Engineering

Projects & community

A bench is a file. It is plain JSON, it is small, and it opens on anyone else's machine exactly as you left it.

The .photonica file

One JSON document holding the source, every part with all of its fields, the screens, the camera, the view settings, the design setup and the render timeline. It is readable, diffable, and safe: nothing in a project file executes. It is data describing optics, not a script.

Saving puts the file in Documents\Photonica by default. You can also drag a .photonica file straight onto the window to open it.

Opening from a link

File → Open from link… takes an https URL to a project file and loads it directly — handy for sharing a bench in a message or a lesson plan.

Community

Community → Browse lists the benches people have shared and opens any of them in one click. Community → Share this bench saves your project, shows it in Explorer, and opens the upload page on GitHub, where you drag the file in and propose it. A free GitHub account is enough — GitHub raises the pull request for you.

The collection lives in the public repository, so you can also browse it in a web browser.