Windows 10 & 11 · macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon)

A fuller culling workflow than FastRawViewer.

We will be straight with you: FastRawViewer is fast, it is cheap, and for a lot of photographers it is enough. It is a focused RAW viewer with excellent exposure tools. PhotoTaken is a different bet. We built a full contact-sheet workflow around the cull: pair RAW with JPEG, ingest and verify off the card, keep video in the same grid, and hand clean XMP tags to your editor. If all you want is a quick RAW look, FastRawViewer wins on price. If the cull is a real step in your day, keep reading.

Try it free for 14 days See the full PhotoTaken site

WHERE THE TWO DIVERGE

A RAW viewer, or the whole cull

FastRawViewer is built around one image at a time. You point it at a folder, step through frames, judge exposure and focus, and flag the shots you'll use. It does that beautifully and for about $24 (V2, verified July 2026). We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Our app is called PhotoTaken, and it starts a step earlier and ends a step later. Ingest copies the card to two drives and verifies both before you touch a thing. The contact sheet shows RAW+JPEG as one tile (renamed together, never split) and it shows your video clips right alongside the stills. You rip through, rate, and color-label. Those picks are written to standard XMP, so they travel straight into Lightroom, Capture One, or Bridge without a re-tag. FastRawViewer writes XMP too, so this part is a tie, not a trick.

PhotoTaken vs FastRawViewer

Side by side, honestly.

Honest scorecard. FastRawViewer wins on price outright and matches us on speed, one-time licensing, and portable XMP. We pull ahead once the cull becomes a real workflow.

	PhotoTaken	FastRawViewer
Fast on large folders	✓	✓
One-time purchase, no subscription	✓	✓
Lower upfront price	—	✓
Ratings and color labels in portable XMP	✓	✓
Full contact-sheet culling workflow	✓	~
RAW+JPEG shown as one tile, renamed together	✓	~
Verified dual-drive ingest from the card	✓	—
Video clips in the contact sheet	✓	—

✓ Yes ~ Partial or with caveats (hover for detail) — No

The bottom line

Which one is for you

If you want a fast, inexpensive way to eyeball RAW files and flag the shots you'll use, FastRawViewer is a genuinely good $24. We would not talk you out of it. Pick PhotoTaken when the cull is real work: cards to offload and verify, RAW+JPEG pairs and video in one grid, batch renames, and tags that need to land cleanly in your editor. That is the day we built for, and it is why we priced it as a tool, not an impulse buy.

Questions

What people ask before they try it.

Mostly about where the extra money goes, and how this sits next to the other tools.

Does it judge focus and exposure from the real RAW data?

In the full-size viewer, yes. F toggles focus peaking, E flags blown highlights and crushed shadows, and H brings up a histogram. For RAW files these decode the actual demosaiced sensor data rather than the camera's embedded preview, and that is on by default. You can switch it off under Preferences if you want the lighter, faster check.

The same three keys work on the contact sheet, where they read the thumbnail instead, which for a RAW file is the embedded preview. That is meant as an at-a-glance pass across a burst rather than a precise read. When you shoot RAW+JPEG the tile shows the JPEG, but the viewer's check still reads the RAW half of the pair.

FastRawViewer costs less. What does the difference buy?

The rest of the job around the cull: verified dual-drive ingest, batch rename with templates, the full IPTC field set, search across camera settings, and export. If all you want is to eyeball RAW files and flag the shots you'll use, the cheaper tool does that well and we would not talk you out of it.

Do my ratings and labels carry over?

Yes. We write standard XMP, embedded for JPEG and TIFF and as a sidecar for RAW, so your picks follow the files into whatever you open next.

Is this a replacement for FastRawViewer?

It can be, if the cull is real work for you. If your workflow is one folder at a time and a quick look at focus, you may not need what we add.

Is it a subscription?

There is a 14-day trial of the Pro edition, with no credit card. After that it is $69 for Light or $189 for Pro, bought once. No subscription, and every feature on the roadmap arrives as a free update.