FAQ
What file formats does Magellon support?
Section titled “What file formats does Magellon support?”MRC, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and the common scientific image formats you’d expect. The plugin SDK lets new readers be added without touching the core — if you have a format that’s missing, open an issue.
Is Magellon free to use?
Section titled “Is Magellon free to use?”Yes. Magellon is open source under Apache 2.0 — free for academic, research, and commercial use. The full source lives at github.com/sstagg/Magellon.
Can I run Magellon offline?
Section titled “Can I run Magellon offline?”Once it’s installed, mostly yes. The stack runs entirely on your machine — image viewing, plugin runs, session browsing, and the database are all local. Internet is needed for the initial container pull and for optional features like the plugin hub catalog.
Do I need a GPU?
Section titled “Do I need a GPU?”Not for the platform itself. CTF estimation, particle picking, and most analyses run on CPU. Frame alignment (motion correction) is the main GPU consumer — a CUDA-capable card speeds it up dramatically, but the rest of the workflow is fine without one.
How do I report a bug or request a feature?
Section titled “How do I report a bug or request a feature?”Open an issue on GitHub — that’s where bugs, feature requests, and design discussions live. For security issues, email the maintainers privately first. Pull requests are welcome too; see the Community page for the contribution flow.
How do I write a new plugin?
Section titled “How do I write a new plugin?”Subclass the SDK base, declare your inputs and outputs as Pydantic models, and ship a Docker image. The platform handles discovery, form rendering, job dispatch, and result projection. Walk-through in the Plugins guide.
Where does my data live?
Section titled “Where does my data live?”Under your configured MAGELLON_GPFS_PATH — that’s a single directory you control. Imported sessions land in subdirectories there; results go in home/; in-flight scratch goes in jobs/. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you run a plugin that explicitly does so.
What level of expertise is required?
Section titled “What level of expertise is required?”Researcher-level — comfort with image analysis concepts and basic command-line skills is enough to install and use the platform. Writing your own plugin needs Python; the platform itself is designed so the science doesn’t have to fight the tooling.