Switcheroo — Drag and Drop File Converter for Mac

Switcheroo turns file conversion into a drag. Hold Shift while dragging, and a glass wheel of formats appears under the pointer; drop the files on a petal and they are converted on the Mac, beside the originals.

Press and hold on a file

Holding the pointer on a file in Finder or on the Desktop for half a second opens the wheel around the file itself, with no dragging at all. Move onto a petal and let go, or release in place and click one.

Six petals, whichever the file can become

The wheel only offers formats that make sense for what was dropped, from images and PDFs to video, audio and archives. The middle of the wheel shows the target, and a second page holds the rest.

Hold Option for eleven tools

The same wheel swaps to the tools ring, six petals to a page: crop by ratio or by hand, resize, rotate or flip, compress, strip metadata and location, trim, split, snapshot a frame, change speed, merge images into one PDF and unpack an archive. Tools that need settings open a panel with a live preview, so a crop is framed on the picture itself before anything is written.

Beside the original, never instead of it

Converted files are written next to the source with a new extension, numbered if a file of that name already exists. Nothing is replaced, moved or deleted, and each file reports its own error rather than failing silently.

Or just use the menu bar

Files dropped onto the menu bar icon open the same wheel, which needs no permissions at all.

How it works

• Press and hold on a file in Finder or on the Desktop and the wheel opens around it.
• Or hold Shift while dragging files anywhere on the Mac and the wheel appears under the pointer.
• Or drop files straight onto the menu bar icon, which needs no permission at all.
• Hold Option while the wheel is open to swap the petals for the tools: resize, compress, strip metadata, trim, merge to PDF and unpack.
• The keyboard works too: arrow keys or a scroll rotate the wheel, Return converts, Escape dismisses.
• Right-click, or tap with two fingers, to cancel at any point, before or after the wheel opens.
• The rim fills as it converts, then the middle shows a tick and the new file name, with a Reveal in Finder button. The converted file sits beside the original, which is never replaced or deleted.

Opening it the first time

Switcheroo is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a normal double-click. The Shift-drag wheel also asks once for Accessibility permission, because watching for the Shift key while dragging needs it. Each update is signed the same way, so after replacing the app macOS may stop recognising the permission.

What else can it do to a file?

Crop an image or a video to a ratio or to exact dimensions, rotate or flip it, resize by the longest edge, compress with a quality slider, strip EXIF and location, trim a clip, split a clip in two or a PDF into pages, snapshot a frame as a PNG, change playback speed, merge images into one PDF, and unpack archives. Speed keeps the audio in sync, though its pitch is not corrected, so voices shift.

What can it convert?

Images between PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and GIF, and into PDF. PDFs into images at 150 or 300 DPI, or into plain text. Video into MP4, MOV or an animated GIF. Audio into M4A, WAV, AIFF or CAF, including pulling the audio out of a video. Folders and files into ZIP, TAR or TAR.GZ, and archives back out again.

Does it upload my files?

No. Every conversion runs on the Mac through the tools built into macOS. There is no account, no server and no network access.

What about WebP and MP3?

WebP files can be read and converted to other formats, but macOS cannot write WebP, so there is no WebP export. There is no MP3 export either, because macOS has no MP3 encoder. M4A covers the same ground for audio.

Which Macs does it run on?

Any Mac with Apple silicon or Intel running macOS 13 Ventura or later.