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 CoolGorilla — 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 🦍
CoolGorilla 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 CoolGorilla 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!
What's changed, release by release.