FloatPic icon

FloatPic

FloatPic is a macOS image viewer with a borderless floating window, keyboard-friendly browsing, and tools for metadata, color, OCR, and image comparison. It supports macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs and claims support for 30+ image formats.

FloatPic

Overview

FloatPic is a macOS-native image viewer designed for people who want to view and inspect images in a borderless floating window. Its interface is intentionally minimal, but it still includes practical tools for zooming, browsing, metadata inspection, color sampling, OCR, slideshow playback, and image comparison.

The app supports macOS 14.0 and later on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. It also advertises support for 30+ image formats, including common image files, PDFs, SVGs, several RAW camera formats, and formats such as AVIF and JPEG XL.

Features

Smart Zoom

The window can scale up to fullscreen and then pan the image with a minimap navigator, which helps when you need to inspect detail without losing context.

Fullscreen Mode

When an image exceeds the screen size, FloatPic can switch into fullscreen automatically and exit again when the image is reduced.

Gallery Navigation

A thumbnail strip at the bottom and a separate thumbnail grid shortcut make it easier to move through images in the same folder.

Huge Image Support

CATiledLayer tiled rendering is used for very large files, and the site says 100MB+ images can still zoom smoothly.

Inspection Tools

FloatPic includes EXIF metadata panels, a pixel-level color picker, AI palette extraction, histogram display, OCR text recognition, and three image comparison modes.

Keyboard-First Controls

Keyboard shortcuts cover core actions such as zoom, rotate, metadata, color tools, OCR, slideshow, and image comparison.

Use Cases

  • Focused image viewing

    Open a single image in a borderless window when you want it to sit alongside other apps without taking over the whole screen.

  • Detail review

    Inspect large or detailed files with zoom, fullscreen switching, and a minimap so you can work at high magnification without losing orientation.

  • Folder-based review

    Browse through a folder of related images with gallery strip navigation or arrow keys, which suits quick curation and comparison.

  • Image inspection

    Check camera metadata, sample colors, read embedded text, or compare two versions of an image when the task goes beyond simple viewing.

  • Slideshow browsing

    Play a directory as a slideshow for hands-off browsing or presentation-style review on the Mac desktop.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Native macOS app built with SwiftUI and AppKit.
  • Supports a wide range of image formats, including common raster files, PDFs, SVGs, RAW files, AVIF, and JPEG XL.
  • Includes tools beyond basic viewing, such as EXIF inspection, color picking, histogram, OCR, slideshow, and image comparison.
  • Handles large images with tiled rendering and a zoom/pan workflow designed to preserve context.
  • Multiple onboarding paths are supported, including Finder Open With, drag and drop, and folder browsing with arrow keys.

Cons

  • The pricing page shown does not document plan tiers, so purchase options are not clear from the source material.
  • The site does not describe sharing, collaboration, or export workflows, so those capabilities cannot be confirmed from the available evidence.

FAQ

What does FloatPic require to run?

FloatPic runs on macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) and later, with support for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

How do I start using FloatPic?

You can open an image from Finder with Open With, drag image files onto the FloatPic window, or browse through images in the same folder with the arrow keys.

What kind of workflow is FloatPic designed for?

FloatPic is built around viewing images in a floating, borderless window, with tools for zooming, fullscreen viewing, galleries, comparison, metadata, color inspection, OCR, and slideshow browsing.

Which file types does FloatPic support?

The site says FloatPic supports 30+ image formats, including common formats like JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, WebP, SVG, PDF, AVIF, and JPEG XL, plus several camera RAW formats.

Is FloatPic meant for team use?

The source does not describe team features, shared workspaces, or collaboration controls, so FloatPic appears positioned as a personal desktop viewer rather than a team workflow tool.

Quick Facts

Category
Desktop image viewer
Platform
macOS 14.0+ (Apple Silicon and Intel)
Primary use
Viewing and inspecting images in a floating window
Formats
30+ image formats
Site
floatpic.app
Pricing
Pricing details not specified on the source pages