Contact Sheet - A photo manager for your Mac.
Problem I built Contact Sheet because Finder, Quick Look, and full photo libraries can all feel surprisingly clunky when all you want to do is review a folder of images quickly. Sometimes I do not want to import files, create albums, wait for indexing, sync to a cloud service, or maintain a giant catalog. I just want to: open a local folder visually scan everything inside it find the right image move on So I made a tool focused entirely on that workflow. Contact Sheet is a lightweight macOS image browser built for fast, local-first image review. Point it at a folder and instantly get a clean contact sheet with searchable thumbnails, folder navigation, fullscreen previews, metadata inspection, and quick keyboard-driven browsing. No friction. No library management. No “project setup” moment. Just folders and images. Features Recursive folder scanning Fast thumbnail grid built for large folders Persistent folder sidebar and filtering Search and sorting Original-image lightbox viewer Keyboard shortcuts and navigation File and camera metadata when available Reveal files in Finder Open images in external editors Optional RAW file support groups Move unwanted photos directly to Trash Everything stays local on your Mac. No cloud account. No uploads. No catalog. No lock-in. Comparison Compared with Finder + Quick Look, Contact Sheet gives you a much denser and faster image-review workflow. You get thumbnails, folder filtering, search, sorting, fullscreen previews, and keyboard navigation all in one place. Compared with Photos, Lightroom, or Capture One, Contact Sheet is intentionally tiny in scope. Those apps are fantastic for editing, presets, albums, syncing, and long-term asset management. Contact Sheet is for the in-between task: your files already exist on disk, and you just want to fly through them without turning the folder into a managed library. Pricing Contact Sheet is normally $8.99 as a lifetime purchase. For the r/macapps community, you can use code MACAPPS50 for 50% off. If you regularly work with screenshots, exports, design assets, photography folders, or large collections of local images, Contact Sheet is built to make that workflow dramatically faster. If you're interested, you can purchase Contact Sheet at: contact-sheet.vecho.me Links 🚀 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vecho/ 🧑💻 Portfolio: https://vecho.me ⚙️ GitHub Profile: https://github.com/StefanoVe EDIT: I've added a demo download on the bottom of the gumroad page to try out the app, everything's unlocked but it only displays up to 50 images
Collected discussion
Would you say Contact Sheet is better than FlowVision (free)?
Honestly I think they target slightly different workflows. FlowVision feels more like a general media/workspace app, while Contact Sheet is really just built around “open a folder and fly through images as fast as possible”. Also purely personal opinion, but I feel like FlowVision lacks a bit UI-wise. I wanted something that felt cleaner, denser, and more focused for quickly reviewing big image folders.
So it's more comparable to Adobe Bridge?
how does this compare to FlowVision and Phiewer? both do the “point at a folder, scan fast” thing and Phiewer’s been my go-to for a while
I already replied to another comment about FlowVision, but short version: Contact Sheet is way more focused on the “open a folder and review images fast” workflow, while FlowVision feels broader and more workspace-oriented. As for Phiviewer, honestly it’s a really good app. Probably more feature-complete than Contact Sheet right now so I wouldn't say Contact Sheet is objectively “better” than PhiViewer overall. I just personally wanted something simpler and more opinionated around the actual contact-sheet style workflow, instead of an all-in-one media editor.
I gave the demo version a try, and have a few quick comments. Image dimensions are important to me, as I often have multiple versions of the same image and am looking for a certain size, yet dimensions are missing from the "file information" section. Also, I'd like to be able to access the file information from the thumbnails, rather than the extra step of opening the image large size. I can't tell from the demo version as it will only show one folder with up to 50 images, but is it possible to navigate folders in the sidebar, or do I have to press Cmd-O every time I want to go to a new folder? Lastly, it looks like the app can't deal with HEIC images, as I pointed it at a couple of folders with HEIC files and got the message that "no files matching the selected file types were found."
I’ll look into it, thanks! (Yeah, you can navigate the folders in the sidebar without having to change the target folder every time)
Purchased. Great app!
Thank you! 🫶
Looks interesting. Question - is it using Apple's engine for decoding RAWs? In other words: does displaying RAWs in this app match current macOS in speed, quality, and camera support? And does it inherit new functionality automatically when the OS is updated?
Hey! As of 1.1.0, RAW display uses a simpler preview pipeline, so support depends partly on macOS and partly on embedded RAW previews. I’m currently in the process of writing an update to use macOS’s RAW/Quick Look preview engine more explicitly, because a few specific formats had rendering issues. That update should ship in the next few days.
Thank you for the detailed information, that explains everything. Going more native with macOS's engine sounds like the right direction long-termly. Looking forward to the update!
The use case is genuinely underserved on macOS. Finder plus Quick Look gets painful past a few hundred images because you cannot stay keyboard-driven through a large set. Photos and Lightroom are library management tools - great for what they do but total overkill when you just need a fast cull on a folder of exports. The local-first approach is the right call for client assets or anything under NDA where cloud sync is either prohibited or just extra friction you do not need. The RAW file grouping is also a thoughtful detail - that is exactly the annoyance for photographers who shoot RAW and JPEG simultaneously and do not want to see both versions for every shot.
Is there any option find a phone by location?
English is not my native language, so apologies if I don’t understand it well. Is this a sort of alternative for the default image viewer of macOS?
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Jesus mooch! It’s $9, and he’s offering a 50% off code. That makes it $4.50!
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A Mac App Store release is definitely planned! I just wanted to ship an early version first, before going through the whole notarization and App Store process, to validate whether people are actually interested in the app
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Yep! you can find the download link on the website
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There’s not really much in terms of privacy settings because the app is fully local. It doesn’t use accounts, cloud sync, or uploads. It just reads the folders you choose to open on your Mac.