Clop
Shrinks whatever you just copied or recorded, in place, before you get round to sending it.
What it does
Clop watches for new images, videos and PDFs and optimises them without being asked. Copy a screenshot and the clipboard version is already smaller when you paste it; stop a screen recording and the file is re-encoded by the time you reach for it. The quality loss is minimal and the size difference is the kind that turns a rejected attachment into an accepted one.
A floating control appears per file, with hotkeys for downscaling (incremental, or straight to a fraction of the original), cropping to an aspect ratio, converting a video to GIF, changing speed, muting or stripping audio, and re-encoding to a compatible MP4. Video encoding can run on Apple Silicon’s Media Engine rather than the CPU, which is the difference between a warm laptop and a quiet one.
There is also a drop zone: drag files onto it to optimise in place, hold Command for more aggressive settings, and define preset zones that run a Shortcut on whatever is dropped — convert to WebP, downscale to 50%, watermark.
Notes
- Free to use, with a one-off Clop Pro licence for the full feature set. The source is GPL-3.0.
- It is the automatic layer over the same job ImageOptim does by hand, and it reaches video, which ImageOptim does not.
- macOS 13 or later.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| ImageOptim | Open source | Lossless image work, by hand, no video |
| HandBrake | Open source | Far more control over the encode, nothing automatic |
| gifski | Open source | Better GIFs, and only GIFs |
| ffmpeg | Open source | Everything, once you have written the command |
| Sending the original file | — | No install, and a rejected attachment |
Install
brew install --cask clop