FastLoupe

Photo library browser · Windows & Mac

A hundred thousand photos. No spinner.

Point FastLoupe at the folders you already have — or at your Lightroom Classic catalog, ratings and albums intact — and scroll all of it at full speed. Your files stay exactly where they are. Buy it once. No subscription, no cloud account, no upload.

Coming soon Microsoft Store · Mac App Store

One purchase · free updates · your photos never leave your machine

CONTACT SHEET 1 SELECTED
ILLUSTRATION — NOT A SCREENSHOT 107,630 PHOTOS

Measured, not promised

Speed is the whole product.

Catalog size
107,630 photos

The library these numbers were measured against — not a demo set.

Grid scrolling
49 fps cruise

40 fps while flinging through tens of thousands of frames.

Thumbnails
915 /sec

Built once into a packed cache, then memory-mapped.

Filter a view
<10 ms

Date, rating, flag, colour, camera, tag — indexed, single-digit milliseconds.

Measured on the development machine against the catalog above. Your numbers depend on your disk and GPU. Nothing here is an average of a benchmark suite — it is the app, running on a real library.

Why it's fast

It never touches your originals while you browse.

Most photo apps get slow because they reach for the original file — a 45 MB raw — every time you scroll past it. FastLoupe never does. Browsing reads from two purpose-built local stores, so the size of your library stops being the thing that hurts.

An indexed catalog

Every filter, date bucket and search runs against a local SQLite index with full-text search. No scanning folders, no waiting on a server.

A packed thumbnail cache

Thumbnails live in memory-mapped pack files ordered by capture date — not a million loose files — so scrolling reads sequentially instead of thrashing your disk.

Non-destructive by construction

Ratings, flags, rotation and adjustments are stored as data. Your original files are never modified, moved or rewritten unless you explicitly export.

Getting in

Keep the library you've already built.

No photo app should make you reorganise your life to use it, and years of ratings, picks and albums shouldn't be the reason you stay on a subscription. There are two ways in, and neither of them moves your files.

Add the folders you have

Point FastLoupe at a folder and it catalogues the photos where they are — nothing is copied, moved or renamed. Your own filing, whatever it is, stays exactly as you left it. FastLoupe only ever writes its own index and thumbnail cache.

Or open your Lightroom catalog

FastLoupe reads an Adobe Lightroom Classic .lrcat directly and never writes to it, so Lightroom keeps working exactly as before while you try this. Nothing to commit to, nothing to undo.

  1. Your work comes across

    Star ratings, picks and rejects, colour labels, keywords and collections arrive with the photos — not just the filenames.

  2. It reuses Lightroom's previews

    Rather than re-rendering a hundred thousand thumbnails from scratch, it borrows the previews Lightroom already built, so the library is browsable almost immediately.

  3. Then it learns to recognise your photos

    A one-off pass fingerprints the library so FastLoupe can find a photo again later even if it's moved, renamed, or replaced by a re-exported copy. You choose when to run it.

When things move

Photos get moved. FastLoupe keeps up.

Every catalogue eventually points at a file that isn't there any more — a drive left unplugged, a folder tidied up, a photo re-exported over the original. Most apps answer with a broken thumbnail and no explanation.

Browse with the drive unplugged

Thumbnails live in FastLoupe's own cache, so you can scroll, search, rate and plan a shoot with the external disk sitting in a drawer. It tells you plainly which drive is missing rather than pretending the photos are gone.

Reconnect a whole drive at once

Moved the library, or the drive letter changed? Show FastLoupe where it lives now and every photo on it is found again in one step — verified against the disk before anything is written, so a wrong guess can't make things worse.

Find a single photo again

Renamed, filed somewhere else, or replaced by a smaller re-export? FastLoupe recognises it by content and shows you the two pictures side by side. Nothing is re-linked until you say so.

Scope

What it is, and what it isn't.

FastLoupe is built for the part of the job that happens most often: getting photos in, finding the good ones, and getting them out. It is not a retouching suite, and pretending otherwise would waste your money.

Built for this

  • Browsing and searching very large libraries by date, album, keyword or camera
  • Cataloguing folders you already have, in place — nothing copied, moved or renamed
  • Culling: star ratings, picks and rejects, colour labels, side-by-side compare, full-screen review
  • Importing from a card into dated folders, verified bit-for-bit, with an optional second backup copy
  • Everyday adjustments — exposure, white balance, tone curve, colour grading, crop and straighten
  • Video alongside stills: plays in place, with duration and poster frames in the grid
  • Keeping track of photos that move, get renamed, or sit on a drive that isn't plugged in
  • Exporting at preset sizes, and copying originals straight out to Explorer or Finder

Not built for this

  • Layer-based retouching, healing and compositing — keep Photoshop or Affinity for that
  • Cloud sync of your library to our servers; there are no servers, by design
  • Face recognition and people albums
  • Tethered shooting and print layout
  • Being the last word in raw conversion — it handles everyday adjustments, not pixel-peeping profiles

Price

Buy it once.

One-time price

ANNOUNCED AT LAUNCH · NO SUBSCRIPTION

FastLoupe is coming to the Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store.

  • Windows and macOS — one purchase covers the app on both, per store
  • Runs natively on Intel, AMD and Arm, including Apple silicon
  • Free updates; no subscription, ever
  • Works entirely offline — no account, no telemetry, no upload

Optional add-ons. Extra backup destinations, starting with Azure Blob Storage, are sold separately so you only pay for what you use. You connect your own storage account and your provider bills you directly — we don't host or resell storage.