For me these have entered into my must haves
- BetterDisplay: For better scaling support for external monitors
- Rectangle: To be able to use a mouse to drag and snap windows
- Pixea: To be able to double click an image with a mouse in any folder and then use arrow keys or scroll wheel to proceed to the next file in the folder. Replaced the stock preview with this.
Something I’m looking for now is the ability to use the forward and back buttons on my mouse when I’m in Finder and want to go back to the previous folder I was in. Doesn’t work in Safari either. Works in good old dependable Firefox though.
And separate volume controls for each applications.
I’m not sure I understand the point of Pixea when macOS has QuickLook. Select an image/file, press the space bar, and you get a preview. Use the arrow keys to move around. You can also highlight a bunch of images to pull them all up and navigate through them or have a basic slideshow.
With pixea I can just double click to open an image no matter the folder view it is set to and use arrow keys or scroll wheel to look through the images in the folder.
Meanwhile in Quick view I have to reach for the space bar. Mind you I’m using a macmini so my hands are more likely to not be near the space bar as it would be using a TouchPad on a laptop.
And then my preferred view is grid, but then the arrow key navigation stops at the row it started on instead of automatically proceeding to the next row. So I have to click down then have to use the opposite keys to look at the previews then down again and go the opposite direction. And scroll wheel navigation doesn’t work either. So then if I want to use one key I have to go through the process of changing to list or column view so I can just click down to view the next. But, why would I have to do that? It just seems like too many unnecessary steps.
No need to highlight anything with Pixea. Or switch to space or whatever. Simply open the image and just look through the media in the folder with no extra steps, which more fits into my idea of simplicity that I expect from MacOS than the default behavior that doesn’t feel mouse friendly either.
Makes sense. Glad you found a solution that works for you. I always just deal with the round about arrows based on my views (but am typically a column view person).
I briefly used Windows for a while not long ago and installed InfraView(? Something like that), which did something similar to what you’re saying. I did kind of like it, but it was ugly. Lol
Yeah, basically the default windows or Linux pic behavior. When I saw you had to do these additional steps of space bar and selecting images in grid view I was like no… I could have lived with clicking space bar, but having to do the additional step of selecting images or do a folder view adjustment was just too clunky for me haha. It felt like someone trying to explain how downloading a PC game then going through setting options isn’t that hard a opposed just downloading and playing a game on a console. My thought why does a simple image preview even need those steps.
When QuickLook came out it was awesome, and I still use it a lot for previewing single things. Space to open, but also space to close, makes it easier for me than double-click to open, then hitting the tiny button to close. That being said, Apple hasn’t really done anything to it in a decade.
Yeah, it seems like it has less development that even the photo viewing behavior in iOS. Like you can just navigate through the files app and open a Pic and just keep swiping right instead of running into this random limitation.
To be fair, photo viewing on iOS is in the Photos app. If you view picture in Photos on macOS you can also swipe forever. Photos is specially for that while QuickLook is for general purpose file previews. I think it’s purpose was to quickly check to make sure you have the right thing before opening the file in a full app, the photo browsing ability is just kind of an incidental value add.
Still seemed odd to me why a preview doesn’t have such a basic continuous function, since other native options for other OSS aren’t full blown editors either. I think this picture function has been around in other OS for over a decade now?
Especially with more people who use phones or tablets than desktop OS it seems like coming into MacOS and opening a file to look at a larger preview and being able to continuously look with no additional steps would be the behavior they’d expect.
This is the one thing that has confused me more than the default windows snap behavior or the scaling options for external monitors, since it is so basic I never expected to not be a thing in any OS released these days.
There are certain cases where Apple really leans hard on their apps. Photos is one of those areas. There are areas where they just assume your pictures are in Photos and don’t think why you’d have them elsewhere. I think what your running into is one of those cases. They’re in meetings like, “you might have one picture you’d want to QuickLook, but obviously anyone who really wants to look at a collection of pictures will put them in Photos!”
Another I ran into today is setting a profile pic on a local account. I had to put the Picture into Photos to make if available to the profile picture dialog, I couldn’t simply grab a picture from Finder.
There are certain things like that which require some getting used to on macOS. The ones who fight the hardest end up the most frustrated, so I kind of go with the flow.