How to open a .cbz file
Comic book archive · Ebook / comics
A .cbz file is a ZIP full of images, one per page. A comic reader such as YACReader or Calibre opens it properly, and renaming a copy to .zip lets any archiver extract the pages.
What a .cbz file actually is
CBZ stands for Comic Book ZIP. There is no clever format involved: it is an ordinary ZIP archive containing numbered image files, and the reader simply displays them in order.
CBR is the same idea with RAR compression instead, which is why the two extensions appear together and why some readers handle one but not the other.
Why it will not open
No operating system associates .cbz with anything, so a double-click does nothing. The file is not unusual and nothing is damaged.
Renaming it to an extension you can open will not help: changing the extension does not convert the file, it only changes what Windows tries to open it with.
Step by step
Windows
- 01Install a comic reader. YACReader and CDisplayEx are both free and handle page order, zoom and reading direction.
- 02Calibre also reads CBZ and manages a library if you have many.
- 03To just get the images out, copy the file, rename the copy to .zip, and extract it with 7-Zip.
macOS
- 01YACReader has a macOS build, and Simple Comic is another free option.
- 02To extract the pages, rename a copy to .zip and open it with Keka or Archive Utility.
What usually goes wrong
Page order comes from file names
The reader sorts pages alphabetically, so 001.jpg through 120.jpg works and 1.jpg through 120.jpg puts page 100 straight after page 10. If a comic reads out of order, the numbering inside the archive is why.
Programs that open .cbz
Our pick, in order. Every one links to the publisher's official download URL and the SHA-256 hash of the installer. Once you have downloaded it, you can check the file against our index before you run it.
If you end up downloading one of these from somewhere other than the publisher, what you can and cannot verify about that is worth two minutes.
Also registers .cbz in its manifest
Taken straight from publisher manifests. Some of these handle the format for a narrow purpose rather than as their main job.
Common questions
- How do I open a CBZ file without special software?
- Rename a copy to .zip and extract it. A CBZ is an ordinary ZIP of image files, so any archiver gets the pages out. A dedicated reader is only nicer for actually reading.
- What is the difference between CBZ and CBR?
- Only the compression. CBZ is a ZIP of images and CBR is a RAR of images. CBZ is more widely supported because ZIP is open, which is why it has become the more common of the two.