1. Phiewer
Phiewer is a pretty standard image viewer app for Mac. In addition to allowing you to view images, the app also gives you the option to view audio and video files as well. The app is folder based, so whatever file you decide to view on it, you just need to select its parent folder, and the app will do its job, with all files available to browse in one window. What’s good about Phiewer is that the app offers smooth transitions, and is fluid when switching between different viewports. It has some quick controls too, along with a bunch of shortcuts such as browsing, play/pause, rotate, etc to allow for easy access. Besides, you can view detailed information about a file like its EXIF data to have an overall better understanding of it.
Among other things, the app gives you slideshow options, with the ability to change different settings according to your requirements. Some of the settings you can tweak include speed of each slide change, transition effects, background music, etc. Moreover, the app supports various image, video, and audio formats, making it a one-stop solution for all sorts of media browsing. It’s a very good Preview alternative on Mac. Free-mium (In-app purchase) Download Phiewer
2. Xee³
If you are looking for an image viewer that simply displays images without offering a bunch of other options — basically, an alternative to the Preview app — the Xee³ is one such option. The app, with its convenient image viewing prowess, offers you to easily browse the contents of different folders and perform operations like move or copy files around. It comes with support for various image formats, and also has animations for the supported ones, to make your image viewing experience even better. Furthermore, there is support for the TouchBar, so if you happen to own a newer generation Mac that comes with a TouchBar, you can pretty much use the touch controls to perform various operations.
Talking about other useful features, Xee³ provides you with metadata for different image files, for which it relies on the Image:: ExifTool — one of the largest metadata libraries out on the internet — to offer more in-depth information about your image. Paid ($3.99) Download Xee³
3. ImageOne
ImageOne is another Preview alternative with its clean and simple browsing and multimedia management offerings. The app is fairly easy to use and allows you to better organize your images, videos, and audio, all in one place. It offers quick preview and full-screen slideshow to easily browse large libraries of media on your Mac with just a few clicks. Moreover, besides browsing through different media files, you can also perform different operations on the files such as rotate, flip, mirror, copy/paste, delete, rename, and more. Not to mention, you also get the option to view EXIF data for images, which can come in handy at times when you need to understand different properties of the images to get a better idea about its quality.
What’s more, with ImageOne, you can edit different aspects of an image to tweak it as per your liking. Among these, some of the settings you can alter include brightness, contrast, exposure, hue, sharpness, etc alongside some conversion around formats, sizing, and scaling using the built-it batch conversion tool. One of our favorite image viewer apps for Mac. Free-mium (In-app purchase) Download ImageOne
4. ApolloOne
With ApolloOne, the developer suggests using OS features such as multi-threading, Grand Central Dispatch, and Core Image graphics, to offer an app that is smooth and responsive. What this essentially means is that, while browsing through different images, viewing a slideshow, or editing images, the app does not stutter and instead provides a smooth experience. Besides, you also get controls for altering different settings to your liking and have an option to view EXIF data for more comprehensive information about the image. The app also displays camera AF points and detects faces to allow you to magnify into them and check on the focussing. Moreover, you get a context menu for functions that you frequently access, along with options to send an image to an external editor, in case you wish to make some changes. Thus, saving you a few steps.
Moreover, among a range of other things that ApolloOne has to offer include file caching for quick and instant photo browsing experience, support for a different color palette like sRGB, AdobeRGB, and ProPhotoRGB, and the ability to capture JPEG from a video. Free-mium (In-app purchase) Download ApolloOne
5. Lyn
Lyn is a simple and lightweight media browser for Mac with a pleasing interface that is clean and beautiful, to say the least. Besides image viewing, the app also provides you the option to edit different aspects of an image such as brightness, color temperature, contrast, highlights, shadows, color tones, and more, to tweak it to your liking. It comes with sharing options within the interface to provide you quick access to sharing files across different online channels like Flickr, Dropbox, and more. Similar to some of the other image viewer app suggestions on this list, Lyn also provides EXIF data to give you extensive information for your image.
What’s more, the app comes with a bunch of presets and batch processing to allow for quick and basic editing when needed. And also provides a fullscreen slideshow, with options to change some of its settings like transition speed, animation, and background music. Free-mium (In-app purchase) Download Lyn
6. qView
Compared to the rest of the image viewer apps we’ve so far recommended in this article, qView is quite different. For starters, it is open-source software, meaning, besides using the app as it is, you can also modify and make changes to the software as per your requirements, granted you have knowledge of how to. The app takes a minimalist approach with its interface that is simple yet elegant and offers a range of functionalities, without being too cluttered. Although the app claims itself to be minimalist in itself, it does not compromise on the functionalities and offers some basic operations such as rotating, mirroring the image, and more.
The developer of qView suggests it to be less hungry on the machine resources like the CPU and the memory, which is a good thing, considering how crucial it can get if you have a less powerful machine. Moreover, you also get a myriad of configurable options to change different preferences for the app and make it a more customizable experience. Easily, the best free Preview alternative on Mac. Free Download qView
7. XnViewMP
XnViewMP is another image viewer app for Mac, which doubles as image management and image resize solution, offering a one-stop solution for various image operations. It has an easy to use interface so you can browse and organize your images in a much-simplified manner. Further, it also provides different views (thumbnail, full-screen, filmstrip), slideshow, and image comparison, among other options, to assist you for a better image viewing experience. Moreover, just like other apps in the list, you can view EXIF data for different images and also perform a bunch of operations such as resize, rotate, crop, along with brightness, contrast, color temperature tweaking.
What’s more, XnViewMP claims to offer support for over 500 image formats and batch conversion (downloaded as a plug-in), making it one of the most advanced image viewing apps for Mac. Free, Paid Download XnViewMP That’s it for this listicle! Those were some of our recommendations for the best image viewer apps for Mac. What apps do you find useful, or use yourself? Let us know in the comments below.
