⬅️ You can download the app here (see the "Assets" section of the release)
A modern, native Apple Silicon rewrite of JView, the classic simple Mac picture viewer (next / previous / random navigation), built with Swift and SwiftUI.
The original JView is a 2010-era universal binary (Intel/PowerPC) that macOS is deprecating support for. ModernJView reproduces its full feature set as a native, fast, arm64 app for Apple Silicon Macs, plus a few additions.
- Next / previous / random image navigation, with configurable custom keys
- Multi-window browsing (drag one or several images/folders onto the app)
- Zoom: fixed percentages, Resize to Fit (shrink only), Expand to Fit
- Rotate / flip
- Slideshow (Auto Browse) with configurable interval
- Delete to Trash (with confirmation) and Delete Immediately (⇧⌘D, no dialog)
- Reveal in Finder
- Copy Prompt: extracts and copies an image's embedded Draw Things / AI generation prompt (PNG/EXIF/TIFF/IPTC metadata)
- Preferences matching the original JView's options (window placement, cache size, folder scan depth, custom navigation keys, etc.)
No Xcode project is required — this is a plain Swift Package.
swift build -c release
The build output then needs to be assembled into a .app bundle (Info.plist + icon + binary) and code-signed (ad-hoc signing is enough for local/personal use).
ModernJView is a modern rebuild of the original JView, created by Allan Liu (home.nc.rr.com/jview/jbrowser.html).
If ModernJView is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee. Entirely optional, and the app stays exactly as free either way.
TBD.
ModernJView now opens the requested image immediately while scanning its folder in the background. This significantly improves startup responsiveness, especially when images are stored on external drives that need to wake from sleep.
Folder navigation and existing behavior remain unchanged.