Working on a Mac is like a dance. You’re always collecting files, documents, or links. You’re saving them here, dragging them there, finding new source material from the web. And you ultimately hope to put it all together in an email attachment or a folder in a cloud drive.
As good as macOS Finder is (and you can customize it to make it better), it doesn’t really help with this dance. Here, Dropover can come to your aid and become that dance teacher you never really had.
Dropover is a shelf utility, and is a perfect companion to a research tool like GoodLinks. It acts as a bridge for your files, a safe haven between Finder and wherever you want your files or documents to ultimately end up. Perhaps it’s an Outlook email that you haven’t drafted yet, or a WeTransfer upload you’re gathering pictures for.
How Dropover works
Once installed, Dropover lives in your menu bar. But the real way to access it is by using an intuitive mouse gesture. First select some files, folders, links, or documents, then quickly shake your mouse, like you would to locate it on the screen. Instantly, a Dropover shelf will pop up. If you’re not a mouse gesture person, you can use the keyboard combination Option + Shift + Space bar to conjure up a new shelf. Option + Shift + A will bring up a new shelf with items preloaded from the clipboard.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
You can drag and drop the files here and the shelf will now stay pinned, floating on top of every other window, easily accessible. While the shelf is pinned, you can continue to browse files in Finder or photos in the Photos app, and you’ll be free to add more things to the shelf. You can also rename the shelf or change the highlight color from the context menu. Dropover also has a couple of file actions, so you can quickly resize images, convert image files, compress files, and more.
Dropover also supports Cloud sharing and it has its own Cloud sharing website as well, so you can quickly share direct download links for images or files. This is super handy, and if you don’t want to use Dropover’s servers, you are free to use iCloud, Dropbox, AWS S3, Google Drive, or OneDrive. If you’re paying for Dropover Pro, you get 10GB data for free. When uploading files, you can choose to delete them automatically in a couple of days, and you can set a password as well.
Use Instant Actions to supercharge your workflow
When you bring up a shelf, you’ll see a little lightning bolt icon in the bottom-right corner. When you drag files over it, it will bring up four actions. Here, you can quickly open the files in Email, Messages, generate a Dropover link, or my favorite, open the files in AirDrop.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If you’re paying for Dropover Pro, you can do one better and create custom actions just for you. Go to Settings > Custom Actions to create actions to move the files to a particular folder. I’ve created an action to quickly move an application to the Applications folder. As someone who loves testing and playing with small Mac utilities, this kind of action can really save me a lot of time. Perhaps you might instead create an action for adding files to an ongoing work project.
You can use Dropover for free for 14 days without any limitations. After that, you’ll be forced to wait for 3 seconds before interacting with a shelf, which is a bit annoying, to say the least. Alternately, you can pay $5.99 to upgrade to Dropover Pro, which is thankfully a one-time purchase. For a utility that is this well polished and easy-to-use, it’s not a bad price.
