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Pellicle Help

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.