Photismos Viewer is a single, self-contained HTML file — an offline image and video review tool. You open it in a browser, point it at a folder of media on your own computer, and it renders a polished gallery with a full-screen lightbox, zoom, categories, titles, descriptions, and more. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; every file stays on your machine.
It reads directly from your folders, and it can also write back to them — adding media, renaming files, storing titles and descriptions as small text files, and setting cover images. When you're happy with a collection, it can export a standalone static website you can host or share.
Requires a Chromium browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.) — not Firefox or Safari.
Essentially, it turns your local folders of images and videos into an interactive experience similar to a live website, with image thumbnails representing folders, a navbar at the top that mirrors your folder structure, and responsive galleries with a lightbox.
I developed this tool with the help of Claude AI as a better alternative to using Windows file explorer and default photo viewing apps. It looks nicer, provides easier navigation and larger thumbnails, and handles short video clips much better.
It also has the ability to group variants of related image/video items into group slideshows, with one showing as the default and others showing when you use the hover navigation controls. I find this feature one of the most useful, as I often make multiple videos from one source image; this allows me to include variants without cluttering the gallery thumbnails with each version.
The zip download contains two html files: the Photismos Viewer, and a comprehensive User Guide. Please make sure to read through it.
See the About This Version section of the model page for a full changelog listing updated features and bugfixes. Always download the latest version available.
Description
All of the changes below have been made since the last posted version on Civitai:
New in 3.8.8. The Export dialog now shows a “Copying media files N of M…” line beneath the current page name while that page's media are being copied, so a large copy no longer looks stalled.
New in 3.8.7. Fixed a brief flash of every thumbnail when clicking a group card's variant arrows/dots on a gallery page — a masonry-reflow side-effect of the 3.8.5 lazy loading. Switching variants no longer disturbs the layout.
New in 3.8.6. Fixed a gallery loading spinner that could keep spinning for several seconds after the page was already visibly loaded — a side-effect of the 3.8.5 video changes. The spinner now clears as soon as the page is actually ready.
New in 3.8.5. A memory/stability fix for pages with many .mp4 clips. The viewer now explicitly frees each clip's video decoder when you leave a gallery (and when the lightbox closes or steps to the next clip), rather than leaving it for the browser to clean up later. Browsers limit how many video decoders can run at once, so on clip-heavy libraries the old behaviour could pile them up and eventually show as black, stalled or glitchy thumbnails after a while of browsing. Thumbnails also preload only their metadata now (not the whole clip), and group cards load only the visible variant — the others load the moment you flip to them. Nothing looks or behaves differently; it just uses far less video memory.
New in 3.8.4. Settings are now per page instead of global. Each folder- and gallery-level page keeps its own style choices in a small settings.json file inside that page's own folder, so different pages can look different — a Midnight-themed category page next to a Paper-themed gallery, for instance. Open the Settings panel on any page and it shows that page's saved choices; change something and only that page updates. A brand-new page (a subfolder you make in the viewer, or one you create in your file manager and then open) gets a settings.json created automatically, seeded from the page you were just on, so it inherits the current look. Export bakes each page's own settings into that page's HTML, so a full-site export can reproduce different looks per page.
From 3.8.3: Folder covers can be MP4 video clips, alongside the usual JPG/JPEG/PNG/WEBP. A video cover auto-plays and auto-loops, muted and inline — a natural way to represent a gallery page that holds videos. Name it after the folder (e.g. Trailers.mp4 for a folder called Trailers) and drop it in the Covers folder, exactly like an image cover; everything else — Change cover image, folder rename, folder delete, and export — treats it just like an image.
From 3.8.2: The info popups now match exported sites: the in-lightbox popup slides in from a right-hand panel (rather than opening centered), and both it and the centered thumbnail/category popups show a white title over a muted body. The Export dialog’s Export Now button is now pinned to the bottom so it stays reachable while the options above it scroll. Also fixed: in legacy mode, the “select your covers/ folder” message is no longer hidden behind the loading spinner while the folder picker is open.
From 3.8.1: Category pages now show their own stats (e.g. “8 folders · 24 subfolders”) instead of leaving the last gallery’s count on screen.