack you added that has changed on GitHub since shows Update, which swaps its skins for the new version; folders keep their icons, and a favourite of a picture both versions share stays a favourite.

• index.json in folderskin-community lists every pack: its id, name, author, licence, tags, number of skins and a hash of its exact contents (pack.json and every picture). The app keeps the hash with the skins it adds, which is how it knows a pack has an update. folderskin-tools packs index writes it, together with previews/<id>.png, a strip of the pack's first four skins drawn as folders. Both are generated on folderskin-community's main; never edit them by hand.
• The app downloads a pack's pictures only when you add it, four at a time, and shows how many have arrived. It checks every one against the limits above and saves nothing unless all of them pass; then it saves them together, so a pack is never half added.
• FOLDERSKIN_COMMUNITY_URL points the app at another copy of folderskin-community. For example, serve a checkout with python3 -m http.server from its root and set it to http://localhost:8000 to try a pack end to end.

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