Session Saving, Restoring, and Sharing

Cellucid sessions are how you persist and share “what the app looks like right now”: camera, active fields, filters, highlights, views/snapshots, and (some) analysis state.

This section is intentionally written for mixed audiences:

• Wet lab / non-technical collaborators: click-by-click “save my work and send it to someone”.

• Computational users: exact semantics (what is saved, what isn’t, and why things sometimes restore differently).

• Power users / demo builders: progressive restore, large-session performance, dataset identity pitfalls.

Important

A session bundle (.cellucid-session) does not contain your dataset.

To restore a session you must:

1. load the same dataset (or a dataset Cellucid considers “the same”), then

2. load the .cellucid-session file.

Tip

If you’re here because “I loaded a session but it looks different”, start with:

• Versioning, compatibility, and dataset identity (dataset identity + mismatch rules)

• Troubleshooting (sessions) — fast fixes (symptom → diagnosis → fix)

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Fast path (choose your goal)

You want to…	Do this	Why it’s the right choice	Start here
Reopen your work later	Save State → keep the .cellucid-session file	Captures UI state; reproducible “what I was looking at”	Save/restore UX (manual save + restore)
Send someone an exact view	Send dataset export folder + .cellucid-session	Sessions don’t include data; folder + session is the portable pair	Share workflows (links vs bundles vs exports)
Make a dataset open “already configured”	Put a session in exports + list it in state-snapshots.json	Enables auto-restore latest on startup	Auto-restore latest session (dataset exports)
Collaborate on labels with many people	Use Community Annotation (GitHub-backed)	Sessions are single-user artifacts; annotation is multi-user	Community Annotation (Voting + Consensus; GitHub Sync)

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What to read (recommended order)

1. Session mental model (what a session is and how to reason about it)

2. What gets saved and restored (explicit inclusion/exclusion list)

3. Save/restore UX (manual save + restore) (manual Save State / Load State)

4. Share workflows (links vs bundles vs exports) (how to share with humans)

5. Troubleshooting (sessions) — fast fixes (the big “why did this fail?” map)

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Save State downloads a .cellucid-session bundle; Load State restores it after the dataset is loaded.