Show HN: Imagin Raw – A 9MB Open-Source Alternative to Adobe Bridge for Mac

cgomez 63 days ago |

This looks so promising as a lightweight replacement for Bridge or Photo Mechanic and the interface is great.

Has a lot of opportunity on the actual image rendering and performance side, but will definitely keep up with updates on how it evolves!

kmeisthax 63 days ago |

As someone who has had to use Creative Cashcow tools in the past... dare I ask what the hell was Bridge even for? Just an Adobe-developed file manager?

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

Yes, but comparing to Finder you could actually have a useful preview of your files, with caching and stuff

dofm 63 days ago |

These things are such a puzzle because there are so many that pop up and just don’t survive. I loved FileLoupe, for example, but it appears abandoned.

So I am sure to try this. I’d love to see closer integration with Affinity where that is possible.

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

This is a type of software that can be feature complete quickly, so besides maintenance i don't see how long can you innovate. The nice thing though is that if the app disappears you go back to Bridge and you continue where you left off, you don't lose your ratings and labels and stuff. Can you tell me about Affinity, what kind of integration? You can currently open a photo to edit in Affinity

dofm 63 days ago | | |

Mainly I would like to see (if you don’t have it already) proper support for /previewing Affinity files (ideally the older .afphoto but I believe they are similar), and also Affinity layered TIFF, which I have used quite a bit.

I will test the app out soon. Best of luck with it!

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | | |

I logged an issue to look further into this, but being a proprietary format i don't think it will be possible unless they embed a preview

hankbond 63 days ago |

I would argue that the choice to render the embedded JPG is optimal from the UX of a Fuji user. We tend to use the JPG as the creative reference we want to start from using the film sims.

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

Do you mean to show the jpeg when you have a raw+jpeg pair? I'm planning to add some options here in the next version, you'll be able to chose if to see both at once or only one and toggle between them

hankbond 63 days ago | | |

RAF files contain (or at least can be configured to contain) a full size JPG embedded in them that will have the film sims baked in (as all JPGs do). You can use EXIFTools to extract them. Immich can be configured to make thumbnails off these embedded images instead of the demosaic'd RAF. I'm not sure if they are progressive JPGs but if they are I imagine it would be pretty efficient to directly read the images at a lower res and not even have to generate thumbnails (although that probably is less generalizable as a pipeline).

This is my current understanding and may be inaccurate.

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | | |

Can you confirm that Imagin Raw does not display the previews with film simulations applied? There is only one embedded jpeg as far as i know, and i display that. If you toggle the zoom you can see a decoded version of the raw with nothing applied which looks totally different. I do not have a Fuji to do proper tests.

Toutouxc 63 days ago |

I’ll check this out. The macOS photo library situation is really embarrassing. I actually migrated from Affinity to DxO Photolab (expensive!) a few years ago just for that.

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

Hope it's to your liking

drumih 62 days ago |

Looks good!

Have you compared the image colors on the screen between your implementation and Adobe Bridge? Are they significantly different because of LibRaw, or is it not a problem?

Thanks!

cristi_baluta 62 days ago | |

They look different, I display the jpeg preview backed into the raw, Bridge i believe decodes the raw and applies a default processing, they are more contrasty.

jonaias 63 days ago |

Wow, nice implementation, very smooth.

I’m building photopipe.app, a paid cloud-based culling tool, so I’m taking the opposite approach. Curious what made local-first important for you.

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

That's some serious commitment there, i don't want to be responsible for people's files and i don't want to lock them into my software either. It seems to me highly inefficient to upload raws to a server then browse and edit online

adyus 62 days ago | |

As the OP mentioned, seems inefficient to upload RAWs for processing and culling online. However, extracting and uploading the embedded or sidecar full-res JPEG, editing that non-destructively, then applying the edits to the offline RAW copy seems like it might work better.

sirjaz 63 days ago |

Just make sure to release it on Windows, There are more installed copies of Win 10 amd Win 11 than all iOS, MacOS, OSx systems combined

cristi_baluta 63 days ago | |

Unfortunately I have time to build only the software that I need, and I'm a Mac user. If I'd do a cross platform version it will end up like the other crappy cross platform apps out there.

gilesvangruisen 63 days ago | |

not being used by photographers

Toutouxc 63 days ago | |

It’s written in Swift and uses SwiftUI and UIKit and AppKit.

Seriously, what the hell are you talking about and why.

mplewis 63 days ago | |

I encourage you to take a crack at it!

mplewis 63 days ago |

Thank you for building high-quality alternatives to Adobe software!

imagetic 63 days ago |

Dope. I'm gonna have to check this out.