The best Dropover alternatives for Mac

Dropover gives drag and drop a place to rest. Shake the pointer while you drag a file and a floating shelf appears; drop the file on it, go find where it should go, in another window, Space or app, and drag it off the shelf there. Its own site lists more ways to open a shelf: a keyboard shortcut, the menu bar icon, the notch, Dock shelves at the screen edge and folders it watches. Shelves can be named, coloured, pinned and reopened.

Shelves also do things. Built-in actions resize images, pull out text and make ZIP files; Instant Actions run as soon as you drop on them; custom actions run AppleScript, Automator or shell tools. One click uploads a shelf to Dropover Cloud, iCloud Drive, S3, Google Drive, OneDrive or Imgur and copies a link.

Dropover is free to download from the Mac App Store, the only place it's sold, with a 14-day trial of everything. After that, its FAQ says it keeps working with a 3-second wait before you can use a shelf. Dropover Pro removes the wait: $7.99 once, as an in-app purchase. It needs macOS 13 or later.

We make Koi, so read this with that in mind. Koi is first below because it's ours, but Koi is not a shelf app, and we're precise about the difference below. Every fact about another app comes from that app's own site, checked October 21, 2026.

Both start the same way, with a file you're dragging. What happens next is different, and it decides which one you want:

• Dropover: shake the pointer mid-drag. A shelf appears and holds the file for later. You let go of the mouse, move around, and drag the file out somewhere else. The file itself doesn't change.
• Koi: hold Shift mid-drag. A wheel of tools for that kind of file opens round the pointer. You drop the file on a wedge, and Koi does that thing to it now: compress, crop, convert, trim, merge, unzip. A new copy is saved beside the original.
• Dropover is for moving files. Koi is for changing them. Koi has no shelf, keeps nothing for later, and uploads nothing.

So if you drag a picture onto a shelf mostly to resize it, convert it or zip it, Koi does that in one drop. If you drag files onto a shelf to carry them between windows, Koi doesn't replace that.

With Dropover, using a shelf action:

1. Start dragging the picture and shake the pointer. A shelf appears.
2. Drop the picture on the shelf.
3. Run an action on it, like resizing, or drop it on an Instant Action you set up.
4. Drag the result off the shelf to where it goes.

With Koi:

1. Start dragging the picture from Finder, the desktop or any app, then press and hold Shift.
2. Drop it on Convert. The wheel turns into formats and stays up.
3. Click PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, AVIF, BMP or PDF. The copy is saved beside the original and shown in Finder.

The other eight picture wedges, and the wheels for videos, PDFs, documents and archives, are on the Shift wheel page. Step by step: how to use the Shift wheel.

Dropover and Koi overlap on a few everyday jobs. Here's how each one does them:

• Making a picture smaller. Dropover's built-in action resizes images on the shelf. Koi's Compress caps the size between 3840 and 800 pixels, or squeezes the file under a size you type, and shows the size before and after.
• Zipping files. Dropover makes a ZIP from a shelf. Koi packs a folder, or several files dragged together, into a ZIP, TAR or GZIP beside them, and also unpacks ZIP, TAR, GZIP, 7z and RAR archives into a folder.
• Converting. Dropover's own actions don't list format conversion, though custom scripts can do it. Koi converts pictures, videos, PDFs, Word files, slides, spreadsheets and ebooks from the wheel.
• Getting text out. Dropover pulls text out of items on a shelf. Koi's wheel doesn't; Koi's PDF wheel turns a PDF into text or Markdown, read by your Mac's text recognition when the PDF is a scan.
• Sharing. Dropover uploads a shelf and copies a link, or sends to Mail, Messages and AirDrop through the Share menu. Koi's wheel doesn't share; it saves a copy and shows it in Finder.

Anything that changes a file is one drop in Koi. Anything about holding, moving or sending files is Dropover's job.

A shelf on its own keeps files on your Mac. Dropover's uploads are the exception, and you start them: Dropover Cloud uploads need no account, and you can add a title, a password, an expiry date and a link type, or send to your own iCloud Drive, S3, Google Drive, OneDrive or Imgur instead. Uploads can be seen and deleted from the menu bar or Preferences.

Koi's wheel has no upload at all. Every picture, video, PDF, document and archive tool runs on your Mac and writes its copy beside the original, or in Downloads when that folder can't be written to. Nothing inside an archive is opened or run, and a password-locked archive is left for Archive Utility.

From each app's own site. “Not listed” means the site doesn't mention it.

• A plain shelf, paid once, or a Mac older than macOS 13? Yoink.
• A shelf plus actions like AirDrop and uploads? Dropzone.
• Files shrunk as you drop them? Clop.
• The file changed mid-drag, compressed, cropped, converted, trimmed, merged or zipped, on your Mac? Koi, and keep a shelf app too if you also park files.

The two work together: a shelf for moving, Koi's wheel for changing. For what Koi does to screenshots, see our Shottr alternatives, and for converting documents without uploading them, CloudConvert alternatives. Plans are on the pricing page.