• 2 min read
Imagin RAW packs photo culling into a 9MB Mac app
Imagin RAW is a native macOS RAW browser and organizer built as a lightweight alternative to Adobe Bridge, with an iOS version in development.
Image: Hacker News
Imagin RAW is a native macOS app for browsing, culling, and organizing RAW photos, pitched as a lighter alternative to Adobe Bridge. The developer says the app weighs in at about 9 MB, compared with roughly 2 GB for Bridge (2022 version), and is designed to work directly with folders on local disks, external drives, or SD cards without an import step or managed library.
Built with SwiftUI for macOS 14.6+, plus AppKit/UIKit for the thumbnail list where SwiftUI performance fell short, the app uses LibRaw for RAW decoding through an Objective-C++ bridge. CoreImage handles other formats and acts as a fallback. Metadata support includes direct EXIF parsing from RAW and JPEG files, plus XMP sidecar read/write support for compatibility with Lightroom and Adobe Bridge.
Key features include:
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- Multi-root folder browsing
- Real-time file system monitoring via FSEvents
- Spotlight-backed search with NSMetadataQuery
- Rating and color labels written to XMP sidecars or embedded directly in JPEG/HEIC without re-encoding
- RAW+JPEG pair deduplication
- SD card ingest with optional backup to a second destination
- Duplicate and similar photo detection in a Review mode
- Instagram frame export as TIFF
- Video export from photo sequences
- Offline client proofing through PDF export and re-import
The comparison with Adobe Bridge focuses on speed and system footprint. According to the project page, Imagin RAW has 0% idle CPU, can use as little as 100 MB of memory depending on the album, launches nearly instantly, and does not require a restart when ejecting an external drive. Bridge is still ahead in one major area: thumbnails processed with Adobe Camera Raw adjustments. Imagin RAW currently shows embedded JPEGs instead, and the developer says reproducing the full ACR pipeline is not feasible, though basic exposure and crop preview adjustments may be explored.
The app supports both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Users can get it through the App Store, download a release manually, or compile it from source. An iOS version is also in development as an alternative to Apple’s Photos app, with an added focus on scouting.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via Hacker News
