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 and focus stacking — manual, or an automatic lens sweep on autofocus cameras — with a halo-free method made for black backdrops
- Exposure check before shooting: judged on the model, with a suggested exposure
- Crop to a tall or wide frame before shooting
- Fast captures: saving, compressing, stacking and uploading run in the background — by default stacking waits until you pause shooting
- 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
- Update banner and one-click 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 | bashOr from a clone:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/MichaelTimmermans/MiniatureStudio.git
cd MiniatureStudio && ./install.shThe installer:
- installs the system packages from
apt-packages.txt(picamera2, Flask, OpenCV, rclone, cifs-utils, nfs-common, …); - clones the app to
/opt/miniaturestudio(or uses your clone); - builds focus-stack from
vendor/focus-stack(a git submodule) — roughly a quarter of an hour on a Pi 3B; - installs a small root helper for mounting a USB disk or NAS;
- installs the
miniaturestudiosystemd service (starts at boot).
Then open http://<hostname>.local:8000.
- In the web app: the app checks for updates when it starts (and every 6 hours) and shows a banner at the top of the page — Show & install. Or any time: Settings → Check for updates → Install update. The app restarts by itself.
- Or in a terminal:
miniaturestudio-update(--checkto 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 4 (1 GB) and 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. The Arducam 16 MP (IMX519) autofocus camera, with autofocus and lens sweep, and a USB webcam (Sony IMX179) work too. Details and other cameras: Hardware.
12 MP focus stacking is heavy work, and the disk matters as much as the Pi. A stack writes one ~37 MB frame after another and the stacker reads every frame several times, so a slow disk makes even a fast Pi feel sluggish — and a good disk makes the whole app noticeably smoother.
| Pi | Status | Stacking (halo-free), per frame | PNG compression, per 12 MP image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pi 3B, 1 GB | tested | 16-22 s (8 frames in 132-176 s) | 10-15 s | Works. USB 2 only (~35 MB/s for the disk); slows down noticeably while it processes. |
| Pi 4, 1 GB | tested | ~4 s (21 frames in 78 s, with the hard disk below) | 3.5-6 s | Clearly smoother. USB 3; 1 GB still means one job at a time. |
| Pi 4, 4 GB | not tested — better | ~4 s (expected) | same, 3 at a time (expected) | More memory: no swapping, compression and the app keep going while it stacks. |
| Pi 5, 4 GB | not tested — best | ~2 s (expected) | faster (expected) | Fastest; can use an NVMe SSD. Needs a different camera cable, a 27 W power supply and active cooling. |
8 GB is not needed. The app scales its stacking threads and compression workers with the memory it finds. Moving the SD card from a Pi 3B to a Pi 4 just works.
What counts is the sustained write speed: the speed printed on a USB stick is usually only its small fast buffer, which is full after a few frames. Measure a disk with Settings → Storage → Speed test. Tested so far:
| Disk | File system | Pi | Sustained write | Per frame in a stack | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheap 4 GB USB stick | FAT32 | Pi 3B (USB 2) | — | slowed down after ~4 frames (observed) | too slow |
| Kingston DataTraveler 64 GB USB 3 stick ("60 MB/s" on the box) | ext4 | Pi 4 | ~3 MB/s | 20-30 s | too slow |
| the same stick | exFAT | Pi 4 | ~7 MB/s (jumping 3-17) | ~6 s (from the speed test) | too slow for stacks |
| NVMe SSD in a USB enclosure (at USB 2 because of the cable) | NTFS | Pi 4 | — | 0.7-0.8 s; stacking ~7 s per frame | good |
| Old 2.5" laptop hard disk in a USB 3 enclosure | ext4 | Pi 4 | ~50 MB/s (75-88 steady) | 0.1 s; stacking ~4 s per frame | best so far |
For comparison, the Kingston stick on a Windows laptop: 18 MB/s write (H2testw).
- Use a hard disk or an SSD, formatted as ext4. An old laptop disk you were about to throw away works great; a small one is plenty.
- USB sticks are finicky: fine for occasional photos, too slow for stacks. If you use one, format it as exFAT — ext4's journal makes cheap sticks much slower.
- Avoid NTFS on a Pi: it works, but goes through a slow driver.
More (formatting, power and vibration of hard disks): Which disk? · 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.