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Vista - The image viewer macOS should have built.

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Preview can't browse folders. Quick Look vanishes when you click. Every alternative is Electron bloat or a full editing suite. Vista just shows the image — fast. Arrow keys, that's it. Simple on the surface, obsessively refined underneath. Every detail you'd expect from a native Mac app, and a few you wouldn't. Free.

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Hey PH 👋 I've been using Mac since OS X 10.5. I'm not a photographer, not a designer — I just look at images sometimes. That's it. But even after all these years, I've never been happy with how macOS handles this. Quick Look is fine until you click anywhere and it's gone. Preview opens files, not folders. You can't just arrow through your photos. For a while, LilyView was exactly what I needed — lightweight, fast, just viewing. But it hasn't been updated in years, and on recent macOS it's barely usable now. I miss what it was. So I tried everything else. Bridge, Apollo — they take half a minute just to launch. Some cross-platform viewers built in Rust are genuinely fast, but the UI never feels like it belongs on a Mac. Others keep adding editing tools I'll never touch — I already have Preview for that. I didn't want any of that. I just wanted to open an image, press arrow keys to see the next one, zoom in where my cursor is, and not think about the app at all. That's it. That's the whole thing. Nobody made it, so eventually I just wrote it myself. Vista can only view images. It can't edit, it can't organize, it can't do AI magic. But it opens in a second, it handles everything I throw at it, and after weeks of daily use, it still feels right. I think this is what macOS should have had all along. It's free. I'd love to hear if it fixes the same itch for you.
Chris Messina

Here's the homepage:

https://storepal.app/vista

Looks useful — is it possible to replace Preview with this for image files?

Xiao

@chrismessina Thanks, definitely. I use Vista for everyday image browsing, and only switch to Preview when I need to resize or do light edits.

Kevin

As a fellow Mac developer, this makes me really happy. Preview has been frustrating for years and Quick Look disappearing on click is one of those tiny annoyances that adds up. Love the "simple on the surface, obsessively refined underneath" approach. That's exactly the philosophy I try to follow with my own Mac apps. Quick question: does it support HEIC and RAW files natively? Those are the formats I deal with most and Preview handles them poorly.

Xiao

@lzhgus Thanks, that really means a lot!

And yes, Vista supports both HEIC and RAW. For RAW, it prioritizes the embedded preview when available, so the image stays much closer to the camera maker’s intended look. It also has full HDR support as well.

Julia Yudova

Switched from Windows to Mac just last month and was shocked there is no option to just open one picture and then use arrows to switch to the next ones in the folder. Thank you man! You are a saviour.

Julia Yudova

Hmmm, I guess there is no way to make it a default image viewer

Xiao

@julia_yudova Actually it is possible. If you check the settings page of Vista, there is a detailed guide on how to set it as the default image viewer.