For users new to Mac and just switching over from Windows, they are not used to viewing images on macOS, missing the experience of “double click to open one image, use arrow keys on the keyboard to flip through pages continuously viewing images, scroll mouse wheel to zoom in/out of images.”
In macOS, by default the app associated with double clicking on an image to open it is Preview.app. However, Preview is not a pure image viewing app by design, and is not meant for purely viewing images. Some macOS users recommend selecting all the images you want to view before double clicking to open, which can solve this issue.
Some macOS users also recommend directly browsing photos in the folder by pressing the Space key, and then using the left and right arrow keys to view the previous or next photo. But this also has an issue where if the folder contains files that are not images, those other file types would also be cycled through when continuously flipping through photos.
Therefore, for more professional image viewers like photographers, a lightweight and clean image viewing software is needed. This article introduces using Picview to perform image viewing operations on macOS, allowing users to: “double click to open and view, use arrow keys to continuously flip through pages to view folder images, scroll to zoom photos.” It brings the familiar Windows experience to Mac computers.
Download and Install
Open the macOS App Store app, type “Picview” in the search box, click Get to download, install and then open the app.
Enable Full Disk Access
After installation, open Picview and there are two things needed before use:
Grant Picview Full Disk Access permission in the Setting/Viewer/Open section of Picview.
Set the default image viewer to Picview, refer to Set Picview as the default image viewer for instructions on how to set it.
Continuous Image Viewing
At this point, double clicking an image in the folder will open it in Picview, allowing you to continuously browse through the images in the folder with left and right arrow keys. It will only show images and no other random file formats will appear during continuous browsing. Picview also features rich mouse, keyboard and touchpad gestures, such as zooming images with mouse scroll. It is very lightweight and convenient to use. Refer to Rich Gesture Operations - Mouse, Keyboard, Trackpad Viewing for specific settings.
Others
In addition to general viewing, Picview also has the capability to filter images by format, which is very useful for photographers. For example, as camera users may know, when taking a photo with a camera, it generally produces both a JPG image and a RAW image file. With Picview, users can directly filter the RAW format photos for viewing after double clicking to open. Furthermore, Picview allows sorting images by capture time and browsing through subfolders, which is very practical.