I’ve been building an image viewer called RabbitViewer — designed specifically for photographers and power users with large libraries.
It uses a background daemon to index your library and handle heavy tasks like thumbnails and metadata, so the UI stays fast and responsive — even with big collections. It supports a wide range of image formats (including RAW) as well as common video types.
The core idea behind RabbitViewer is extensibility. It’s built to be customizable, and adding support for new file types or custom functionality is part of the design — not an afterthought.
I’d genuinely love feedback from this community. This group has people who work with real-world photo workflows every day, and that perspective is incredibly valuable.
Installation should be straightforward on Linux and macOS.
If anyone is willing to try it out or share ideas, I’d really appreciate it.
Hey Thanks for your comment! If you open the gui there is an overview with all the hotkeys. You can always look it up if you press “?”.
I’ve just added it today.
This looks pretty rad. I’ve been simply using feh as an image viewer lately because it’s just simple and fast. But this looks like feh on steroids at least at first glance. Looking forward to trying it out.
It’s heavily inspired by sxiv and feh. I took the parts I loved from a bunch of tools and built the viewer I always wished existed.
My goal is simple: coming back from a shoot and reviewing thousands of images shouldn’t feel like punishment. It should be fast, fluid, and actually enjoyable.
Would love to hear what you think once you’ve tried it — especially what feels right and what doesn’t.
yes, it is using exiftool to write ratings back to the files. Exiftool is creating a temporary copy of the file. So even when your machine crashes the file stays safe.
It’s this tool https://exiftool.org/
As far as I understand it’s the same like adding rating in camera. I’d need to learn more about the pros and cons of sidecards and native exif rating. But changing that would not be a big deal. What are your thoughts about that?
For me, the raw file is an artifact of my photography, and I archive it as-is. Any further addition of metadata is handled in the sidecar file. Exiftool is great, but is not immune to bugs and can very easily damage raw files. The easiest way to avoid that is to not change them.
In fact this would not work on my system, as my raw files are made read-only on the filesystem immediately after they’re copied off the SD card.
Have you also implemented a side by side comparison?
In order to compare more images: e.g. to choose the sharpest.
It is an option I personally use quite often.
For instance, with XnView Mp, you can compare, side by side, up to 3-4 images. When you zoom in and pan they are all visually syncronized.
Great idea, it’s not there yet, but definitely something I can do. I could add a pin to the “inspector view”. the windows you see on the right side. then you can have mouse tracking etc.
If you want the most interoperability, yes xmp. Be aware that darktable uses filename.ext.xmp where others use filename.xmp.
If you wanted to be complete, and I assume you’re not writing that much metadata, arp (for ART) and pp3 (for rawtherapee) are the same format, INI style.
Exiftool can handle sidecars natively. I already implemented it and made sure the original image is never altered at any step.
I also implemented a side comparison that feels native to the existing design.
You can compare as many images as you like. Here is a quick video.
This is a really admirable goal! Have you looked in to Photo Mechanic? It was born to solve this problem and they’ve spent almost three decades refining it.
Perhaps a few ideas can be picked up from there. Will try your software this weekend!
This the sane way. Remember that darktable has a bit of a non-standard way of naming XMPs though. I’d say it’s the better way, but in the XKCD way.
Thank you for pointing me to Photo Mechanic — I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with it before your comment. I’ve started looking into it now, and it’s impressive how long they’ve been refining that workflow.
Since you’ve used it: what do you think are the standout features that really make it fast or enjoyable in practice? I’m especially interested in the parts that make reviewing large shoots feel efficient rather than tedious.
I’d love to learn from tools that have solved this well.
Also, if you’re planning to try RabbitViewer this weekend — are you comfortable installing from git? The setup is still a bit developer-oriented at the moment. I’m actively improving the documentation and onboarding, but I’m happy to guide you through it if needed.
