The fastest image viewer for macOS. Inspired by ACDSee 2.41, which was an amazing piece of non-bloated software in the 1990s.
Open an image, see it instantly, zoom and pan, use arrow keys for next/prev. In the background, there is Rust, GPU acceleration, background preloading of images, which make it the fastest image viewer imaginable on macOS. Prvw opens camera RAW files from all major brands too, so Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, iPhone ProRAW, and the rest go straight from the SD card to the screen.
No editing tools, no fancy anims, a ~8 MB binary and your pics.
Built in Rust with winit + wgpu + muda. Native macOS menus, Metal rendering, ~19 MB binary.
Download at getprvw.com.
- Instant display: open an image, see it in about 600 ms.
- Lightning fast navigation: Use
Space/→/]for next pic,Backspace/←/[for prev pic, or mouse wheel. The previous+next two pics are preloaded in the background, so switching is instant. - Zoom and pan: pinch or scroll to zoom (depends on settings), click-drag to pan. Buttery smooth thanks to your GPU.
- Fullscreen view: Press
For⌘Fto toggle fullscreen. - True colors: The app converts the embedded ICC profiles (Adobe RGB, ProPhoto, Display P3) to your monitor's native color space. If you have a MacBook or fancy Mac or gaming monitor, you see the full color range instead of everything clamped to sRGB.
- EXIF orientation: phone photos display right-side-up automatically.
- Transparency support: checkerboard background for transparent PNGs (Photoshop-style, fixed in screen space).
- Format support: JPEG (SIMD-accelerated via
zune-jpeg), PNG, GIF (first frame only for now for anims), WebP, BMP, TIFF, plus camera RAW: DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF, RAF, RW2, PEF, and SRW.- Phase 1 caveat: Fujifilm RAF uses a bilinear X-Trans demosaic, so fine detail is a bit softer than what dedicated RAW tools produce. iPhone ProRAW DNGs render fine but may not match Apple Photos pixel-for-pixel until DNG opcode-list support lands in a later phase.
- Native macOS feel: real system menus, SF Pro overlay text, transparent titlebar, Finder double-click integration. This is actually surprisingly tricky to integrate with the GPU-accelerated main window.
- Auto-fit window: Window resizes to match each image. Zoom in/out and the window follows. Toggle in View menu.
- Display-aware color management: Mentioned above, but just to reiterate: NOT all image viewers go all the way to
- read the ICC profile from the image file
- actually check your active screen's native color space
- convert the image to that space with a pure Rust lib that does it in 40 ms on an M3 MacBook Pro
- auto-update the conversion if you move the image to a different screen
- even let you switch your rendering intent between Relative Colorimetric and Perceptual. Honestly, how cool is that?
- Keyboard support: the app is mouse-first by nature, but you can navigate and zoom go fullscreen and quit with the keyboard. No panning by kb for now.
- Auto-updater: checks for updates on startup, downloads and installs in the background. (You can turn this off in settings.)
Pure Rust: winit for windowing, wgpu for GPU rendering (Metal on macOS), muda for native menus, glyphon
for text rendering, zune-jpeg for fast JPEG decoding, rawler for camera RAW, image for other formats, objc2 for AppKit integration.
An embedded MCP/HTTP server (PRVW_QA_PORT=19447) lets AI agents and E2E tests control the viewer programmatically.
Good for testing and debugging, but if it's also handy for your agents, use it.
This is a side project, so consider these someday/maybe-s, but if you open an issue or PR, it's a good signal to me about what people would like to see.
- Live reload: watch the file; if it gets updated on disk, refresh it immediately
- Slideshow mode
- Image metadata overlay (EXIF, dimensions, file size)
- Thumbnail view of a folder
- Thumbnail strip at the bottom
- Play videos
- Play JPEG-embedded videos
- Make it cross-platform: Linux, Windows
- Add IPC daemon mode (to open even faster from Cmdr)
- Diff view in git repos
- Some very minimal editing
- Lossless 90/180 degree manual rotation
- "Save as smaller JPEG" export: Convert big pics to a sensible size for sending etc.
- Free for now: this is very beta so not charging for it yet.
- Intended price later: $29 per device, with 1 year of free updates, then $19/year for updates.
Download for free for now at getprvw.com.
Prvw is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1.
The source becomes AGPL-3.0 after three years (rolling per release). Until then, you can view, modify, and learn from the code, but not use it commercially without a license.
Contributions are welcome! Report issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.
Legal blah blah: By submitting a contribution, you agree to license your contribution under the same terms as the project (BSL 1.1, converting to AGPL-3.0) and grant the project owner the right to use your contribution under any commercial license offered for this project.
Q: Sigh. Is this some vibe-coded soulless crap?
A: No. All user-facing parts are handcrafted by a human. And about the internals, neither you, nor I should really care about besides the fact that they are taken care of. If you do care about the internals for safety concerns or whatever, the source code is right here. It's honestly a really nice app. Check it out!
With ❤️ by David