- Pixea is a minimalistic image viewer for macOS that offers a clean UI and lets.
- For folks who love the minimalist interface and a wide variety of image format support, Pixea is a perfect photo viewer app for the macOS. Pixea offers histogram, EXIF data, photo rotation, image.
Dear Lifehacker, I was wondering if you had any recommendations for a good image viewer for Windows. I’ve been looking for something that lets me view most image types and zoom in/out as well as. Do any of the following: Zoom in or out on a photo: Drag the Zoom slider, or pinch open or closed on the trackpad. You can drag the zoomed image to reposition it. View information associated with a photo: Click the Info button in the toolbar. See Add titles, captions, and more to photos using Photos on Mac. Make a photo a favorite: Click the Favorite button in the toolbar.
One of the biggest frustrating parts of moving from Windows to Mac started with the image preview tool. Such a simple function user experience that Windows Image Previewer is doing since XP, but Apple resists to adopt it. Once you open any image in the folder, you should be able to scroll through the next and previous images using arrow keys.
So default image preview app in Mac OS X (Seira or any previous version) SUCKS BIG TIME!
It works only if you select all images, right-click and hit preview, and then use up and down keys. That’s like 3 clicks painfully long process to what you can easily do with a single click. So I was on a hunt to find an app that can build Windows like image browsing with simple arrow keys, and simple zooming features with maybe some additional features.
Also Read:Fotojet Designer Mac App Review – For Designing Social Posts/Printables
Windows Like Best Photo Preview App for Mac OS X
The app I am going to suggest if called PhotoX, and its a completely free app on Mac App Store, but few steps mentioned below will make it run as good as windows preview tool and scrolling through images will be awesome again!

Download & Install the App
Head over to the Mac OS app store, and download our Windows like image browsing tool PhotoX.
Make it Default Image Preview App
Once you install the app, you have to make it a default preview app, otherwise, you have to right-click and select open with to work it properly.
Go to any of your folder with photos.
Right-click (control-click) on any image.
Click on Get Info > Click on Open With > Select Photo X > Click on Change All.
This will give you a warning that you are changing the default app for that image format. Just confirm and you’re done.
Finishing Touch!
You’re not quite done yet. As the first image, you select, might be just a JPEG. And your new Windows-like photo viewer PhotoX only defaults for that format.
Mac Image Viewer
So just enlist the most formats you need. My requirement was just JPEGs and PNGs. So I opened another GET INFO tab, and set PhotoX as default previewer there.
You can do additional image formats, for which you need quick formatting.
So PhotoX, not only allows you to scroll images with side arrows just like in Windows, but you can zoom in and out with Up & Down Arrows, Rotate, Tilt, Flip image, all of the good stuff using this single app!
Photo Viewer App Mac
I simply loved a lot of things on Mac OS X, but this photo scrolling using arrow keys was the first thing I wanted to fix immediately. There are other free apps like Xee, or paid ones with even better options for editing like Adobe Lightroom, but for most basic functionality I thought it’s ridiculous to pay for an app, that does nothing but scrolling through images. So PhotoX is the best Image preview app for me at least.
Best Mac Picture Viewer
Please share what other problems you might have faced with image previews, or if any other app you would like to recommend, in the comments section below.
