Mantel hangs your favourite photos right on the Mac desktop: a print in a white mat, an instant snap with a handwritten caption, a strip of film. Every photo keeps its real shape — portraits stay tall, panoramas stay wide.
Free · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon & Intel · How to open it the first time
Pick a frame per piece and add a slight tilt if you like things a little less tidy.
A thin white mat with a soft shadow and an optional printed label.
A deep bottom border with your caption in a handwriting-style font.
Dark film with sprocket holes that let the desktop show through. Across or down.
Just the photo with rounded corners — quiet and modern.
A print held up by two strips of masking tape.
Mantel works out every collage from the photos’ own proportions, so nothing is squashed into squares.
Drop files or whole folders onto the Mantel window, or pick albums from Apple Photos. Mantel keeps its own copy, so pieces survive tidying up.
One photo or a collage. Choose a layout, a frame, a size, a tilt and captions for each photo or the whole piece.
It appears on your desktop. Drag it where you like, lock it, or hide everything at once from the menu bar.
Only if you want to import from Apple Photos. macOS asks once, and Mantel copies just the photos you pick. Adding image files or folders needs no permission.
Nothing — your pieces keep working. Mantel stores its own copy of every photo you add (resized to a sensible size) in its Application Support folder.
No. They sit at desktop level, below your app windows and just above desktop icons. Lock a piece and clicks go right through it.
Yes. Turn on “Start Mantel when you log in” in Settings and your pieces come back where you left them, on each display.
Mantel is distributed directly from this website. Here’s how to open it the first time.
