Better Point Cloud Viewer

• Point clouds without the heavyweight software: open a scan and look around it in seconds
• It reads all the common interchange formats — .las, .laz, .e57, .ply, .pcd, .pts and .xyz.

Point clouds are the files least likely to open on a Mac and most likely to matter when they arrive. A surveyor sends an .e57. A drone flight produces a compressed .laz. A scanner writes .pcd. macOS shows a blank icon for all of them, and most desktop tools that read them are Windows-only or cost more than the laptop.

Point Cloud Viewer opens the lot: .xyz, .pts, .pcd, .las, .laz, .e57 and .ply. Clouds render as true SceneKit point geometry that you can orbit and inspect, coloured by elevation, by true RGB where the file carries it, or by return intensity. Thumbnails and Quick Look work for the whole set, so a folder of scans is finally browsable.

The hard parts were the compressed and containerised formats. LAZ required a hand-written LASzip decoder handling single and multi-chunk files. E57 meant implementing a paged CRC container, its XML section and bit-packed CompressedVector data. LAS support covers point formats 0 to 3 and the newer 1.4 formats 6 to 10. All of it written from published specifications, with no GPL code and no dependencies.

Point Cloud Pro adds classification filtering to isolate ground, buildings or vegetation, cross-sections on any axis, point-to-point 3D measurement, and export of subsets to XYZ, PLY or LAS.

Requirements

Universal binary, so it runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Intel Mac or Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)

Installation

Download the file, unzip it, and copy it into your Applications folder. Open it once and it registers the Quick Look handler itself. Instructions are included with the download.

Apps downloaded here are signed by Apple, so you shouldn't see any Gatekeeper warnings.

Licence

What you may do: install and use the software, at no cost, on any Mac you own or control, for personal or business purposes.

What you may not do: sell, rent, lease, sublicense or otherwise charge anyone for the software; redistribute, repackage, bundle or host it for download (please point people at the official download page instead); or modify, adapt, translate, reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the limited extent applicable law expressly permits.

The software is licensed, not sold. All rights not expressly granted above are reserved by the copyright holder, who may offer future or paid versions under different terms.

Privacy

100% on-device. No accounts, no tracking, never connects to the internet, collects no data whatsoever.

Feedback

Please contact me with any feedback, issues, suggestions or requests!