Diffractor is designed to manage a collection of photos and videos. It indexes your files to allow duplicate detection, fast search and collection presence.
Diffractor is designed to manage a collection of photos and videos on your PC. It can view and search any files, but the collection has extra features such as duplicate detection, fast search and presence. The collection is indexed to support these features.
Diffractor calculates the presence of files in the collection. The presence indicates if a file exists or is duplicated in the collection. It also indicates if an item has sidecars. Sidecars are extra files associated with a media item – for example XMP metadata or subtitles. The presence tooltip lists the files that diffractor has detected. Duplicates in red and sidecars in green. Presence also works for files outside the collection. Use it to check if files on an old memory card are missing from the collection. Simply open the memory card and group files by presence.
Three dates, each labelled — Original, Created and Modified are now separate and searchable, so an edit no longer moves a photo to the day it was retouched (#184).
Panoramas and 360° photos — wide stitches sweep at full width, equirectangular files become a camera you turn by dragging, and @panorama finds them.
Items view settings without scrolling to the top — group, sort, media-type filter and Show items in subfolders open from the scroller (discussion #251).
The sidebar map is now a globe, and the history chart spans your whole collection (#175).
Verbose metadata reports what the file actually holds — unnamed tags kept, maker notes as directories, embedded thumbnail shown.
Security updates — expat 2.8.3 closes CVE-2026-72522, plus libopenmpt, libarchive, libebml and sqlite.
Before you upgrade: taken:, when:, timeline: and c: now mean Original, so saved searches may return different results. Every icon is redrawn.
Full detail: docs/v-1.27.2.md
Frequently asked questions
Is Diffractor free?
Yes. Diffractor is free and open-source software released under the LGPL license.
What is the latest version of Diffractor?
The latest version is 126.0, released on May 31, 2024.
Is it safe to download Diffractor?
The download button links to the official installer published on github.com, the same file Windows Package Manager installs. You can verify the downloaded file by comparing its SHA-256 checksum with 88b28702ed5c81a165897e03e51cc1562409d8dfb2bd82d212051c108a408509.
Which Windows versions does Diffractor support?
Diffractor runs on Windows and is available for 32-bit (x86) systems.
How do I install Diffractor silently?
Run the offline installer with "diffractor-setup.exe" /S, or install it with Windows Package Manager: winget install --id=Diffractor.Diffractor -e --silent.
How do I uninstall Diffractor?
Open Settings › Apps › Installed apps, find Diffractor and select Uninstall. From the command line, run winget uninstall --id=Diffractor.Diffractor -e.
Alternatives to Diffractor
Other File managers programs for Windows from different developers.
Sysinternals Suite is a bundle of the Sysinternals utilities including Process Explorer, Process Monitor, Sysmon, Autoruns, ProcDump, all of the PsTools, and many more.
