Who never had the feeling of, when watching some tech youtuber’s video on “top 10 Mac apps you NEED in 2025”, realized they’ve been just sold the same subscription service, note-taking apps, and “productivity” apps for the past three years. Most of these recommendations feel like paid partnerships disguised as genuine discoveries, leaving you wondering if any of those creators actually use the software they’re promoting. But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s possible to stumble across something genuinely useful, buried in the usual suspects. That’s exactly when I found Clop mentioned in passing during a “Mac Apps I Can’t Live Without” sort of video.
Clop is a macOS software that automatically optimizes everything that gets copied to the clipboard and any other folder the user chooses to. Images get compressed, formats get converted — all without lifting a finger. It sounds simple, almost boring, until you realize how often you actually copy and paste (or download) images and videos throughout the day.
The expected features work exactly as advertised. Screenshots automatically lose their bloated file sizes, HEIC photos are converted to JPG, and those massive files from design tools get compressed before being attached anywhere. Clop lives quietly in the menu bar (and in my case completely hidden) using minimal resources and processing everything locally. There’s not much else to ask for.
What caught me off guard was how convenient the drop zone was. Just drag and drop. I know, simple, but with apps these days… A relief. Also, it maintains a backup folder and a clipboard history that can retroactively optimize images copied earlier on. As someone who frequently screenshots, being able to clean up a whole batch of images at once saves considerable time.
There’s also an option to delete identifiable metadata from files, while preserving file creation and modification dates. It’s a small touch, but a good one.
I’ve talked before about how I like frictionless design and, while this is purely about functionality, I firmly believe here’s where Clop justifies its price: it eliminates friction from a task that I do dozens of time daily, without realizing it. Every time I copy and imagine or AirDrop something to my Mac, Clop is working behind the scenes, constantly. The time savings compound quickly because instead of manually optimizing images through an algorithm or explaining to colleagues why your iPhone photos won’t open in their Android or Windows devices out of the box, everything just works.
If you’re worrying about loss of quality, even when Clop optimized my 720p episode from 30 Rock from 472mb to 265mb I could barely notice a difference. It’s visible, yes, and expected, too. After all, the resolution matters the most when it comes to this specific situation.
To conclude, I think that unlike the productivity theater that dominates tech YouTube, with creators showcasing elaborate setups they clearly don’t maintain, Clop solves a genuine daily annoyance with minimal fuss. It’s the kind of utility that disappears into your workflow while remaining completely functional. It’s a genuine piece of software that happens to work as advertised, from a tech YouTuber that actually panned out.
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