All about CR3 Files

The CR3 file type is primarily associated with Digital Photo Professional.

CR3	File extension: CR3
	File type:	raw image

What is a CR3 file?

CR3 files mostly belong to Digital Photo Professional by Canon. CR3 is the filename extension of high-resolution photographs saved in Canon RAW 3 file format. When capturing images in RAW mode, Canon digital cameras such as those in the EOS series (e.g. EOS M6 Mark II) save graphics and metadata captured by the camera's image sensor to a CR3 file. Depending on the compression settings used to capture a photo, some Canon cameras save the photo as a minimally compressed lossless (RAW) or lossy (C-RAW) image. Lossy-compressed CR3 images are usually around 40% smaller than lossless CR3 images. Although a Canon RAW 3 file has CR3 filename extension, the file is actually an MP4 container with custom tags defined by ISO Base Media File Format (ISO/IEC 14496-12). Earlier iterations of Canon RAW format used CRW and CR2 which were based on the CIFF and TIFF formats respectively. Digital Photo Professional, Preview, Lightroom, and FastStone Image Viewer support CR3 format.

How to open CR3 files

You need a suitable software like Digital Photo Professional to open a CR3 file. Without proper software you will receive a Windows message "How do you want to open this file?" or "Windows cannot open this file" or a similar Mac/iPhone/Android alert. If you cannot open your CR3 file correctly, try to right-click or long-press the file. Then click "Open with" and choose an application. You can also display a CR3 file directly in the browser:. Just drag the file onto this browser window and drop it.

Online CR3 Text Viewer

Choose your .cr3 file to analyze

or drag and drop it here

Online File Viewer

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CR3 file format:

If you can determine the file format, the associated program can also be determined. The initial characters of a file are called signature, sometimes also referred to as "magic bytes". The signature can be used to infer the file format. If the file extension does not match the file format, double-clicking on the file will cause an error upon opening. Knowledge is power - this also applies when dealing with unknown or faulty files. Below you will find our evaluation of the CR3 files:

The CR3 file extension is very common and predominantly uses a uniform format. The two most popular formats are as follows:

• 97% of all CR3 files are Canon Digital Camera RAW image files, which are based on the MP4 file format. MP4 is a multimedia container format used to store video and audio and allows streaming over the Internet. If you open these files in a text editor, you will see only illegible characters. The files are often between 17 MB and 38 MB in size. This file type is based on cutting-edge technology. Certain words are almost always found in the files, such as CCDT, F+jH, crx isom, ftypcrx, \CCTP, &CNCVCanonCR3_001/00.09.00/00.00.00, uuid, moov, pCTBO and \CTBO. These files are attributed to eosr, imgl and tula.
• 1% of all CR3 files are associated with CoolReader 3 cache. The contents of these files cannot be read by a human; only a computer program can interpret the data. The file size is in the range of 450 KB to 4 MB. The keywords Cache File and CoolReader 3 Cache File v3 are typical for these files.

All other CR3 files (2%) have no uniform format. If you want to find out what your CR3 file contains, drag and drop it onto this page.