Finder's Gallery view lets you lot curlicue through folders of photos on your Mac with an enhanced preview pane and rich metadata. Preview works fine every bit a basic photograph viewer for Mac, but it lacks navigation controls, superior viewing experience, and other features.

You don't demand an app like Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom, or one that supports databases to update and organize your drove while displaying images. We'll show you some of the all-time photograph viewer apps with unique features for Mac and how you tin can use them.

1. XnView MP

XnView MP image viewer and organizer for Mac

XnView MP is a photo viewer, manager, and resizer for Mac. The congenital-in tools let yous organize images in multiple ways and process them with an arsenal of editing tools. It has a built-in batch conversion module and supports WebP, Animated WebP, TIFF, PlayStation TIM, and numerous image formats.

When you launch the app, you'll meet 3 panels.

The left sidebar is the Finder file organization, with section tabs—Folders, Favorites, and Categories Filter. It consists of pre-configured categories to aggregate and label your images.

The center panel shows a thumbnail preview of each photo. Navigate to View > View Every bit and select Thumbnails + Labels to show the details. You can sort images past name, file size, EXIF date taken or modified, or even filter them by rating, comments, or tags.

On the right side, yous'll encounter a preview panel. Info lets you come across file properties, histograms, and EXIF data. Switch to the Preview panel to cheque out the image.

Unique Features of XnView MP:

  • Support for old, not-standard, Photoshop, Corel, Autodesk, and HEIF image formats. Click Create to split or bring together images and create multipage image files.
  • It tin can handle RAW file photos and uses the GPU to amend operation, caching, and processing. Information technology too supports a full internal bit depth motion-picture show of eight, 16, or 32 bits per component.
  • Customize the layout of the app as per your needs. Navigate to View > Layout, or select Costless to create a custom layout.
  • Integrates with XnConvert to catechumen images, resize batches of images, and apply adjustments like rotation, watermarks, filters, fancy effects, and more than.
  • Create custom slideshows with parameters for setting up a timer (or keyboard press), screen size, transition effects, and background music.

Download: XnView MP (Free)

ii. ApolloOne

Apollo One image viewer app for Mac

ApolloOne is an image viewer app for Mac to view and organize photos. The built-in camera RAW decoder can generate a preview of an image direct from the RAW file. With the built-in Lanczos filter, it tin can scale your image back to its original quality.

To admission your photos, choose Tools > Browser in the toolbar. Click the plus (+) button and and so the Folder menu item. Select the folder you want to add to Places. Yous can group related folders by calculation a separator. Now simply navigate to the folder (check the Include Subfolders setting to include subfolders) and click to load your photos.

Then press the left or right arrow keys to see your photos. With just few keystrokes yous tin navigate beyond many photos, similar on a Windows PC. Thumbnails are generated on the fly using a multi-core processing engine. For Macs with a GPU, the app tin can further speed upward the display of images and quality.

Head to Preferences > Avant-garde and plow on the Loftier quality epitome scaling option. You lot can zoom in or out of the photo. Press the Control cardinal to instantly zoom to a detail magnification.

The Inspector panel shows yous detailed information from a photographic camera JPEG or RAW file. To inspect whatsoever epitome, click the Inspector push in the toolbar. On a supported camera, the info page can reveal the serial number, shutter count, and other specifications.

Unique Features of ApolloOne:

  • Information technology provides a glance view of images at the tiptop of the viewer—like a film strip (Tools > Show Filmstrip).
  • Prepare the source of the metadata and back up both macOS extended attributes (used by Finder searches) and XMP. Turn on Spotlight indexing to search images by dissimilar EXIF parameters.
  • There's a born adjustment console to help with the assessment of a RAW image. This includes exposure bounty, highlights and shadows adjustment, and an Automobile Tone curve.
  • Contact sheet fashion (View > Contact Sheet) displays the thumbnails in a grid manner. With it, y'all can perform file operations in majority.
  • Add a Smart Folder created by Finder to admission your photos. It even supports Finder tags and lets you use a combination of tags for further filtering. Hither's how to employ smart folders on a Mac.

Download: ApolloOne (Free, premium version bachelor)

iii. qView

qView minimal photo viewer app for Mac

qView is a cantankerous-platform, minimal paradigm viewer app for Mac. On launch, you'll run into a black window. Navigate to File > Open up and choose a binder to display its contents. Then, press the left or correct pointer keys to navigate between the photos seamlessly, just similar on a Windows PC.

Scroll to zoom in or out and Control-click any film to access more options. You tin rotate images, flip images, or switch to the original size and view them in item.

Unique Features of qView:

  • qView supports GIFs, assuasive y'all to increase or decrease the speed or save a specific frame as a PNG or JPEG.
  • View photos in slideshow mode by going to Tools > Start Slideshow. Yous can customize the slideshow direction, timer, and preload settings.
  • It offers shortcuts to navigate and admission different options and usability. Check the Shortcuts tab in preferences.
  • By default, the title bar shows the file name. Head to Preferences > Windows and check the Verbose option under the title bar text to show you more details.

Download: qView (Free)

iv. Picturama

picturama photo viewer app for Mac

Picturama is a modernistic-looking, electron-based, picture-viewing Mac app that lets y'all apace view images. The app supports JPEG, PNG, TIF, WebP, HEIC, and HEIF. Information technology also reads the RAW file format for a bunch of cameras through the LibRaw libraries congenital into the app.

To get started, click the Settings button and choose a folder.

You lot can browse the photos by date using the stylish progress bar on the right. Choose a year and month and directly navigate to your photos.

Press the i push to see the information and EXIF information of an paradigm. Click the flag button to add together that image to your favorites.

Unique Features of Picturama:

  • Comprehensive EXIF, IPTC, MakerNotes, and XMP information for each image.
  • You lot tin can add together a tag, but it has no relation with the Finder.
  • Rotate and crop your photos. You lot can zoom in or out with the slider in the toolbar or mouse bike.
  • Consign photos in formats like JPEG, PNG, or WebP. When doing this, you tin set the quality and size, and remove EXIF data.

Download: Picturama (Free)

5. Lyn

lyn photo organizer and viewer app for Mac

Lyn is a Mac photo viewer and organizer. It supports TIFF, HEIF, TGA, WebP, GIF, and many non-standard, old, and RAW paradigm formats. With the born support of camera models and multi-threading, information technology can progressively scale high-resolution images.

The left sidebar displays all your folders (including Smart Folders), photo libraries, devices, and mounted volumes.

The viewer displays the epitome and has view options like Icon, Strip, List, and Map mode. The map layout mode uses Apple Maps with GPS data to provide visual location information. The list view fashion shows the image thumbnail, detailed information, and metadata. And the strip view mode shows a tiny strip of thumbnails on the top with a viewer area.

At the right, yous'll run into the Inspector panel. Information technology displays data similar type, color space, EXIF, MakerNote, IPTC, GPS, and more.

Scan your photos either using strip view mode or by double-clicking a picture and using the left or right arrow keys. Y'all can apply different zoom methods and apply shortcuts to magnify the image at the cursor level.

Lyn tin also sort photos in many means, like past name, date, color label, tags, and rating. Or it can filter them past name, extension, and tags in the search field.

Unique Features of Lyn:

  • This app uses ColorSync colour direction technology, from source to printing. It can observe the colour profile (through ICC) of the paradigm, embedded contour, EXIF, or camera MakerNote.
  • You can rate, assign keywords, or add together tags to your photos. Information technology'southward also possible to create a smart binder with tags, and then y'all can easily find files. Under the Search For tag, you'll find all your Smart Folders.
  • When yous connect a camera, expand the Devices section and start importing your photos. Information technology tin even import from a card reader, hard disk drive, or NAS.
  • Lyn includes a non-destructive filtering engine to conform color, exposure, contrast, raise the shadows, utilise a sepia filter, convert to black and white, and more. You can even straighten or crop an image and later revert information technology.
  • Publish your photos directly to Flickr, Dropbox, and SmugMug.

Download: Lyn ($29.99, free trial available)

Free and Paid Prototype Editors

Although viewing images seems like a simple operation, many people have different needs from their photo viewing app. The apps discussed in this article comprehend a wide range of options for different professionals and border cases. Effort out these apps yourself to run across which one fits your needs best.

If you lot're looking to edit your images, and so y'all require an epitome editor. All these image viewers have the option to Open with an image editor of your choice. If this interests you lot, take a look at the best free and paid image editors for Mac to find the best option.

The 8 All-time Complimentary and Paid Paradigm Editors for Mac

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About The Writer

Rahul Saigal (180 Articles Published)

With his M.Optom Caste in Heart Care Speciality, Rahul worked as a lecturer for many years in the higher. Writing and education others is e'er his passion. He at present writes nearly technology and make it digestible for readers who don't empathise it well.

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