Screen Loupe
A zoomed monitor exactly where you need it. Pin a frame over any part of the screen, keep working there with your normal mouse and keyboard, and watch that spot magnified — live, pixel-true and perfectly still — in a window next to it.
Download for macOS · Mac App Store · Guide · Support · Source on GitHub
Free. The core is open source (MIT); official builds add free closed-source features. macOS 15.2 Sequoia or later. No account, no telemetry: the app collects no data.
Who it is for
- UI designers checking how a design actually renders — 1 px misalignments, blurry half-pixel edges, antialiasing, icons, shadows, borders — while still editing in Figma, Sketch or the browser.
- Front-end and Apple-platform developers tuning layout: change the code, hot-reload, and see the result magnified next to it.
- Anyone writing a design review or a bug report who needs a crisp, zoomed picture of exactly what is on screen.
What it does
- Work in place. Clicks inside the frame go to the app underneath, so hover states stay live while the Viewer shows them big — on the same display or another one.
- Pixel-true. At 800% every screen pixel is a crisp 8×8 square, never a blur, on Retina and non-Retina displays alike.
- Nothing moves on its own. The Viewer keeps its zoom and framing while you move or resize the frame; zoom presets glide smoothly to what you were looking at.
- Copy exactly what you see: the zoomed view, a selection snapped to pixels, or the source at native resolution — and the text in it with Copy Text, as Live Text works in Preview, also from an app that doesn’t let you select it, such as the Simulator.
- Inspect: a Color Meter with HEX, CSS, SwiftUI and AppKit values, recent and favourite colours and a WCAG contrast check; a corner ruler and a selection ruler; a pixel grid; reference layers with a Difference blend to check the screen against a design export. Open, drop or paste an image file to inspect it with the same tools.
- See it as others do: simulate six kinds of colour vision — protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, two weaker forms and grayscale — live, over any app, and copy the simulated view into a bug report.
- Catch transient states: freeze the view from any app with F13, or after a countdown, while the mouse is held down; take snapshots, kept across launches, to inspect later.
- Before and after: lay a snapshot or the frozen frame over the live screen in Difference, change the code, and whatever moved glows.
- Split view: a reference beside the live image, or normal vision beside a simulated one, on either side of a line you drag — a change shown to someone who doesn’t read a Difference image, and copied with the line and its labels.
- Place the frame fast: snap it to window edges with ⌘, fit it to a window in one click, or attach it to a window with the magnet so it follows as the window moves — fitted to the window, it follows its size too, with margins to leave out the window’s toolbars.
- Screenshot studio: exact, clean pictures for the App Store, the web, docs and bug reports — pixel sizes, a timer, a backdrop seen on screen, one window alone with or without its shadow, PNG, JPEG or HEIC with no personal metadata.
Privacy
Screen Loupe needs Screen Recording access to see the screen. What it captures stays on your Mac: nothing is sent anywhere. See the privacy policy and the terms of use.