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Tableau is a lightweight, open-source macOS utility designed to place photos on your desktop without destroying their framing. While Apple's native widgets force your photos into rigid squares or rectangles that crop out your subjects, Tableau preserves the exact aspect ratio of your image. A tall portrait or an ultra-wide panorama will scale perfectly without losing a single pixel.
Tableau frees you from Apple's invisible grid, letting you place photos anywhere on your screen. You can point it to a folder to cycle through images with GPU-accelerated fades, and it will independently remember the exact size and position for every individual photo.
For power users, Tableau offers a unique Click-Through mode. You can pin a photo above your active windows and lock it so your mouse clicks pass right through it. If you need to move it, simply holding the Option key makes it interactive again. Built with an ultra-efficient SwiftUI engine, it consumes almost zero idle CPU.
Features
- True Aspect Ratio: Dynamically calculates window dimensions to match your image exactly with zero cropping.
- Unrestricted Placement: Drag and drop photos anywhere on your screen without snapping to an invisible grid.
- Independent Persistence: The app remembers the exact position, size, and lock state of every individual photo across relaunches.
- Native App Integrations: Pick images directly from your native Apple Photos.app library.
- Smart Canvas (Folder Mode): Point a widget at any folder to automatically load and cycle through images.
- Custom Rotation Intervals: Rotate photos on double-click, every 30 seconds, 5 minutes, hourly, daily, or set an exact custom interval down to the second.
- GPU-Accelerated Fades: Hardware-accelerated Core Animation crossfades between images.
- Cyclic Spatial Memory: Remembers the unique size and coordinate position of every single image inside a rotating folder.
- Floating Mode: Pin any photo so it floats persistently above all your other active windows.
- Linked Click-Through: Lock a photo so mouse clicks pass right through it, ensuring it never steals your focus.
- Global Modifier Override: Hold the Option (⌥) key globally at any time to temporarily move or interact with a click-through photo.
- True Mission Control Integration: Photos are uncoupled from the rigid wallpaper layer, meaning they smoothly fly away during Mission Control and App Exposé.
- Custom Corner Radii: Smoothly adjust photo corners from 0px (sharp square) to 50px (pill shape).
- Drop Shadows: Toggle native macOS window shadows with controls for blur radius and opacity.
- Adjustable Borders: Add custom-colored borders with adjustable thickness.
- Edge Fade (Vignette): Apply a subtle fade-to-transparent effect at the photo edges so they blend into your wallpaper.
- Multi-Select Support: Import up to 20 images at once via the file picker.
- Ultra Lightweight: Consumes ~20MB RAM and uses 0% CPU when idle.
Project Samples
