macOS · Windows · Linux — free
Open the folder.
See every photo.
Instantly.
Skera opens full-resolution photos and camera RAW the moment you point it at a folder — no import, no catalog. Adjust White Balance, Tone and Color right there, and nothing is saved until you say so.
- Version
- 1.0.0
- Price
- Free
- Account
- None
A full RAW file opens like a thumbnail.
Skera reads camera RAW directly — 16 formats across 10 manufacturers — with no import step and no catalog. Press I and the whole EXIF record is there.
- Body
- NIKON Z 6_2
- Lens
- NIKKOR Z 24–70mm f/2.8 S
- Exposure
- 70.0 mm · F11 · 1/160 s · ISO 720
- GPS
- Read locally, never transmitted
On Windows, not yet
RAW decoding rides on libvips, which the Windows build ships without — it opens JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP, TIFF, GIF and reads full EXIF, but not RAW. The full format list.
Lock A. Sweep through B.
Press C and the current image pins as A with the next one beside it as B. Click any thumbnail in the filmstrip to change B.
Adjust the image. Nothing is saved until you are.
Press E for a collapsible panel — White Balance, Tone, Presence, and an eight-channel Color group. Every slider previews instantly with no re-decode per drag.
- White Balance
- Temp, Tint
- Tone
- Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks
- Presence
- Vibrance, Saturation
- Color
- Hue / Sat / Luminance × 8 channels
Save, or Save a Copy
⌘S bakes pending edits into the file, behind a confirmation since it overwrites the original; ⇧⌘S writes a new copy and never touches it. A rotation-only edit rewrites just the EXIF orientation tag — no re-encode, no quality loss, and the only way to save onto a RAW file at all, since there is no RAW encoder. Any tone or color adjustment re-renders pixels, so Save a Copy of a RAW file always produces a JPEG.
One key, and the app disappears.
Skera is image-first by default — the toolbar and filmstrip float over the photograph and hide on command.
Fast isn't a claim. It's the architecture.
A cache measured in bytes
Decoded images live in an LRU cache with a 768 MB budget — a cap on actual resident pixels, not a count of files, so one 60-megapixel RAW does not quietly evict forty JPEGs. Compare mode pins both of its images so neither can be evicted while you are looking at them.
Decode off the UI thread
Decoding runs in a fixed worker pool ordered by priority, so the image you asked for outranks the ones being preloaded. Move on before a job starts and it is dropped from the queue; move on mid-decode and the running job gets a cancellation probe and abandons the work itself.
Neighbours load before you ask
The images either side of the current one are decoded ahead of time at a lower priority. Next and previous read from memory instead of stalling on disk, which is the whole difference between flicking through a folder and waiting on it.
Drive the whole thing from the keyboard.
Every action has a key. No pointer required, motion preferences respected — the viewer is meant to disappear under your hands.
One small app. Every desktop.
Version 1.0.0. Free, no account, no telemetry.
The disk image is not notarized yet, so the first launch needs right-click → Open.
RAW + EXIF
Windows
.zip · 50 MB
Unzip and run. RAW decoding is not in the Windows build — see below.
EXIF only · no RAW yet
Linux
.AppImage · 80 MB
One portable AppImage. Needs glibc 2.31 or newer — Ubuntu 20.04+, Debian 11+, Fedora 34+.
RAW + EXIF
First launch on macOS
The disk image is not codesigned or notarized yet — that needs a paid Apple Developer account — so Gatekeeper will say Skera is from an unidentified developer. Drag Skera to Applications, then right-click it and choose Open instead of double-clicking, and confirm once. It opens normally after that.
Older builds and release notes live on GitHub releases.