6 Best Mac Image Viewer Apps with Unique Features

Finder's Library view lets you scroll through photos in a folder on your Mac, with an enhanced preview pane and rich metadata.As a basic photo viewer for Mac, the preview is decent, but it lacks navigation controls, an ideal viewing experience, and other features.But sometimes, you need more than what these apps provide.

You don't need Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom, or other database-enabled apps to update and organize your collection while displaying images.We’ll show you some of the best photo viewer apps for Mac with unique features and how you can use them.

1. pixea

pixea It is a simple photo viewer for Mac that can also view video and audio files.It supports keyboard shortcuts for instant browsing of photo, video or audio files.If your MacBook is equipped with a Touch Bar, Pixela supports it too.

It has several quick-access controls at the bottom of the selected media, including play/pause, rotate, zoom in and out, and zoom.Additionally, Pixea lets you remove objects, people, or blemishes from your photos in just a few taps.You can also improve the clarity of your images with Pixea's Super Resolution feature, which uses machine learning to sharpen and enhance image details.

Pixea supports various image, video and audio formats such as JPG, PNG, HEIC, MP4, MOV, A4V, FLV, MP3, WAV, etc.It's a free app with limited but adequate functionality.Pixea Plus, priced at $9.99, includes a thumbnail panel, 4x zoom, keyboard shortcut customization, cloning tools, trackpad gestures, and more.

Download: pixea (Free, premium version available)

2. XnView MP

XnView MP is a photo viewer and manager for Mac.The app lets you organize your photos in a variety of ways and manipulate them with a host of editing tools.It has a built-in batch conversion module and is compatible with more than 500 image formats.In addition, it supports non-standard Photoshop, Corel, Autodesk and HEIF image formats.

It can process RAW file photos and use your Mac's GPU to improve performance, caching and processing power.It also supports full internal bit depth images of 8, 16 or 32 bits per component.It integrates with XnConvert to convert pictures, resize picture batches, and apply adjustment functions such as rotation, watermarks, filters, and fancy special effects.

The sidebar on the left side of the application is the Finder file system, which has some tabs for folders, favorites, and category filters.It consists of pre-configured categories for summarizing and labeling your images.The middle panel shows a thumbnail preview of each photo.You can sort images by name, file size, EXIF ​​capture or modification date, and even filter images by rating, comments, or tags.

On the right is the preview panel.The information panel lets you view file properties, histograms, and EXIF ​​data.Switch to the preview panel to view the image.You can also customize the layout of the app to suit your needs.You can create a custom layout by navigating to View > Layout from the menu bar.

Download: XnView MP (free)

3. Apollo One

Apollo One is an image viewer application for Mac that can be used to view and organize photos.It can provide an image overview at the top of the viewer like a film strip, or compare two images in split view.

To access your photos, select Tools > Show Browser from the menu bar.Then, click the plus (+) button at the top of the sidebar and select the folder.With just a few keystrokes, you can manipulate many of your photos just like you would on a Windows PC.You can also add smart folders created by Finder to access your photos.It even supports Finder tags and allows you to use tag combinations to further filter.

Thumbnails are generated on the fly using a multi-core processing engine.With it, you can instantly zoom in or out on your photos.Alternatively, press the Control key to instantly zoom to a specific magnification.There's also a "Contact Sheet" mode that displays thumbnails in a grid.With it, you can perform file operations in batches, resize pictures and convert them.

The Inspector panel displays metadata and details for your camera's JPEG or RAW files.On supported cameras, the information page can display the serial number, shutter number, and other specifications.Additionally, there is a built-in adjustment panel to help evaluate RAW images.It includes exposure compensation, highlights, shadow adjustments, color temperature, hue adjustments, and automatic tone curve.

Download: Apollo One (Subscription required, free trial available)

4. qView

qView is a simple yet full-featured image viewer application for Mac.To get started, navigate to File > Open from the menu bar and select a folder to display its contents, or drag and drop images into qView's window.Then, press the left and right arrow keys to seamlessly switch between photos, just like on a Windows PC.

It supports GIFs, allowing you to increase or decrease the speed, or save specific frames as PNG or JPEG.It provides shortcut keys to navigate and access different options and availability.By default, the title bar displays the file name, but you can go to qView > Preferences > Window from the menu bar and check the Verbose option for the title bar text to display more details.

Scroll to zoom in or out, and Control-click any image to access more options.You can rotate the image, flip it or switch to original size and see the details.You can also view photos in slide show mode via "Tools" > "Start Slide Show" in the menu bar.You can customize slideshow direction, timers, and preload settings.

Download: qView (free)

5.Picture

Picturama is an Electron-based Mac application for viewing images.The program supports JPEG, PNG, TIF, WebP, HEIC and HEIF.It can also read the RAW file format of some cameras that support LibRaw through the LibRaw library built into the program.It displays comprehensive EXIF, IPTC, MakerNotes and XMP information for each image.

You can also mark, rotate, and crop photos, and zoom in or out using the slider on the toolbar.In addition, you can export photos to formats such as JPEG, PNG or WebP.When exporting, you can set quality and size, and remove EXIF ​​data.

To get started, click the Settings button at the top and select a folder.You can browse photos by date using the stylish progress bar on the right.Select a year and month to browse photos directly.Press the Info (i) button at the top to view the image's EXIF ​​data.Click the "Mark" button to add a picture to your favorites.

Download: picturama (free)

6. Lyn

Lyn is also an excellent Mac photo viewer and organizer.It supports TIFF, HEIF, TGA, WebP, GIF and many non-standard, old-school and RAW image formats.With built-in camera models and multi-threading support, it can progressively scale high-resolution images.

The left sidebar displays folders (including smart folders), photo libraries, devices, and mounted volumes.The viewer displays images with different view (icon, ribbon, list, map), sorting (name, date, color label, flag) and filtering (name, extension, flag) options.

On the right is the Inspector panel.It displays information such as type, color space, EXIF, MakerNote, IPTC, GPS, and more.The app can detect an image's color profile (via ICC), embedded profile, EXIF ​​or camera MakerNote.

Lyn includes a non-destructive filtering engine to adjust color, exposure, contrast, shadows and more.You can even straighten and crop images and restore them later.

You can browse photos using the ribbon view or by double-clicking on the image and using the left and right arrow keys.You can use different zoom methods or shortcut keys to enlarge the image at the cursor. Lyn also lets you upload photos directly to Flickr, Dropbox and SmugMug.

Download: Lyn ($29.99, free trial available)

Preview isn't the only photo viewer for Mac

While viewing pictures may seem simple, many people have different needs for a photo viewing app.For the average user, Preview is probably good enough, while the apps discussed here cover a variety of options for professionals and fringe users alike.So give it a try and see which one best suits your needs.