Eight media chores I moved into the Mac right-click menu — free
Count what it actually costs to do a tiny media job on a Mac. Shrink a photo for a website: open an editor, wait for it to load, export dialog, quality slider, where-do-I-save. Cut a subject out of one picture: open a giant creative suite, or upload your client's photo to some ad-covered website and hope. Make a folder of thumbnails: contemplate writing a shell script, again. None of these jobs deserve an app. They deserve a verb.
The right-click menu is the app
Disko-Tools installs eight of those verbs straight into Finder's right-click menu, under Quick Actions. Select a file — or five hundred files, or a whole folder — right-click, pick the job, done. Results are always saved next to your originals with a clear suffix, and the originals are never touched. There's no window to keep open, no accounts, and nothing ever leaves your Mac.
- Optimize for Web — any image becomes a tight, web-ready JPG; PNGs stay PNG with transparency intact
- Upscale 2x — Real-ESRGAN AI upscaling, running on your own GPU
- Cut Out Subject — neural background removal to a transparent PNG
- Green Screen BG — the same cut-out dropped onto chroma green, ready to key in AE
- Scrape Images — every image in a folder (WebP, AVIF, HEIC, PSD, even RAW) → flat JPGs in _thumbs
- Video Thumbnails — a middle-of-the-video still for every clip in a folder → _videothumbs
- Convert to MP4 — any video becomes a web-optimized H.264 at the same resolution
- Convert to GIF — a filmstrip pops up, you drag the in/out points, out comes a lean GIF
The one I use fifty times a week
Optimize for Web is the TinyJPG ritual without the browser tab. It decodes basically anything macOS can read — HEIC off an iPhone, WebP some site handed you, a 60-megapixel TIFF — caps it at 4K, converts to clean sRGB, and runs it through mozjpeg-grade compression into a progressive JPG. Hand it a PNG and it does the TinyPNG trick instead: lossy palette compression that keeps transparency. It also strips metadata on the way out, so the GPS coordinates of your house don't ship with your portfolio.
AI without the upload
Cut Out Subject uses Apple's on-device neural segmentation — the same machinery behind lifting a subject out of a photo in Preview — and writes a transparent PNG. Green Screen BG does the identical cut-out but composites it onto broadcast chroma green (the proper #00B140, not neon), so it drops into After Effects and keys with default Keylight settings. Upscale 2x runs Real-ESRGAN on your GPU; it fetches its engine once (about 50 MB, integrity-checked) and after that it's fully offline. Your client's unreleased campaign art never visits anyone's server.
Folder chores, batched
Scrape Images walks an entire folder tree and turns every image — whatever the format — into flat JPGs in a _thumbs folder, capped at 1920px. Video Thumbnails does the same for footage: it probes every clip, grabs a frame from the middle (not the black frame at zero), and files them in _videothumbs. Run either again later and it only processes what changed. It's the contact-sheet chore, deleted.
Video, made web-shaped
Convert to MP4 takes anything FFmpeg can decode and produces a web-optimized H.264 at the source resolution — faststart so it streams instantly, HDR footage properly tonemapped instead of washed-out grey. Convert to GIF is the fun one: right-click a video and a filmstrip window appears; drag two handles to pick the range, choose FPS and width, and it exports a palette-optimized GIF that won't get you side-eyed in Slack.
Free, signed, and honest about it
One installer, signed and notarised by Apple, for Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It shows you a real license, ships the open-source credits it owes (FFmpeg and friends do the heavy lifting — they're aggregated as separate helpers, with sources on offer), includes a proper uninstaller, and asks for nothing — no email required to run it, no account, no telemetry. The optional Wicked Sorted Mate component — our free FileBot replacement for Plex, Emby and Jellyfin renaming — rides along in the same installer as a tick-box.
Small jobs deserve verbs, not apps. Now the right-click menu does the work.