Treble Click: How to create and open CBR files

How to create CBR files

Creating .CBR files is very easy. The CBR file extension is just an image container. If we have a set of image files that we want to group in a comic or book format, we only need to:

Sort alphabetically the images that we want to pack iinto the CBR file. The images will be displayed in their original alphabetical order inside such CBR file. Select all the images and compress them inside a .zip file. You can do so with "right click / send to / ZIP compressed folder". Or even with "right click / add to file", depending on your file compressing utility.
We need to display the file extension in order to modify it. If your operative system isn't currently displaying your file extensions, in Windows XP just select the menu tools / folder options, tab display, and then uncheck the option Hide extensions for known file types, and click accept.
Once we have created the .ZIP file and checked the file extensions, just select that compressed file and then we click right click / change name, and then change the extension to CBR (replacing the final .ZIP by a final .CBR, and we are done.

Note: the images inside the containing CBR file need to be in the root of such path. So when compriming all our images together we need to select all the images (but not the folder containing the images) because this could generate a compressed file with a sub-folder of the same name, which could not be read by some specific CBR readers.

How to open CBR files and extract images

To open a CBR file and extract their images we only need to invert the previous process. Just right click the .CBR file and select /open with, and then select WinZip, WinRar or any other software capable of uncompressing our .cbr file (there are several compatible compression software that should handle CBR files). That will open the CBR file and show us all the images that we can extract out of such type of files.

Or, if we have the option to display all file extensions, just change it from CBR to ZIP renaming the file extension, and uncompress the CBR file like any other zipped file.

How to open CBR files in iPhone / iPod Touch.

There is an iPhone APP called MyComics, available just by 2.99€, which will allow us to open and display CBR files, as well as other file formats such as CBZ, PDF, RAR, ZIP.

And if you want to open your CBR files on the go, one of your best choices taking into account a good quality / price ratio could be an Apple iPod touch 8 GB (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL (affiliate link - it is a product that we tested and that we loved).