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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 Indexing Works

When Pellicle indexes a folder, it runs several stages concurrently:

  1. File discovery — Pellicle walks the directory tree and records every supported photo file (JPEG, RAW, HEIF, TIFF, PNG, and more).
  2. Metadata extraction — EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata is read from each file, including camera model, date taken, lens, ISO, GPS coordinates, and keywords.
  3. Thumbnail generation — A thumbnail is extracted or rendered from each photo and saved to a fast local cache on your SSD.
  4. Vision analysis — macOS Vision framework classifies each photo, detecting scenes, objects, faces, animals, and text (OCR). This powers the search feature.

All of these stages run in the background. You can browse photos as soon as they appear in the index — you don't need to wait for indexing to finish.