Elik.lv — an interactive light field gallery for the Lytro ILLUM
A historical project for the discontinued Lytro ILLUM light field camera. Elik.lv preserves Living Pictures and the ability to choose focus after the shot was taken.
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The Lytro ILLUM was an unusual digital camera. Instead of recording only colour and brightness, it also captured information about the direction of incoming light. That made it possible to move the focus point after taking a photograph. Once the camera was discontinued and Lytro ceased operations in 2018, the software and familiar way of publishing Living Pictures began to disappear with it. Elik.lv was built specifically to preserve that experience.
The challenge
A folder of static JPEG exports would not have been enough. The important part was the light field itself: clicking different objects, travelling through focus depth, and presenting one exposure in several ways. The solution also needed to be self-hosted, so the collection would not depend on a closed manufacturer cloud service.
What was built
- A public album and Living Pictures gallery in English, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, and Russian.
- An interactive viewer with click-to-refocus, a focus-depth slider, playback, fullscreen, and an all-in-focus view.
- Additional light field tools including focus peaking, depth view, ADOF, bokeh, tilt-shift, and parallax controls.
- LFR and LFP uploads, a processing queue, focus-layer generation, previews, thumbnails, and web-ready WebP output.
- A photo editor for metadata, colour adjustments, bokeh depth, tilt-shift, and RAW/EXIF inspection.
- An administration area for albums, photographs, API access, application settings, and backups.
- A dedicated Lytro Archive linking to preserved desktop software, camera firmware, manuals, tools, open-source projects, and sample files.
The outcome
Elik.lv turns an obsolete camera format into a usable web experience. Owners of surviving Lytro ILLUM cameras and people interested in light field photography can present a frame as it was intended: not as a single permanently focused image, but as a photograph whose depth remains interactive.
This is a historical project: the Lytro ILLUM is no longer manufactured and the original Lytro ecosystem has closed. Elik.lv remains online as a working demonstration and technical archive; third-party archived software is provided without manufacturer support.