A native, keyboard-first image viewer for modern Macs.
Glint is a fresh Swift reimplementation of the infamous Xee image viewer: open one image, browse its folder, and stay out of the way. It uses SwiftUI, AppKit, Image I/O, Core Animation, and Core Image. There is no web view, imported Objective-C application code, or bundled legacy decoder framework.
Status: usable 0.1 foundation. Fast folder browsing is the first priority. This is not yet a complete replacement for every Xee feature or historical format; the feature inventory tracks that work explicitly.
Requires an Apple silicon Mac, macOS 26 or later, and Xcode 26 or later (Swift 6.2+). Development builds have been verified locally with Xcode 27 / Swift 6.4 on macOS 27.
Open Glint.xcodeproj, choose Glint → My Mac, and press Run. The default signing identity is ad hoc; a developer account is not needed to build locally.
Or build the app from Terminal:
./Scripts/build.sh
open build/Build/Products/Release/Glint.appFor a quick development launch without Finder integration:
swift run Glint /path/to/imagesUse the Xcode-built .app for Finder’s Open With, Dock, document icons, and normal application behavior. Release artifacts require Developer ID signing and notarization before public distribution; the local build is not notarized.
- Open images, folders, multiple selected files, ZIP/CBZ, RAR/CBR, and 7z/CB7 archives, and clipboard images. Drop files anywhere in the window.
- Natural filename sorting, date/size/type sorting, reverse order, filename filtering, optional recursive folders, and recent locations.
- Thumbnail sidebar and contact sheet with asynchronous, cached thumbnails.
- Immediate cached previews, progressive refinement, and directional prefetch for fast keyboard browsing.
- Next/previous, first/last, jumps of 10/100, random browsing with history, and optional looping.
- Optional scroll navigation with mouse-wheel-only or mouse-and-trackpad modes. Trackpad gestures advance one image at a time without momentum skipping.
- Fit, fill, actual pixels, pinch zoom, double-click zoom, drag/scroll panning, pixel interpolation, and four canvas backgrounds.
- Full screen, distraction-free view, timed/random slideshow, and display-sleep suppression during slideshows.
- EXIF-oriented decoding, metadata inspection, animated GIF/APNG/WebP when supported by Image I/O, frame stepping, multi-page TIFF, and PDF page navigation.
- Reversible rotation, flips, crop, undo/redo adjustments, and PNG/JPEG/HEIC/TIFF export.
- Rename, copy/move to a folder, move to Trash with confirmation, reveal in Finder, open in Preview, copy image, and print.
- Live updates for the open directory and selected file.
Format support comes from the installed macOS Image I/O decoders. This normally includes JPEG, PNG, HEIF/HEIC, GIF, TIFF, WebP, BMP, icons, and supported camera RAW files. Some specialized formats or variants are not supported; errors are shown without blocking navigation to the next file.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Browse if the image fits; pan if it overflows on that axis |
| Space / Shift Space / Backspace | Next / previous / previous image |
| ⌘ → / ⌘ ← | Next / previous at any zoom |
| Shift arrows / Option arrows | Jump 10 / 100 images |
| Home / End | First / last image |
| F / 1 | Fit / actual pixels |
| ⌘ ⌥ 0 / ⌘ 0 | Xee-style fit / actual pixels |
| + / − / pinch | Zoom |
| [ / ] | Previous / next frame or page |
| ⌘ F / ⌘ G / ⌘ I | Filter / contact sheet / information |
| ⌘ R / ⌘ ⇧ R | Rotate clockwise / counterclockwise |
| ⌘ K | Start crop; drag a rectangle, then Return to apply |
| ⌘ ⌥ Z / ⌘ ⌥ ⇧ Z | Undo / redo adjustment |
| ⌘ ⇧ S | Export |
| ⌘ ⌥ R | Refresh folder |
| ⌘ ⌥ S | Toggle slideshow |
| ⌘ ⌃ F / ⌘ ⇧ D | Full screen / distraction-free view |
| Escape | Cancel crop, stop slideshow, or leave full screen |
| ⌘ / | Show the shortcut reference |
At 100%, one source pixel occupies one display pixel, including on Retina displays. Fit scales images up or down to fit the available canvas, preserving their proportions and keeping the whole image visible. To cap Fit at 100%, turn off “Enlarge small images to fit” in Settings.
Scroll navigation is off by default. Enable it in Glint → Settings… (⌘,) → Browsing → Scroll to navigate images. Scroll down for the next image and up for the previous image while the pointer is over the canvas and the image fits. Zoomed images still pan, and Option-scroll zooms. “Mouse wheel only” ignores smooth scrolling from trackpads and touch mice; choose “Mouse wheel and trackpad” to include those devices.
Browsing reads original files. Adjustments are temporary, belong to the current image, and reset when you navigate away. Export re-encodes the selected frame with adjustments; it does not perform lossless JPEG block transforms. Export omits source metadata and refuses the original path. The Copy Image and Print commands use the displayed rendition.
The app runs locally and has no analytics, network service, or automatic upload. It currently runs outside App Sandbox to support sibling browsing and file management. A sandboxed distribution will need security-scoped bookmarks and explicit folder-access handling.
ZIP uses indexed range reads with size and CRC checks. RAR (including classic and modern solid archives) uses the official UnRAR reader; 7z uses macOS’s libarchive. Archive members have a 256 MiB limit, independent of the archive’s total size. Shared extracted-image caching is bounded to 64 MiB in RAM and 1.5 GiB on temporary disk, with automatic cleanup. Cache filenames are generated by Glint; archive paths are never extracted to the filesystem. Encrypted, split, nested, and ZIP64 archives are not implemented. Synthetic 512 MiB and 1 GiB archive benchmarks are documented in performance. A first distant jump in a solid archive may require decoding preceding data; cached revisits avoid repeating it. Viewing chooses a rendition for the window, normally 2048 pixels on the long edge, increasing up to 8192 for larger windows and high zoom; larger images remain downsampled. Full-resolution export is limited to 64 megapixels. PDF export is rasterized at a 4096-pixel long edge.
swift test
swift run -c release glint-bench /path/to/images 30Generate reproducible samples for a smoke test:
swift Scripts/generate-fixtures.swift /tmp/Glint-Samples
open -a "$PWD/build/Build/Products/Release/Glint.app" /tmp/Glint-SamplesThe Xcode project is checked in. Regenerate it after adding or removing app source files:
python3 Scripts/generate-project.pyThe app and archive scheduling/cache logic are Swift. ZIP uses system zlib, 7z uses system libarchive through pinned public headers, and RAR uses a small C interface over vendored UnRAR source. There are no remote Swift package dependencies or external archive-tool requirements. See third-party notices for dependency licenses.
See architecture, performance methodology, feature parity, and contributing. GitHub Actions builds an optimized app and runs the tests on macOS 26 when the repository is uploaded.
MIT, for the new code and artwork in this repository; vendored dependencies retain their own licenses. Inspired by Xee’s folder-first workflow and the work of its original authors and maintainers. Xee source, graphics, bundled codecs, and frameworks are not redistributed here. See acknowledgments.