JustLooking Out-Previews Preview

I recently discovered JustLooking, an app that promises to be a replacement for Preview, and I was intrigued by the idea. As far as image viewers go, Preview is actually pretty good, but there are a couple of things about it that have always bugged me, so I decided to give JustLooking a try and see if it did things any better.

First of my annoyances with Preview is that it’s one of those apps that stays open when you click the close window. I tend to forget to quit applications when I’m finished, and before long I have a ton of apps still open, clogging up my RAM. JustLooking solves this annoyance for me simply by quitting when you close the window.

My second issue with Preview, and much more annoying than the first, is the way it handles image sizes. Even with the “actual size” view selected, some images actually appear smaller or larger than their pixel dimensions. This has to do with DPI, and you can change this setting within Preview, yes, but JustLooking handles everything just fine “out of the box.” Also, JustLooking will automatically resize an image within its window as you drag around and resize the window itself, which Preview will not do.

Lastly, working with the side drawer in Preview can get a bit troublesome. JustLooking uses a different system for viewing multiple images, similar to the Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows. With this feature, you have a simple forward and back button for navigating through images, and you can even start a slideshow of all the images within a particular folder on the fly. The one thing JustLooking lacks that Preview does have is the image correction feature, but if you’re doing any editing on images at all, you probably shouldn’t be doing it in Preview anyway.

Overall, JustLooking is a better image viewer than Preview, though only marginally. But nonetheless, better is better, and JustLooking has become my new default image viewer. Try it out and it just may become yours, too. JustLooking is free, available here.