PhotoPop documentation

PhotoPop pops your whole Photos library open from the menu bar — every album in a fast thumbnail grid, plus any folder of your own pinned right alongside them, 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 two 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.

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 build updates through its own channel. See License for the differences between the two.

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.

Pinned folders

PhotoPop isn't limited to the Photos library — pin any folder on your Mac and it shows up in its own Folders section of the sidebar, browsed exactly like an album. Add one by dragging it onto the sidebar, by clicking the + next to the Folders heading, or from Preferences → Sidebar, which also lists every folder you've pinned so far with a one-click way to remove one. The heading only appears once you've actually pinned something.

A folder view shows only what belongs there: subfolders to navigate into, and the images and videos actually worth looking at — documents, archives, code, and other files sitting nearby are filtered out automatically.

Files in a pinned folder work like Photos-library items throughout the rest of the app: Quick Look and the inspector, rotate, and Move to Trash all just work.

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.

Searching is forgiving about how you type a term: plurals match their singular labels, so cookies finds the same shots as cookie, and multi-word terms like baked goods or birthday cake match too.

Photos stored in iCloud

Looking inside a photo means having the photo. If your Mac keeps full copies of your whole library, that's the end of it. But with Optimize Mac Storage switched on in the Photos app, macOS keeps only a small thumbnail of most pictures here and leaves the real thing in iCloud — and a thumbnail is far too small to classify or read text from. Left alone, PhotoPop would quietly index only the handful of photos whose full copies happened to be local, and search would answer from a fraction of your library.

So it asks iCloud for what it needs: a scaled-down copy of each photo it hasn't seen, never the full-size original, and often already cached on your Mac so nothing is fetched at all. This is on by default and lives in Preferences → General, under Search — the switch is Index photos stored in iCloud. Underneath it, a progress line shows how many photos have been indexed out of how many are in your library, so you can tell a half-built index from a finished one. Switch it off and PhotoPop searches only the photos already on this Mac.

A first pass over a large library takes a while — it runs gently in the background, roughly a photo a second, and picks up where it left off after a relaunch. Search keeps working throughout; it simply finds more as the index fills in.

Search by place name

Photos records where a shot was taken as raw coordinates — it doesn't store the name of anywhere. So searching Kyoto or Big Sur needs those coordinates turned into names first, and that is the one thing PhotoPop can't do on your Mac alone.

Turn it on in Preferences → General, under Search — the switch is Search photos by place name. PhotoPop then works through the photos that have coordinates, asking Apple's geocoding service for the matching place names and caching each answer locally so it never asks twice. Progress shows underneath the switch, and results start appearing in search as they arrive. Photos without location data are unaffected, and everything else about search keeps working exactly as before.

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 or pinned folder in the sidebar to import them there — dropping onto a specific album or folder 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.

The same Rotate Left / Rotate Right buttons work on an image file in a pinned folder — the file is rotated in place on disk, and the preview and metadata in the inspector update immediately. Animated GIFs and other multi-frame images are skipped, so a rotate can't silently drop every frame but the first.

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.

In a pinned folder, the same ⌫ / ⌘⌫ and the context menu's Move to Trash move the selected file(s) to the Trash instead, after a confirmation. It's recorded the same way a regular move is, so the titlebar's undo button can put an accidentally-trashed file straight back.

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).
• Search photos by place name — the opt-in geocoding pass described under Search by place name.
• Index photos stored in iCloud — lets the content index fetch scaled-down copies of photos that aren't kept in full on this Mac, described under Photos stored in iCloud. On by default.
• 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 two 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.

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.