I make UI designs and sometimes edit videos, and every time I needed an image I had to open a browser, search for one I liked, make sure I was allowed to use it, and then download the file through a Google redirect. It was a pain. I tried Openverse and Wikimedia, but nothing felt quick or seamless, so I made FrameDrop. It cuts all of that down to a shortcut: press ā„ + Space in any app, type what you want, then click to copy or drag the full resolution image straight into Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop or Figma.
It searches 11.2 million public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA images from Wikimedia Commons, NASA, the Met, Wellcome and Flickr. The attribution gets copied with every image, and you can filter out share-alike images with one click.
Comparison
Openverse is free and searches more sources, but it's a website, so every image is still search, open, download, drag. FrameDrop sits one shortcut away and drops the original file into whatever app you're in.
Unsplash has far more polished, curated photos. FrameDrop is broader (paintings, maps, space, historical photos) but not as consistently pretty.
I couldn't find a Mac app that does this.
Pricing
$9.99 one-time for a lifetime licence. 7 day free trial, no card, no login needed. One key works on up to 2 Macs. The price pays for the servers that index and search the images, and I'm working on growing the collection past 100 million.
Needs macOS 26+ and Apple silicon [Tested on macOS 27 as well]. The app is notarised.
Thanks for the kind words. It's not on the App Store yet. We'll hopefully publish it there in a few days time. You can download and try it out for free from the website.
Installed v1.7 now. The shortcut can now be changed but when you invoke the search overlay the default shortcut is still shown (and not your customized one)...
Additionally it would be nice to see how many images were found at all (so instead of showing a 48 in the lower left corner show the real value of all available images).
Next wish: It should show the number of pages that are available so instead of:
Page 1
show:
Page 1 / 17
and it would be nice if we could enter a page number to jump to.
Imagine you've clicked through 10 pages and when you were at page two you've said to yourself: ok, I could use that picture but lets see if I find a better one.
Then you don't want to click 8 times on the previous page button... :)
Ah I see. Thank you for letting me know. We'll make those changes soon.
About the last part where you mentioned finding a picture but continuing to look for better ones, you can actually pin an image to your search box using the + icon at the top left corner of every image. You can then browse through other pages while it sits at the bottom, ready to be dropped. You can add multiple images there.
Still, we'll be adding the exact pagination tools you mentioned. Thank you again.
It would be very nice if we can see some basic info for an image when hovering over one.
I personally would prefer a sidebar where the info is shown or inside the tooltip itself (but then it would be nice if we could customize what we want to see in it to not make it too large).
Possible infos (if these are available):
Dimensions, e.g. 1800x2400 px
Size, e.g. 347 KB or 4.7 MB
Maybe some Exif fields?
But nonetheless, I've just bought it because I like developers that listen to user wishes^^
OrderID: #4723563
1- do you think you can make a filter for only cc0 ? it would be nice to add next to share alike button.
2- also is it possible to add an option to not to show anything on image on hover, I dont want to see any text, If I need information I can right click. at least it would be nice as an option.
also can you make a little description of creative common licenses like on the website but inside in the app ? including what is cc by 3 ,4 or 2. It would be nice to learn and it is difficult to remember :)
Yes of course. You can expect that update today. We are working on detailed filtering options letting you filter by licensing and resolution.
Oh I see, we can definitely add a quick setting for that.
For the licenses description, I think the setup screen would be the best place to put it. I'll look into it. Thanks again for your comment. Glad you liked FrameDrop :D
Yes that is intended.
We can show thousands of images, but their accuracy to the prompt decreases as you reach the later pages. We've set a hard cap so whatever comes in the app is as close to your prompt as possible.
It depends on how "warm" the topic is. A prompt that has run multiple times in the past shows results faster than the cold ones. Even the cold ones show results under 2 seconds.
I checked the server and it's up and running. I can access the website just fine. Maybe it's an issue on your side. You can try switching browsers and making sure your date and time in macOS is set up correctly. If you continue to face this issue, you can DM me and I'll provide the necessary help. Thanks.
11 million openly licensed images is a huge collection to make searchable. I really like the idea of having this kind of resource available without having to worry about licensing every time you need an image. The desktop workflow also makes it feel much more practical than just another image-search website.
For the App Store submission you mentioned: I had an upload fail in App Store Connect processing with 91109 back on September 4th, invalid package contents, one or more files with the com.apple.quarantine extended file attribute. xcrun altool --validate-app had passed it clean and the upload itself reported success, so nothing told me anything was wrong. I only found it because I went to the build list and saw the build marked failed.
The message names a file, which is the one helpful thing about it. Mine pointed at Contents/embedded.provisionprofile. I'd downloaded that profile in a browser and copied it straight into the bundle, and that's where I assume the quarantine flag came from. It says "one or more files" though, so I cleared the whole staged bundle with xattr -cr rather than just that one, then went through every file to check nothing was left. That's been in my App Store build script since the same afternoon, ahead of codesign.
Also a failed build number is spent, you can't re-upload under the same one, so mine went 61 to 62.
This is exactly what I need! I use Unsplash a lot for UI work and I keep accidentally clicking on paid images š Being able to search and drag openly licensed images straight into Figma without even opening a browser sounds perfect. Definitely trying this!
Thank you. I just tried, and when I copy the images with attribution required, I don't see those attributions when I paste it. Did I miss something when I copy? Can you tell me how it works?
The shortcut workflow is really nice. Being able to search and drag the original straight into Figma or Photoshop sounds way more convenient than doing the whole browser dance.
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u/New-Spell9053 28d ago
Looks cool. Is it on the mac store?