RAW and DNG Support?

[Chris4tytwo]

Hi there,

I did not see this mentioned yet and thought first it might just work/is supported but it seems it does not work with raw files and/or dng files yet.

Would be great if it could be used at least for these file types....or maybe also in general, completely other file types as well

[Antoine-lb]

Hello Chris
The plan is to eventually add them, but we have had very little time to work on this app in the last months. One day we will get there, but I cannot tell you when.

In case you're motivated to add the support for these file types, I can guide you through the steps. It's not that much work, we have examples of adding HEIC support, which is very similar

Hope we find time to work on this app again soon 🙏

[Chris4tytwo]

Hi Antoine, Merci (you are french?) Thanks for your message and the proposal. OneFolder seems to have great potential! It looks simple and useful and I really like the mindset (your Manifesto) as it aligns with my goals and wishes too. I kind of would be willing to provide some help for this project! …but… the thing is just that I had never done any programming/coding so far It would then be on you to judge If I could still do/try this… I would definitely be interested…would be an option to get the feet wet!? I have a background in product design, programming and coding is not something I have done yet but I have some good ideas/conecpts for some apps/tools and UI/UX interfaces too. Would be a option to get startet…maybe? Regarding OneFolder in general: For me/In my opinion the following things would be important to have in such a tool to reach a wider audience (photographers, designers, creatives etc) 1) Imho having RAW + DNG support would be a crucial thing to have in such a photo browser / DAM tool. 2) Smart albums/folders, saved smart searches -> I think this should be easy to implement... as it is already implemented in Allusion on which oneFolder is based on? 3) Ideally the option to use/tag and see (all) other files in the app too. 4) having the option - in addition to smart Albums/Folders - to manually put (respectively link) files into other folders too. -> this is, like ratings, and color flags something else than regular tags. Imho tags are/should be used to identify the content of the image eg: Dog, Cat, House, at the Beach, Summer etc. But I used this feature a lot in Apple Aperture to eg. make a temporary collection eg. „to print“ „for Diashow tonight“ „work in Progress“ etc. or simply to manually group things and beeing able to access it „there“ too. If you delete these folders or Albums nothings gets lost as it is just a pointer to some files (* I know it could be done with Tags too but this is not really a suitable application for tags, and this manual folders approach offers many benefits) In Apple Aperture there where „Boxes“ that actually contained (or pointed to a Master reference file) piictures and Albums that could point to these. You could access the same image in several places and you could easily create versions of a image without really duplicating the file Best regards, hope to hear from you. Chris

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Am 12.01.2026 um 13:31 schrieb Antoine ***@***.***>: Antoine-lb left a comment (OneFolderApp/OneFolder#135) <#135 (comment)> Hello Chris The plan is to eventually add them, but we have had very little time to work on this app in the last months. One day we will get there, but I cannot tell you when. In case you're motivated to add the support for these file types, I can guide you through the steps. It's not that much work, we have examples of adding HEIC support, which is very similar Hope we find time to work on this app again soon 🙏 — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#135 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BBHQQ45W3GFJB2TUGDBB4CD4GOHYRAVCNFSM6AAAAACRKY7ICGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZTOMZYGMZTAMJRG4>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.

[Antoine-lb]

Hello @Chris4tytwo
Glad that you like the app! And thanks for being open to contributing to Onefolder.

Honestly speaking, this app may not be the best to start coding, and sadly I won't have much time to guide you through the steps to boot it up and work on it.

You can try using Claude Code and other AI tools to guide you. But there are other apps that are way easier to get started and to understand the fundamentals. In OneFolder we deal with web technology, but also desktop APIs and large files that are always a bit tricky and require being comfortable with messy tech documentation.

But if you decide to give it a try, I will be there!

In case you still decide to give it a shot to add RAW support, here are the modifications that have to be made in order to add HEIC, which is very similar to what we should do to add RAW:
#86

The only part that requires research is for the library that will display the RAW image on web technologies. We need to do some conversions maybe at import time or on the fly like we did on HEIC.

When adding HEIC support, the most important part of the job was deciding that libheif-js was the right way to solve it.

Hope you get your hands into coding whether in this project or another, with or without AI. It's a phenomenal time to build software solutions in our software-centric world !

[mairamartinsk]

@Antoine-lb About 70% of my 120k images are raw files and the lack of file support is a deal breaker.

The complication is there are many raw file formats, and most of them are proprietary. Each camera maker has their own format. Nikon has NEF files, Fuji has RAF files, Canon has CR2 and CR3, Sony, Hasselblad, Pentax, they all have their own formats. There is one attempt at a universal file format with Adobe's DNG.

Raw files are just raw data as captured by the camera sensor, they are not really files that can be opened without a raw processor. For that reason, they usually have an embedded JPG image so that we can see the photo in the back of the camera after shooting. Programs like Digikam, PhotoMechanic and Adobe Bridge make use of this embedded JPG for fast loading of previews. Metadata is usually added to an XMP sidecar file, as it is not possible to simply embed it on the raw file itself.

I suspect implementation of raw file support will be way more complex than HEIC. I will take a look, if I get something working I'll open a PR.

[Antoine-lb]

We have to think about proprietary formats for each different image type. And when we talk about RAW, we mean the open raw format.

In case we want to implement proprietary formats, it's still the same workflow; just that a different one for every proprietary format. It's why the HEIC example shows you the work that should be done for each of those formats.

For example, if we ever wanted to implement Nikon's proprietary format, we would have to find a library that knows how to read it and convert it to a web-compatible image on the fly. We have to replicate that for every proprietary format we want to support.