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Pellicle
Pellicle
Super fast photo browser for macOS

Pellicle is a super fast photo indexer, browsing, culling, importing, and searching application. Most photo tools are slow; Pellicle is not. You can scroll through directories of hundreds of thousands of images without any lag at all, and it's built with network share storage in mind.

Add your photo folders to the index and Pellicle will start cataloguing everything it finds, extracting metadata, detecting subjects, and caching thumbnails. But unlike Lightroom the thumbnail caching is optimised - thumbnails operate on a read-through/write-through caching system across two levels, keeping browsing fast but only storing locally what you're browsing or what you choose to keep cached. It maintains a secondary store at the root of your indexed folders, making reattaching network storage and browsing the photos a dream.

Database size is negligible compared to many other solutions, with 300,000 photos taking up less than 500MB of database space and only ~10GB of thumbnails, which can be split between your local disk and the indexed folders.

Download on the Mac App Store
Pellicle screenshot

Help & Documentation

Pellicle Help
How Pellicle Works Adding Folders Browsing Folders How Indexing Works Searching Thumbnails Culling & Flagging Network Volumes RAW File Support Keyboard Shortcuts Remote Watcher Synology NAS Setup QNAP NAS Setup SSH / Command Line Setup

How Pellicle Works

Pellicle is a fast photo indexer for macOS. It scans folders of photos, extracts metadata and thumbnails, and lets you browse, search, and rate your library — even across network volumes with hundreds of thousands of images.

Overview

When you add a folder, Pellicle runs a concurrent indexing pipeline that discovers files, extracts EXIF/IPTC metadata, generates thumbnails, and classifies images using the macOS Vision framework. All of this happens in the background — you can start browsing as soon as photos appear in the index.

Pellicle is designed for large libraries on network storage. A two-tier thumbnail cache keeps scrolling fast even when your NAS is slow or disconnected, and remote watchers on your NAS can send real-time change notifications so new photos appear instantly.

Key Features

  • Fast browsing — Scroll through hundreds of thousands of photos without lag, even on network volumes.
  • Search — Find photos by subject, scene, object, animal, or text detected in the image.
  • Pick, reject, and rate — Flag photos with keyboard shortcuts. Selections are written to sidecar files.
  • RAW support — View thumbnails and full decodes for most major RAW formats via ImageIO and LibRaw.
  • Import — Import photos from cards and local drives into your indexed folders.
  • Network-first — Built for NAS storage with automatic remount mapping, volume availability tracking, and remote file watchers.

Support

If you've found a bug, have a feature request, or need help with Pellicle, get in touch at support@afternoonrobot.co.uk.