Pillu Player · in testing
Your Lottie files,
finally visible.
A folder of .json animations looks like a folder of blank
text files. Pillu Player fixes that at the operating-system level —
real thumbnails in Finder, the animation playing in the preview pane,
and a full frame on spacebar.
Free forever · no account · runs on your Mac, never uploads
The annoying part
Twelve files. All identical.
macOS has no idea what a Lottie file is. Every animation you have ever exported sits in Finder as the same grey document icon, so finding the right one means opening them one at a time in a browser tab.
The file already contains the animation. Your Mac just refuses to look.
Four places it shows up
You install it once and then forget it exists.
Pillu Player registers itself with macOS, so the animations appear everywhere you already look at files.
Thumbnails in Finder
Every Lottie file gets a real thumbnail drawn from the animation itself, in icon view and in list view. You can tell your loaders apart at a glance.
It plays in the preview pane
Select a file in Finder and the preview pane on the right plays the animation, looping, without opening anything.
Spacebar for Quick Look
Hit space and the animation runs full size in the Quick Look window, exactly the way a video or an image would.
And the app itself
Open a file properly when you need to scrub it, check a frame, change something, or send it out in another format.
Inside the app
Not just a viewer.
Play it properly
Scrub the timeline, loop a section, step frame by frame, and read the frame count and duration without digging through the JSON.
Make small changes
Adjust the things you normally reopen After Effects for — [Sagar: list exactly what Pillu can edit — colours? speed? size? layer visibility?]
Export to other formats
Send the same animation out as [Sagar: which formats? GIF, MP4, WebM, APNG, PNG sequence, dotLottie?] without a round trip through another tool.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No upload, no rendering queue, no account. Client work under NDA can go through Pillu with the Wi-Fi switched off.
Price
Free. Not free-for-now.
Pillu Player runs entirely on your machine, so it costs us nothing to let you keep it. There is no paid tier waiting behind it and no trial clock. If we ever build something that genuinely costs us money to run, that will be a different product with its own price on it.
The details
What you need to run it.
- Platform
- macOS [minimum version?]
- Chip
- [Apple silicon only, or Intel too?]
- File types in
- Lottie
.json[also .lottie / dotLottie?] - File types out
- [export list]
- Download size
- [MB]
- Price
- Free, no account
- Internet
- Not required after install
- Distribution
- [direct .dmg or Mac App Store?]
Questions people keep asking.
Will it slow my Mac down?
No. The thumbnail and preview extensions only wake up when macOS asks them to draw something. The rest of the time they are not running.
Does it touch my files?
Not unless you ask it to. Viewing, thumbnailing and Quick Look are read-only. Editing and exporting only happen when you press the button.
Why is a studio giving this away?
We built it because we needed it. It runs on your machine, so handing it to other people costs us nothing — and we would rather be known for the tool than charge fifteen dollars for it.
Is there a Windows version?
[Sagar: planned, or Mac only? Finder thumbnails and Quick Look are macOS features, so the honest answer may be no.]
How do I get updates?
[Sagar: in-app updater, or the waitlist email?]
Be there on day one.
Pillu is being tested inside the studio right now. One email when it is ready to download — nothing before that.
This opens your mail app. One line is enough — we write once, on the day it ships.