PhotoPop documentation

PhotoPop pops your whole Photos library open from the menu bar — every album in a fast thumbnail grid, search by what's actually in a photo, drag images in and out of any app, and rotate or edit in place. This page walks through every feature.

Installation

PhotoPop comes three ways. The download from bendansby.com/apps/photopop is a standard .dmg — open it and drag PhotoPop.app to your Applications folder. The Mac App Store version installs and updates the usual way. The Setapp version installs through the Setapp client; no separate license key, no trial.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. The direct-download build auto-updates via Sparkle; you can also check anytime via the titlebar's … menu (or the menu-bar icon's right-click menu) → Check for Updates…. The Mac App Store and Setapp builds update through their own channels. See License for the differences between the three.

Photos access

PhotoPop mirrors your Photos library through Apple's PhotoKit — it doesn't keep a separate copy of anything. On first launch (or the first time you open the panel), you'll see a Continue button; clicking it triggers the system's Photos-access prompt. PhotoPop deliberately doesn't ask automatically at launch — as a background menu-bar app it usually isn't the active app yet, and an inactive app can't present that system prompt (macOS would silently deny it), so PhotoPop waits for you to ask.

If you've previously denied access, the same screen instead offers Open System Settings, which jumps straight to Privacy & Security → Photos so you can flip it back on.

The menu-bar panel

Click the PhotoPop icon in the menu bar, or press the global shortcut (⌃⌥⌘I by default), to summon the panel. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the menu-bar icon for a quick menu of Preferences, Help, Check for Updates, License, and Quit — without opening the panel first.

PhotoPop can present itself two ways, toggled from the titlebar's window/popover button:

• Popover mode — a classic menu-bar popover anchored under the icon. Dismisses on an outside click by default (configurable — see Preferences).
• Window mode — a free-floating, resizable panel that stays put wherever you leave it, and reopens there next time.

Both presentations share the same underlying state — your current album, search text, selection, and history carry over instantly when you switch between them.

You can drag a file (or a URL, or an image) onto the menu-bar icon itself to bring the panel forward, spring-loaded style, so you can drop it straight into your library.

Albums & the grid

The sidebar lists your library: All Photos at the top, then curated smart albums — Favorites, Recently Added, Screenshots, Videos, and Animated (only shown if it isn't empty) — followed by your own albums. Clicking an album navigates the grid to it; clicking the album you're already viewing scrolls back to the top instead of doing nothing.

Photos and videos appear in a live-thumbnail grid, newest first by default. Use the back/forward arrows (⌘[ / ⌘]) to retrace your steps, and the sort button to switch between Date Created and Date Modified (Photos only sorts by date — there's no name/size/kind sort, since a photo library doesn't really have those). Hide the sidebar with the sidebar toggle (⌥⌘S) to reclaim width for the grid; a compact library-menu button takes its place so you can still jump between albums.

Marquee (rubber-band) selection, ⌘-click to toggle individual photos, and shift-click to select a range all work the way they do in Finder.

Search what's in the shot

Type into the search field and PhotoPop filters the current album live. Once its on-device content index has analyzed at least one photo, search matches against what's actually in the picture — scene and object labels (via Vision's image classifier) plus any text recognized in the photo via on-device OCR — not just a filename or date. Search for beach, receipt, or whiteboard and it finds photos containing those things.

The index builds itself quietly in the background after Photos access is granted, a little at a time so it never pegs the machine, and persists across launches so a relaunch doesn't re-scan your whole library. Newly added or edited photos get indexed automatically. Until the index has analyzed at least one photo, search falls back to matching the plain date label PhotoPop shows under each photo.

Quick Look & the inspector

Press Space on a selected photo for a full-size Quick Look preview; press it again (or select a different photo with the arrow keys) to update or dismiss it — the preview follows your selection live, just like in Finder.

Toggle the right-hand inspector from the toolbar to see a larger preview plus metadata: dimensions, the date taken, a modified date when the photo's actually been edited, duration for videos, and a heart mark for favorites. With several photos selected, the inspector shows a small fanned stack and a count instead of one item's details. For an editable image, the inspector also offers Rotate Left / Rotate Right buttons right next to its preview.

Mini mode

Shrink the panel below a certain width (drag it narrower, or resize the popover) and PhotoPop collapses to a single-column mini layout — no sidebar, no path bar, no view-mode picker, no inspector, just a compact list and a hierarchy/library menu up top. It's meant for a quick "pick a thing and move on" — hover the trailing info icon on any row for a popover with the same thumbnail and metadata the full inspector shows. Widen the panel back out and PhotoPop returns to the full layout automatically.

Dragging in & out

Drag any photo straight out of PhotoPop to Finder, Mail, Messages, a Slack message, or a document — it exports as a real file the moment you start the drag, so it's ready by the time you drop it. Apps that only understand a plain dropped file (browsers, Electron apps) and apps that expect a proper file-promise drag (Finder, Mail) both just work.

Drop images or videos onto the grid, the All Photos row, or any album in the sidebar to import them into your library — dropping onto a specific album adds them there too, not just to All Photos. PhotoPop also accepts a dropped image's raw pixel data (a picture dragged straight out of a web page), not just files.

One level of undo is available immediately after a move — a button appears in the titlebar to reverse it. It expires after a couple more times you summon PhotoPop, so it doesn't linger indefinitely.

Rotate & round-trip editing

Rotate any editable photo 90° at a time — from the right-click context menu, or the Rotate Left / Rotate Right buttons in the inspector. Rotation is a real non-destructive PhotoKit edit, reversible from Photos.app itself, not just an orientation flag.

Deleting & organizing

Select one or more photos and press ⌫ (or ⌘⌫), or choose Delete from the context menu, to remove them from your library. PhotoPop hides the panel first so PhotoKit's own confirmation dialog isn't covered, then re-shows the panel once you respond.

The context menu also offers Copy (copies the image itself to the clipboard, not a file reference) and, with several photos selected, a "New Folder with Selection" affordance for organizing filesystem locations the app can reach.

The global shortcut

PhotoPop's default hotkey is ⌃⌥⌘I — toggling the panel open or closed from anywhere on the system. Rebind it (or clear it entirely) from Preferences → Keyboard Shortcut; a small "Reset to Default" button appears whenever you've changed it from the default. The current shortcut is always visible as key-cap chips in the titlebar, so you never have to remember what you set it to.

Preferences

Open Preferences from the titlebar's … menu, the menu-bar icon's right-click menu, or ⌘,.

General

• Start at login — launches PhotoPop automatically when you log in, via the system's own login-item registration.
• Show icon in menu bar — hides the status item. With it off, the global shortcut and reopening from Finder are the only ways back in (and reopening from Finder is how you reach Preferences again if you've hidden the icon).
• Toggle PhotoPop — the global keyboard shortcut, described above.

Appearance

• Close on click outside — whether clicking anywhere outside the popover dismisses it (popover mode only; window mode is unaffected).
• Close after dragging an item out — dismisses the popover the instant a drag leaves its bounds, so it's out of your way as you drop elsewhere (popover mode only).
• Show at mouse cursor when triggered by hotkey — in window mode, whether the hotkey re-centers the panel on your cursor (on) or reopens it wherever you last left it (off). Clicking the menu-bar icon always anchors under the icon regardless of this setting.

Keyboard shortcuts

Reveal, Open, Copy, Paste, Select All, and Go to Parent are all disabled while you're typing in the search field, so the letters themselves aren't hijacked as shortcuts.

Languages

PhotoPop is localized into English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Русский, Українська, and 简体中文. It picks the right language automatically based on your System Settings → General → Language & Region preferences.

To pin PhotoPop to a specific language without changing system preferences, open System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications, click the + button, and pick PhotoPop.

License

PhotoPop ships through three channels — pick the one that fits how you like to pay for software:

• Direct download. Every feature works from the first launch — no trial clock, no locked controls. An unlicensed copy shows a brief license reminder every tenth time you open the panel — a usage count rather than a time-based grace period, since PhotoPop tends to get used in short bursts throughout the day. Buy via Buy License… in the titlebar's … menu or the menu-bar icon's right-click menu; activate via Enter License…. Activation needs the internet briefly, then works offline; PhotoPop revalidates quietly in the background so refunded or revoked keys stop working.
• Mac App Store. Paid through Apple's standard pipeline — buy it once, no separate license key, no trial, no reminders.
• Setapp. Subscribe to PhotoPop directly through Setapp — included with your subscription. No separate license key; Setapp delivers updates automatically.

Support

Questions, bug reports, or feature requests? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you'll get a reply, usually within a day or two. See the privacy policy.