Photo Viewer

A lightweight macOS photo/screenshot triage tool - keyboard-first navigation and markup, built because the native viewer was costing me time.

Why I built it

I caught myself spending way too much time opening and closing images while working through folders of screenshots - the native Mac viewer made every pass slower than it needed to be. So I built a lightweight tool that lets me navigate and mark up photos fast. Noticed a workflow tax, removed it the same day (built quickly with the help of AI pair-programming tools - I'm in sales, not engineering).

What it does

• Fast keyboard navigation - arrow keys step through a folder; Left/Right by date, Up/Down by filename. No open/close cycle per image.
• Crop (C) - drag a selection, hit Enter.
• Red-box markup (R) - draw, move, resize, and delete callout boxes; they bake into the image on save.
• Background removal (B) - optional, via rembg.
• Multi-format save - JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP, GIF; opens HEIC/HEIF and SVG too.
• Zoom and pan - scroll to zoom (trackpad or mouse wheel), drag to pan.
• Folder scans and image decoding run on worker threads, so a slow disk or NAS never freezes the UI.

Setup

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
./launch.sh [photo-or-folder]

Requires Python 3.10+ with Tk. SVG display additionally needs rsvg-convert (brew install librsvg).

Known limitation

No trackpad pinch-zoom - Tk can't see macOS pinch gestures, so zooming is scroll-based instead. An honest trade-off for keeping the whole thing a single ~1200-line Python file.