Pellicle Help

Thumbnails

Pellicle uses a two-tier thumbnail cache for fast browsing, especially on network volumes:

  1. Local cache (on your Mac's SSD) — Thumbnails are generated here first. The photo grid reads from this cache for instant scrolling, even when the network volume is slow or temporarily unavailable.
  2. Remote cache (on the indexed folder) — Thumbnails are gradually promoted from the local cache to a .pellicle/cache/thumbs/ directory inside your indexed folder. This means if you use Pellicle on another Mac, it can read the pre-built thumbnails instead of regenerating them.

When displaying a photo, Pellicle checks the local cache first. If the thumbnail isn't there (e.g., after clearing the cache or on a new Mac), it falls through to the remote cache.