PhotoBrowser

A photo-focused file browser for the COSMIC desktop, built for fast folder browsing, photo review, and lightweight culling.

PhotoBrowser provides a virtualized thumbnail grid, a three-pane layout, a full-window loupe, duplicate detection, keyword/tag workflows, smart collections, export, and basic RAW develop-look previewing. It never modifies original image files. Ratings, labels, reject marks, and keywords are written to XMP sidecar files next to each photo.

Built in Rust with libcosmic.

Features

Browsing

• Virtualized thumbnail grid for smooth browsing through large folders.
• Current-folder-only scanning; subfolders are not recursively scanned.
• Adjustable thumbnail size.
• Sort by name, modified date, EXIF capture date, or rating.
• Live filename filtering.
• Menu bar with File, View, and Settings menus.
• Open a folder from the command line with photobrowser [PATH].

Layout

• Three-pane interface:
  • sidebar with Favorites, Drives, Places, and folder tree
  • central thumbnail grid
  • right-side preview and metadata panel
• Breadcrumb path bar.
• Bottom status bar with item counts and thumbnail-size control.
• Show-hidden-files toggle for dotfiles and sidecars.

Loupe

• Full-window single-image loupe.
• Fit and 100% zoom modes.
• Adjustable zoom with pan.
• Filmstrip for quick sibling-image navigation.
• View-only slideshow.
• Optional full-resolution RAW demosaic preview.
• Optional native-resolution Actual zoom.
• Click-drag panning.
• Luminance histogram in the loupe.
• Focal-point-preserving zoom with + / -.

Culling

• Star ratings from 0–5.
• Color labels: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple.
• Reject marking.
• Ratings, labels, and reject marks are stored in XMP sidecars.
• Filter by rating or color label.
• Hide rejected photos.
• Sort by rating.
• Multi-select with Ctrl-click, Shift-click, and Ctrl+A.
• Batch rating, label, reject, and unreject actions.
• Grid keyboard shortcuts:
  • 1–5: set rating
  • 0: clear rating
  • 6–9: set color label
  • x: mark reject

Compare

• 2-up Compare view for two selected photos.
• View-only comparison; no source files are modified.

Duplicates

• Find Duplicates for perceptual near-duplicate detection.
• Find Exact Duplicates for byte-for-byte matching.
• Duplicate groups are shown with color-coded borders.
• Duplicate tools are review-only; they do not delete, move, or modify files.
• Duplicate scans can use cached results from the catalog.

Keywords and Tags

• Reads XMP dc:subject keywords from sidecar files.
• Filter by keyword with View → Tag.
• Add and remove keywords from the preview pane.
• Batch keyword tagging for selected photos.
• Batch keyword removal for selected photos.
• Keyword filters compose with camera, date, rating, label, and duplicate filters.

Smart Collections

• Save the current filter set as a reusable collection.
• Restore saved combinations of rating, label, camera, date, and tag filters.
• Clear active collections and filters from the View menu.

Export

• Export selected photos with File → Export selection.
• Exports copies of selected photos and matching XMP sidecars.
• Existing destination files are skipped instead of overwritten.
• Original source files are not moved, deleted, or modified.

Live Updates and Filtering

• Live folder updates when files change on disk.
• Manual refresh with R or F5.
• Images-only toggle.
• Read-only .md and .txt preview in the right panel.
• Filter by:
  • filename
  • rating
  • color label
  • rejected state
  • camera
  • capture year
  • keyword/tag
  • duplicate mode

Formats and Metadata

• Supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, and RAW formats.
• RAW support includes NEF, CR2, CR3, ARW, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2, PEF, and SRW.
• Other file types remain browsable with type icons.
• RAW thumbnails use embedded previews when available, with demosaic fallback.
• EXIF orientation is applied on decode.
• Preview panel shows file info, EXIF metadata, and luminance histogram.
• Canon CR3 support includes embedded-preview decode and camera/capture-date extraction.

RAW Develop-Look Preview

• Optional approximate RAW develop-look rendering.
• Reads common XMP/Adobe Camera Raw settings from sidecars.
• Applies approximate exposure, contrast, tone curve, vibrance, saturation, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks.
• Render-only; original RAW files and sidecars are not modified by previewing develop-look.

Catalog

• Optional SQLite catalog stored in PhotoBrowser's cache directory.
• Indexes camera and capture-date metadata.
• Caches perceptual and exact duplicate hashes.
• Used as a rebuildable cache/index; the filesystem remains the source of truth.
• The catalog is never written into original image files.

Build and Run

cargo build --release
cargo run --release

Requirements:

• Rust toolchain
• libcosmic build dependencies
• libxkbcommon-dev
• libwayland-dev
• pkg-config

These are typically present on COSMIC / Pop!_OS systems.

Development

just check
bash scripts/check-scan-invariant.sh

Status

Current release: v1.37.0

PhotoBrowser currently includes:

• browse-focused photo management
• virtualized thumbnail grid
• three-pane layout
• loupe with zoom, pan, filmstrip, slideshow, and histogram
• XMP sidecar ratings, labels, rejects, and keywords
• multi-select and batch culling
• duplicate and exact-duplicate detection
• camera, date, rating, label, keyword, filename, and duplicate filters
• SQLite catalog cache
• smart collections
• export/copy workflow
• approximate RAW develop-look preview

PhotoBrowser writes only:

• app configuration
• thumbnail/preview cache
• SQLite catalog cache
• XMP sidecar files
• user-selected export copies

PhotoBrowser does not write into, move, delete, or modify original source image files.

Deferred

• HEIC/HEIF thumbnails.
• Video poster-frame thumbnails.

These are deferred to optional, default-off backends because they require system libraries such as libheif, ffmpeg, or gstreamer.

License

Licensed GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Because libcosmic is a hard dependency and is GPL-3.0, distributed PhotoBrowser binaries are GPL-3.0.