Finder's Gallery view lets you scroll through folders of photos on your Mac with an enhanced preview pane and rich metadata. Preview works fine as a basic photo viewer for Mac, but it lacks navigation controls, an ideal viewing experience, and other features. But sometimes, you want more than those apps offer.

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

1. Pixea

Pixea app on macOS with a screenshot opened

Pixea is a minimal photo viewer for your Mac that also lets you view video and audio files. It supports keyboard shortcuts that instantly navigate photos, videos, or audio files. If your MacBook has a Touch Bar, Pixea supports it too.

It has a few quick access controls at the bottom of your selected media, including play/pause, rotate, zoom in and out, and scaling. In addition, Pixea lets you remove objects, people, or defects from your photo with a few clicks. You can also upscale your images with Pixea with its Super Resolution feature, which sharpens and enhances the details of the image with machine learning.

Pixea supports various image, video, and audio formats such as JPG, PNG, HEIC, MP4, MOV, A4V, FLV, MP3, WAV, and more. It's a free app with limited but adequate features. For $9.99, Pixea Plus includes features such as a thumbnail panel, 4x upscaling, keyboard shortcuts customization, a clone tool, trackpad gestures, and more.

Download: Pixea (Free, premium version available)

2. XnView MP

XnView MP with a photo selected in macOS

XnView MP is a photo viewer and manager for your Mac. The app lets you organize photos in multiple ways and process them with an arsenal of editing tools. It has a built-in batch conversion module and is compatible with over 500 image formats. Besides, it also supports non-standard Photoshop, Corel, Autodesk, and HEIF image formats.

It can handle RAW file photos and uses your Mac's GPU to improve performance, caching, and processing. It also supports a full internal bit-depth picture of 8, 16, or 32 bits per component. It integrates with XnConvert to convert images, resize batches of images, and apply adjustments like rotation, watermarks, filters, fancy effects, and more.

The left sidebar in the app is the Finder file system, with section tabs for 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. You can sort images by name, file size, EXIF date taken or modified, or even filter them by rating, comments, or tags.

On the right side, you'll see a Preview panel. The Info panel lets you see file properties, histograms, and EXIF data. Switch to the Preview panel to check out the image. You can also customize the layout of the app as per your needs. Navigate to View > Layout from the menu bar to create a custom layout.

Download: XnView MP (Free)

3. ApolloOne

ApolloOne photo viewer showing an image on Mac with Inspector toggled

ApolloOne is an image viewer app for your Mac to view and organize photos. It can provide a glance view of images at the top of the viewer like a film strip or compare two images in a split view.

To access your photos, choose Tools > Show Browser from the menu bar. Then, click the plus (+) button at the top of the sidebar and choose Folder. With just a few keystrokes, you can maneuver across many photos, like on a Windows PC. You can also add a Smart Folder created by Finder to access your photos. It even supports Finder tags and lets you use a combination of tags for further filtering.

Thumbnails are generated on the fly using a multi-core processing engine. With this, you can instantly zoom in or out of the photo. Or, press the Control key to instantly zoom to a particular magnification. There's a Contact Sheet mode that displays the thumbnails in a grid fashion. With it, you can perform file operations in bulk to resize and convert images.

The Inspector panel shows you metadata and detailed information from a camera JPEG or RAW file. On a supported camera, the Info page can reveal the serial number, shutter count, and other specifications. Also, there's a built-in adjustment panel to help assess a RAW image. It includes exposure compensation, highlights, shadows adjustment, color temperature, tint adjustment, and an Auto Tone curve.

Download: ApolloOne (Subscription required, free trial available)

4. qView

qView minimal photo viewer app for Mac

qView is a minimal yet fully functional image viewer app for your Mac. To get started, navigate to File > Open from the menu bar and choose a folder to display its contents or drag and drop the image into qView's window. Then, press the left or right arrow keys to navigate between the photos seamlessly, just like on a Windows PC.

It supports GIFs, allowing you to increase or decrease the speed or save a specific frame as a PNG or JPEG. It offers shortcuts to navigate and access different options and usability. By default, the title bar shows the file name, but you can head to qView > Preferences > Window from the menu bar and check the Verbose option for Titlebar text to show more details.

Scroll to zoom in or out and Control-click any picture to access more options. You can rotate images, flip images, or switch to the original size and view them in detail. You can also view photos in slideshow mode by going to Tools > Start Slideshow from the menu bar. You can customize the slideshow direction, timer, and preload settings.

Download: qView (Free)

5. Picturama

picturama photo viewer app for Mac

Picturama is an Electron-based Mac app for viewing images. The app supports JPEG, PNG, TIF, WebP, HEIC, and HEIF. It also reads the RAW file format for a selection of LibRaw-supported cameras through the LibRaw libraries built into the app. It shows comprehensive EXIF, IPTC, MakerNotes, and XMP information for each image.

You can also tag, rotate, and crop photos and zoom in or out of them with the slider in the toolbar. Moreover, you can export photos in formats like JPEG, PNG, or WebP. When doing this, you can set the quality and size and remove EXIF data.

To get started, click the Settings button at the top and choose a folder. You 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 Info (i) button at the top to view the EXIF data of an image. Click the Flag button to add that image to your favorites.

Download: Picturama (Free)

6. Lyn

Lyn photo viewer with an image selected and inspector toggled in macOS

Lyn is also a decent Mac photo viewer and organizer. It supports TIFF, HEIF, TGA, WebP, GIF, and many non-standard, old, and RAW image formats. With the built-in support of camera models and multi-threading, it can progressively scale high-resolution images. In the case of images you want to enlarge, take a look at the different ways to upscale images without losing quality.

The left sidebar displays your folders (including Smart Folders), photo libraries, devices, and mounted volumes. The viewer displays the image with different view (Icon, Strip, List, Map), sort (name, date, color label, tags), and filter (name, extension, tags) options.

On the right, you'll see the Inspector panel. It displays information like type, color space, EXIF, MakerNote, IPTC, GPS, and more. This app can detect the color profile (through ICC) of the image, 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 an image and later revert it.

Browse your photos either using Strip view or by double-clicking a picture and using the left or right arrow keys. You can use different zoom methods or shortcuts to magnify the image at the cursor level. Lyn also lets you upload your photos directly to Flickr, Dropbox, and SmugMug.

Download: Lyn ($29.99, free trial available)

Preview Isn't the Only Photo Viewer for Your Mac

Although viewing images seems like a simple operation, many people have different needs from their photo viewing app. While Preview may be good enough for casual users, the apps discussed here cover various options for professionals and edge cases. So, try them out to see which one fits your needs best.