StoryMay 1, 20266 min read

Inside the lokal pipeline

From upload to delivery in seven steps. What lokal does, what it sends to AI providers, and what it does not.

A short, honest tour of how lokal turns one screenshot into many.

1. Upload

The browser sends the image to the lokal backend. The file is stored under your workspace. Nothing is sent to AI providers yet.

2. Job split

When you click Translate with three languages selected on five screenshots, lokal creates 15 jobs (5 × 3). Each job gets a unique ID and goes into a queue.

3. Per job: extract

A worker picks up the job. It reads the original screenshot and extracts the visible text — title, subtitle, body, button labels. This step keeps positions so the layout can be rebuilt.

4. Translate

Extracted text is sent to a language model with the source and target locale, plus context (this is App Store marketing copy, keep it short, follow App Store rules). The result is short, marketing-quality copy.

5. Render

The original screenshot, the new text, and the exact target resolution (e.g. 1320×2868 for iPhone 16 Pro Max) are sent to the chosen image model — GPT Image, Nano Banana, or Nano Banana Pro. The model returns a new image.

6. Validate

lokal verifies the output dimensions match the target. If the model returns a wrong size, the job retries with stricter prompting before giving up.

7. Deliver

The result is saved next to the original under your workspace. You can preview, edit copy, regenerate, or download.

What is not in the pipeline

  • No data is shared with anyone outside the chosen provider.
  • No data is used for training.
  • No analytics on screenshot content.
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Written by Yassine

Indie dev. Built lokal because translating App Store screenshots by hand was eating my launches. Reach out at hi@lokall.app.

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