You know the feeling: you double-click a photo and Windows says it can’t open the file. A Photoshop file, a RAW from your camera, an AVIF saved from a website, a JPEG XL, an animated WebP. Every format sends you looking for an extension in the Store, a plugin or yet another app.
Windows 10 and 11 now have Cobalt Photo: it opens all of these files by itself, at once. Its viewer and its folder manager are free — no ads, no account, no time limit.
The viewer: free, forever
49 formats. JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, TIFF, GIF, BMP, SVG, icons (ICO, CUR and macOS ICNS), Photoshop files (PSD, PSB), Krita and OpenRaster, TGA, and the RAW files of Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Leica, Hasselblad, Sigma and Kodak cameras.
Any DNG. From cameras and phones, lossy-compressed in Lightroom, HDR merges, and DNG with JPEG XL inside, as Samsung Expert RAW writes them. Sony Pixel Shift (ARQ) and Sigma X3F from every generation open too.
No “install an extension”. AVIF, JPEG XL, PSD and RAW are read by the app itself. AVIF opens even on a PC without the AV1 Video Extension, and its see-through parts stay see-through.
Fast. While you look at one photo, its neighbours are already being read, so the next one appears at once. A 463 MB Photoshop file is on screen in 0.17 seconds.
Something for every format
Animations — GIF, WebP, APNG, AVIF, JPEG XL and animated cursors — play as they open. Pause, step frame by frame back and forth, and save any frame as a PNG; the plate shows how many frames there are and how long one round takes.
Icons — ICO and ICNS — show every size inside the file, from 16 to 1024 pixels, side by side. Save any size, or all of them, as PNG. At 200 % and up every pixel is a sharp square, so a 16-pixel icon can be checked pixel by pixel.
SVG is drawn as vectors, not pixels: zoom in to 25,600 % and the edges stay clean.
360° photos from Insta360, Ricoh Theta, phones and drones open from the inside: drag to look around, and a compass shows where you are looking. A panorama fills the window’s height, with a mini-map of the whole strip below it.
RAW shows the camera’s own picture at once and develops from the sensor’s data when you zoom in. A file with no picture of the camera’s inside opens already developed.
Also free: rotating and flipping saved to the file, full screen, flipping through the whole folder, copying, printing, sharing, setting as the desktop background, and deleting.
Thumbnails in File Explorer — free too
Once it is installed, File Explorer shows as pictures what used to be blank icons: PSD, RAW, JPEG XL, AVIF, SVG, Krita. In the preview pane (Alt+P) as well. Nothing to set up.
The manager: your folders and albums, also free
Cobalt Photo Manager is a second window for your whole collection. Folders, drives and cloud folders on the left, thumbnails in the middle, and everything about the photo on the right: where and when it was taken, its light and colours. Free in it:
browsing any folder or drive, with thumbnails and the details of every photo; a photo opens right in the same window;
the timeline: every photo in a folder and the folders inside it, by date taken, with month and day headings naming the town, and a strip of years to jump to any month. No catalog to build, nothing to import;
albums: photos from any folders gathered without copying a file. One photo can be in several albums, and files renamed or moved on the same drive are found again by the album itself.
Pro: everything else for $3.99 a month
When you want to work with your photos, not just look at them, there is Pro. One plan, everything in it, no extras to buy. It is the same app: Pro is simply switched on inside it.
Search and order in your library
Search the way you remember: “Portugal, summer 2023, portrait, Canon”. Every word turns into a chip you can change, and the thumbnails follow as you type. A saved search waits in the sidebar with its count.
Places without the internet: town, region and country from the photo’s GPS. Every town in the world with 1,000+ people is inside the app. Open a trip’s folder and its map draws itself.
Stars, labels and tags are written into the file itself, not into the app’s database.
Many at once: rotate, resize, rename by a pattern, copy and move lots of files in one go, with Undo.
Compare similar shots side by side, zoomed together.
For photographers
RAW development from the sensor’s data, on every core. Convert a whole card to JPG, HEIC or 16-bit TIFF.
Cull: shots taken within a second of each other become a series, the app tells you which is sharpest, and the misses go to a folder or the Recycle Bin.
Find duplicates across folders, even resized copies.
Import from a memory card into folders by date.
Contact sheets: photos in a grid on A4 or Letter with names and dates — as a PDF for a client to choose from, or printed.
No home address: the location is removed from copies in one step before you share them.
The editor
Paint over what doesn’t belong and it fills in from around it. Then crop, light, colour, curves, changes to one area or one colour only, text, stickers, a watermark, frames and effects. All in 16 bits, saved as a copy or over the original with Undo.
Converting by the hundred
- 13 formats to save to: JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, JPEG XL, TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG XR, ICO, TGA and PDF.
- AVIF and JPEG XL keep the look of a JPG at a much smaller file size.
- An exact size, a percentage or the long side, two or three pictures at a time, so a hundred go by quickly.
- Right from File Explorer: right-click files and choose To JPG, Smaller for mail, Remove location or To PDF. The copies appear next to the originals.
The command line: hundreds of files in one command
Everything Cobalt Photo does to many pictures at once also works from a console: Command Prompt, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, a .bat file or your own program. The cobaltphoto command is there as soon as the app is installed, with nothing to add to PATH. No window opens, and you see what happened to every file, with progress and time left.
# Every iPhone photo, subfolders included, to JPG
cobaltphoto convert D:\iPhone -r --to jpg -o D:\iPhone-JPG
# A folder for a website: WebP, 1600 px on the long side, a watermark
cobaltphoto convert D:\Portfolio --to webp --long 1600 --mark "© Anna Novak" -o D:\Web
# 1080 × 1080 squares for social media, the middle cropped
cobaltphoto resize *.jpg --size 1080x1080 --fit crop -o D:\Square
# RAW from the card, developed for print into 16-bit TIFF
cobaltphoto convert *.cr3 --develop --auto-white --noise low --to tiff -o D:\Print
# Rename a trip: date, town, number. See what would happen first
cobaltphoto rename D:\Trip --pattern "{date}_{place}_{n}" --dry-run
# The camera's clock was an hour behind: shift the whole trip's dates
cobaltphoto meta D:\Trip -r --shift +1h
# Find every photo with GPS and remove the location from it
cobaltphoto find D:\Blog -r "gps:yes" | cobaltphoto clean --location-only --replace
# The year's best photos as one A4 PDF
cobaltphoto find D:\Photos -r "stars:5 taken:2025" | cobaltphoto pdf --name "Best of 2025" --page a4
# A memory card into the library, a folder per trip named after the town
cobaltphoto import E:\ --layout trips --to D:\Photos
There are 15 commands in all:
- new files: converting to 13 formats, resizing, shrinking for mail, PDF, the frames of an animation and the sizes of an icon, cleaning out personal data;
- the files themselves: rotating (a JPG is never encoded again), stars, labels, tags, author, copyright, the date and place taken, renaming by a pattern;
- folders: import from a memory card, duplicates, and search by date, camera, place, stars and tags — the same as the manager’s.
Converting has dozens of options of its own: quality and lossless, an exact size cropped or fitted, a watermark as text or a logo in any corner or all over, which metadata to keep, RAW development with white balance and noise reduction. Run any command with --dry-run first: it shows what it would do and changes nothing. Results come as JSON if you want them, and commands chain with a pipe, as find and clean do above.
Rotating, picture info, animation frames and icon sizes, the desktop background and the lock screen are always free in the console too; the other commands are part of Pro.
And more
A slideshow with 172 transitions and your own music, and printing several photos at once with Windows’ print preview.
14 days of everything, free. All of Pro is on from the moment you install, with no limits. No card to enter and nothing to cancel later: if you don’t subscribe, Pro simply switches off, and the viewer, the manager, the timeline and albums stay.
After that, $3.99 a month; the yearly plan gives you two months free. Microsoft Store handles the subscription, and you can cancel it at any time.
What’s next
Cobalt Photo arrived in the Microsoft Store only recently and is updated often. The latest versions alone brought the timeline, albums, contact sheets, AVIF without Windows extensions, six new RAW formats and compressed DNG. Coming up:
- import straight from a camera or phone over a cable;
- search by shooting settings (shutter speed, ISO) and by colour;
- smart features with AI that run on your own PC;
- a separate app for video.
If something is missing for you, say so in the comments: that is how the list of what comes next is made.
Get it
- Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NGPVQTK105Z
- Website and docs: cobaltsmith.com
Windows 10 and 11, x64 and Arm, in 14 languages. No account, no ads, and your photos are never sent anywhere.
I’m happy to answer questions about the app in the comments.
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