Preview is free and it comes with macOS, so it's where most Mac users crop a screenshot, shrink a photo or draw an arrow on something. It does those jobs well. The catch shows up when you sit down at a Windows PC, for work or at home, and Preview simply isn't there.
Pixpresso is a small image viewer and editor for those same everyday jobs. Open one picture and every other image in the folder lines up in a sidebar, so you can page through a folder with the arrow keys and fix what needs fixing as you go. It's free, it needs no account, and your pictures never leave your computer.
Light, quick, and on Mac and Windows
- A small download. Pixpresso for Mac is 9.2 MB. On Windows it's 5.2 MB, and 4.9 MB for Windows on ARM.
- Opens like a desktop app should. Drop a file or a whole folder on the window, or right-click an image and choose Open With. No browser tab, no upload.
- Same app on both systems. Mac, Windows and Windows on ARM, with the same toolbar and the same shortcuts, Cmd on one and Ctrl on the other.
What you can do in it
- Crop and resize. Drag a frame or type exact numbers, lock it to 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9, and see the real output size before you save.
- Rotate and flip. Turn a sideways phone photo upright and save it straight back over the file.
- Mark things up. Arrows, boxes, ellipses, free drawing, text and emoji stickers, plus your own logo as a watermark, with undo and redo.
- Copy text out of a picture. Select the words in a screenshot or photo and copy them. The text reading happens on your own computer.
- Export a copy. Save as JPEG, PNG, WebP or TIFF, with a quality slider for JPEG and PNG.
- Undo a bad save. Revert takes the file back to how it was before your first save in that session.
Who it's for
People with a Mac at home and a Windows laptop at work who want the same quick image tool on both. Windows users who used to have a Mac and miss Preview. Anyone who sends a lot of screenshots with an arrow and a circle on them, or has to shrink photos before an email or a website will take them.
When to stick with Preview
If you only use a Mac, Preview is already there and costs nothing, so there's little reason to add another app for basic crops. And keep it for PDFs: Preview fills out and signs PDF forms, combines PDFs, moves pages around and password-protects files. Pixpresso doesn't open PDFs at all. Preview can also remove the background from an image, which Pixpresso doesn't do.
What it costs
Nothing. Pixpresso is free to keep, with no membership and no account. Download it for Mac or Windows and open your own pictures in it today.
