Photon on a Mac has a full menu bar, covering what the app does and nothing more. There are no filters, no crop or rotate, no audio or subtitle delay, and no window scaling.
Every shortcut
⌘O | Open, with the panel filtered to what photon plays. |
⌘1 … ⌘9 | Go to a tab, in the order you have arranged them. |
⌘F | Search. |
⌘[ | Back. |
Space | Play or pause. |
⌘→ | Skip forward ten seconds. |
⌘← | Skip back ten seconds. |
⌘K | Skip the intro or the credits, where there is one. |
⇧⌘→ | Next episode. |
⇧⌘← | Previous episode. |
⌘I | Show or hide Playback Stats. |
The menus
| File | Open, Open Recent, and Show in Finder for whatever is playing. |
| Go | The tabs, in your own order, and Back. |
| View | Playback Stats, and the sidebar items macOS provides. |
| Playback | Play and pause, the ten-second jumps, Jump to Beginning, Skip, and Next and Previous Episode. All of it is disabled while nothing is playing. |
| Audio | The audio tracks in the file. |
| Subtitles | The subtitle tracks in the stream. |
Two details are worth knowing:
- Play becomes Pause while something is playing, and Skip names the marker it will skip, so the menu says what pressing it will do rather than what the feature is called.
- A disabled item does not swallow its key.
⌘←is the library’s Back again the moment the player is not in front.
Why Audio and Subtitles are separate menus
They list different things:
- Subtitles is the set of tracks in the stream that is playing, the same set the player’s own controls offer. It is in the menu bar so you can reach it from the keyboard.
- Audio is the set of tracks in the file, which is usually longer. Choosing one reopens the title at the point you had reached, because the file has to be opened again for that track to come through.
Where a title has neither, the menu holds a disabled None.
Displays
Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Displays has two switches that exist only on a Mac:
| Prevent Display Sleep | Keeps the display awake while a picture is playing. Audio with no picture lets it sleep as normal. |
| Black Out Other Displays | While a film is full screen, the displays it is not on go black. |
Neither syncs to your other devices, because both describe this machine rather than you.