qView For Mac

As a Mac user, your default options for viewing images are Preview and Quick Look. Both are minimalistic and relatively quick, but they are very limited in their own ways.

qView can serve as an alternative for users who need a fast, simple image viewer, with all the features you might need when navigating through an album. It’s a very simple app at first glance, but it comes with a lot of image manipulation tools and supports extensive customization.

qView was built with efficiency in mind, which translates into an app that launches very quickly and lets you switch between photos with minimal delay. It’s excellent for navigating through a large album when you’re looking for something specific.

As far as controls go, it couldn’t be easier. Once you’ve opened an image, use the left and right arrow keys to navigate through the folder, and the mouse wheel to zoom in or out. There’s a lot more you can do, but the basic functionality is that simple.

With only a small title bar on display, it may appear that qView can’t really do much. However, there’s a lot more to it. A few additional tools are accessible via the context menu, but most can be used with customizable hotkeys.

For instance, you can use the up and down keys to rotate, PgUp and PgDn to go to the first or last file, F and ⌘F to mirror and rotate, ⌘↩ to rename a file, and quite a lot more. All these hotkeys can be changed from the app’s preferences.

Aside from the hotkeys, many aspects of the app’s functionality and appearance can be tweaked from the settings, such as window resizing behavior, zoom amount, titlebar text detail, preloading, and so on.

If you use other platforms as well, you’ll be happy to learn that the app is also available on Windows and Linux, with identical functionality.

qView is an amazing image viewer. It’s as fast as Quick Look, with a lot more features, and it’s suitable for navigation, unlike Preview. It’s an excellent replacement for both, open-source, and available for free.