Photos

Photos shows the images in your library and gives you a clean way to look through them.

Your library

By default Photos watches your Pictures folder, including subfolders, and lays the images out as a grid of thumbnails whose size you can change. The sidebar sorts them into Library, Favorites, Recently added, and Trash, and a search box filters by filename. New images that land in the folder show up on their own.

Viewing

Click a photo to open the viewer. Its controls are bubbles that float over the image and stay out of the way of the photo itself. Move between photos with the left and right arrow keys, and close the viewer with Escape. You can rotate left or right, zoom in, and mark a photo as a favorite with the star. The filename, date, and size sit along the bottom.

Getting photos in and out

Import copies images into your library from anywhere, and you can drag images onto the window to bring them in. A right-click gives you open, copy to clipboard, favorite, and move to Trash.

Photos opens JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, and HEIC.

Note

Photos is for viewing and organizing. The only edit it makes is rotating the view, and that rotation is not written back to the file.