It has turned out to be a great program. It opens RAW photos fast and makes culling incredibly easy. It has made picking out photos on Windows far more practical.
@emreblgcx
Street · Eskişehir
★★★★★
Hey again 👋🏻 If you ended up here, you're probably trying out CoolCroco - my little image viewer for photographers.
I built it because culling thousands of shots after a long shoot was slowly driving me up the wall. Nothing on the market quite fit the way I wanted to work, so I wrote my own - fast, gentle on the eyes, gets out of your way.
It's free and will stay free. But if it ever saved you an evening of squinting at thumbnails, a small tip keeps me motivated to add the next feature on my list. ☕
Thank you so much 🐊
Note: CoolGorilla is now CoolCroco. Same app, same developer - only the name and the icon changed, for trademark reasons. Your settings and ratings carry over when you update.
CoolCroco is a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux - open this page on a desktop browser to download.
downloads so far
📖 Read the user manual - every feature and shortcut
Decodes the whole folder to RAM on background workers, with 2:1 prefetch. After the first pass, every image - forward or back - is instant. No re-decode, no cache flush.
Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Leica and more via LibRaw - plus JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP and the HEIC your phone shoots. Straight from the card, no conversion.
Double-click for native 100% right at the cursor. Full-res is decoded on zoom, so you're checking real pixels - not an upscaled preview.
Zoom into a detail, press Z, then arrow through a burst - every same-size frame keeps the exact crop, so you compare sharpness frame to frame.
Rate 1–5 with one keystroke, saved as Lightroom-compatible XMP sidecars - your ratings travel with the file. Rated groups sort to the front of the filmstrip.
A approves, X rejects - straight into Approved\ and Rejected\ subfolders. Every move undoes and redoes on one timeline.
Ctrl+Shift+C gathers keepers from anywhere in the folder; one paste in Explorer or Finder drops the whole set - no dragging, no clipboard juggling.
Face a whole folder the same way before printing: All landscape turns only the photos lying the wrong way and leaves the rest alone. Revert rotations puts the folder back exactly as it was.
The status bar shows what the photo measures printed, right next to its size in pixels. Set your resolution and units - mm, cm, m or inches - once and forget it.
Order a folder by name, date or file size, either direction. Star-rated photos stay grouped at the front of the filmstrip, sorted within their group.
Send the photo to Lightroom, Photoshop or anything else. Pick your editor once and it's a single key from then on. Drop images or a folder anywhere on the window to open them.
Native builds for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel) and Linux - and it updates itself. Free forever, no account, no ads.
It has turned out to be a great program. It opens RAW photos fast and makes culling incredibly easy. It has made picking out photos on Windows far more practical.
Warning: this app is dangerously fast. I used to have time to reconsider my life choices while my photos loaded. Now I just see all 47 blurry attempts at photographing my son, back to back, with no emotional preparation.
On Linux, opening both RAW and HEIC/HEIF images quickly and clearly, sorting them, managing their EXIF data - and doing all of it in a single application. Exactly what I'd been looking for!
Very practical! Picking photos out of high-volume shoots is one of the most labour-intensive parts of my job, and this app - fast, clear, simple and genuinely functional - takes a lot of the weight off a workflow like mine. The developer's response to feedback is incredible. If you've read this far out of curiosity, I think CoolCroco is worth trying.
I mostly shoot theatre, concerts, and people and places on the street. Sorting through thousands of high-resolution RAW files after an event or a holiday was always the part I dreaded most. As one of the first to try the Mac beta, I can comfortably say this app has been a lifesaver. It opens enormous photos instantly, at full quality, with no waiting whatsoever. And thanks to Approve/Reject, a cull that would have taken hours is done in minutes. I have no doubt it will become every photographer's go-to app!
Yes, and it stays free. There is no paid tier, no trial limit and no feature held back for an upgrade. No account, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking. There is a donate page if you want to support the work, and that is the whole of it.
Nothing is deleted. X moves the photograph into a Rejected folder and A moves it into an Approved folder, both created inside the folder you opened, beside the pictures that stayed. Ctrl+Z puts it back where it came from.
Culling only ever moves files. It does not rewrite them, nothing is overwritten, and nothing leaves the folder you are working in.
Less than holding a folder of raw files sounds like. Photographs are kept at the size your screen shows them, not at full sensor resolution, so a 60 megapixel frame costs about what your display holds rather than what the file holds. Full resolution is decoded only when you zoom in, into a smaller pool of its own.
The cache then sizes itself to your machine: about 4 GB on an 8 GB computer, about 8 GB on 16 GB, about 56 GB on 64 GB. It never comes within 8 GB of your total.
Past three quarters of your memory being in use by anything at all, Lightroom or a browser included, CoolCroco starts handing frames back, furthest from the photograph on screen first and never the eight either side of it. Leave a folder and it is released half a minute later.
RAW from every major brand, read through LibRaw: Sony ARW, Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF, Leica and Adobe DNG, Hasselblad and Phase One among them.
Alongside those it opens HEIC and HEIF from an iPhone, plus JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP. One folder can hold up to 100,000 photographs, however many subfolders it spans.
No account, no advertising, no analytics, no tracking. It reads the files you open and nothing else.
There are two exceptions, both of them plain. Searching by picture content needs a one-off model download of about 156 MB, checked against a known checksum as it arrives and run entirely on your own computer afterwards. And outside the Microsoft Store, the app asks GitHub whether a newer version exists. There is no face recognition, and there never will be.
Yes. Ratings from 1 to 5 are written as XMP, where Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One read them, so a shoot rated in CoolCroco arrives in your editor already rated. Rated photographs group to the front of the filmstrip as you go, and Shift with a number files the frame into a star folder inside Approved.
FastRawViewer is a paid tool built around judging exposure from unprocessed sensor data: a raw histogram, and over and underexposure warnings based on it. CoolCroco has no histogram. If you cull by deciding what is still recoverable, that is something FastRawViewer does and CoolCroco does not.
What CoolCroco does instead is hold the whole folder decoded in memory, so going backwards through a shoot is as quick as going forwards. It demosaics the raw file itself rather than showing you the JPEG the camera embedded: half size by default, full size on request, and full resolution the moment you zoom in. It also finds duplicates and timelapses, searches by what is in the picture, and costs nothing.
What's changed, release by release.
CoolCroco is listed on SourceForge, Slashdot and Top Business Software. If it has been useful to you, a few words on any of them help other photographers find it.