What I want to be able to do is open any folder and double click the image and navigate to the next image with arrows. Without having to view that folder through a separate gallery program.
But instead what happens is I double click and arrows do nothing and stays on the opened Pic. So what I have to do instead is select the Pic and press space. Then I can navigate from left to right. But, then it doesn’t automatically move to the next row, so I have to press down to go down to the next row then move from right to left then down then left to right. Or change from my preferred grid view to list view so I can just rely on a single key press or change to multicolumn view which I’m not a fan of . Having to do those extra steps feels so clunky.
Is there a way to change the behavior of the default preview so double clicking to open a picture in a folder leads to being able to just use arrows to move to the next image in the folder? I’ll even accept hitting space and the image preview automatically moving to the next row. Or another program to replace it that is a better image preview?
If I have understood your question correctly: First, in the Finder, if you view by list instead of icon, you can then use the up/down arrow keys in the Quick Look to navigate backwards/forwards through the images. Second, you can also use the Preview or Gallery mode (I forget what it is exactly called) in the Finder on image directories to quickly create fast scrolling gallery views of image directories.
Pixea ended up being the solution. Let’s me not have to do any of those additional steps. Simple open and navigate to next image with arrows.