Clop is a macOS menubar utility from Low Tech Guys that silently compresses images, videos, PDFs, and clipboard contents the moment they land on your machine — no open dialogs, no drag-and-drop ritual, no interruption to your actual work.
What is Clop?
Clop is an automatic file optimizer that intercepts media at the clipboard and filesystem level, shrinking it before you ever paste or share. It sits permanently in your menu bar as a small status icon, briefly flashing a floating thumbnail each time it acts — showing original size versus compressed size so you always know exactly what was saved and by how much.
Format coverage is impressively wide for a tool that does its work invisibly: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, MP4, MOV, and PDF all pass through the pipeline. The default mode targets perceptually lossless compression, meaning outputs typically look identical to their originals at significantly reduced weight. A quality slider lets you push harder when you need it, and a one-click undo restores the original file if any result looks off. That undo button is the reason I trust Clop to run on aggressive settings — knowing the escape hatch is always one tap away removes all the anxiety from letting a compressor work unsupervised.
What does Clop do best?
Clipboard interception is Clop's signature capability, and it's what separates it from every other optimizer on the Mac. Tools like ImageOptim, Squash, and Compressor.io all require you to bring the file to them. Clop inverts that relationship: it watches the clipboard and works before you've even switched apps.
In practice this means: copy a retina screenshot, and before your finger leaves the trackpad, the clipboard already holds the compressed version. I felt this most acutely when attaching screenshots to GitHub issues. Files that would previously land at 2–4 MB were consistently arriving at 300–700 KB with no visible degradation. Over a normal working week, Clop trimmed gigabytes I never once thought about. The floating optimizer panel handles intentional batch work just as neatly — drag a folder of product images onto it, read the before/after summary, and keep moving.
Is Clop free?
Yes — a free tier covers core clipboard monitoring and single-file optimization, which is genuinely enough for most daily workflows. A paid upgrade unlocks batch processing, additional video compression options, and advanced controls that power users and content teams will appreciate. The free version is a real working tool rather than a stripped demo, so you can evaluate it honestly over days of real work before deciding whether the pro tier makes sense.
Who should use Clop?
Anyone who regularly moves images or video through a Mac will benefit immediately: designers pasting mockups into Slack, developers attaching screenshots to pull requests and issue trackers, content creators batch-compressing before a web deploy, writers embedding images into Notion or Confluence. The app adds the most value in clipboard-heavy workflows where the alternative is manually pre-processing every file before it goes anywhere useful.
What Clop is not is a professional transcoding suite. If you need codec-level control over video bitrate, multi-pass encoding, or frame-accurate edits, HandBrake remains the right answer. Clop is the 95% solution — invisible and fast enough that it handles the everyday compression load without any deliberate thought on your part.
What are the best Clop alternatives?
For lossless image compression delivered through a clean drag-and-drop window, ImageOptim is the benchmark — free, battle-tested, and particularly effective on PNGs with embedded metadata. Squash from Realmac Software covers more formats and ships a friendlier interface at a higher price point. For video, HandBrake offers granular codec control that no menubar app can match. What none of these alternatives do is watch your clipboard automatically — and that gap is exactly where Clop earns its place in the menu bar, day after day.
