Hover Zoom Alternative for Chrome: Full-Size Image Preview Without the Privacy Risks

Imagus is dead. The most popular image hover extension hasn't been updated in years, and it was already showing its age - hard-coded site rules that break when CDNs change, no video support worth mentioning, and a codebase that predates Chrome's current extension format.

Hover Zoom+ is the other option people find. It works, but its history gives pause. The original Hover Zoom was caught injecting tracking code and collecting browsing data. Hover Zoom+ is a fork that claims to have removed the tracking, but it still requests broad permissions and there's no easy way to verify what it does with your browsing activity.

MediaPiper is a privacy-respecting image hover extension that discovers full-size images automatically, works on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and never collects or transmits any data.

How it works

Hover over a thumbnail and MediaPiper shows you the full-size version in a popup. Move your mouse away to dismiss. That's the basic experience.

What's happening underneath: when you hover, MediaPiper needs to figure out where the full-size version of that thumbnail lives. This is surprisingly hard. Cloudflare, Cloudinary, Shopify, Imgur, AWS - every CDN structures image URLs differently. A thumbnail might differ from the full-size image by a query parameter, a path segment, or the entire URL.

Most hover extensions solve this with hand-written rules for each website. When a site changes its CDN, the rule breaks and someone has to update it. MediaPiper takes a different approach.

It analyzes the thumbnail URL against a dictionary of known CDN patterns (19 CDN-specific, plus 5 generic patterns that work across many sites). It generates candidates for the full-size URL, probes them to verify they exist and are larger, and caches what works. The first time you hover on a new site might take a moment; after that, results are instant.

To avoid false positives, MediaPiper tests discovered patterns against multiple thumbnails from the same site. If the same URL transformation works consistently, it's confirmed as reliable. This means MediaPiper works on sites nobody has written rules for - it figures them out automatically.

How do you use MediaPiper?

Install: Get MediaPiper from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons. Safari support is coming soon.

Browse normally. Hover over image thumbnails. If a larger version exists, a popup appears. That covers 90% of usage.

Zoom and pan. Scroll wheel zooms up to 10x. Click and drag to pan. The popup follows your cursor smoothly.

Video. MediaPiper also previews videos with full controls - play/pause, scrub, volume, speed adjustment, frame-by-frame advance, and loop markers. You can screenshot any frame.

Browse images with keyboard. Press Alt+Arrow keys to cycle through images on the page without moving your mouse. Useful for galleries and image boards.

Save for later. Save images or videos to a local collection (stored in your browser, up to 5000 items). A dedicated page lets you browse and manage saved items.

What makes this different from Imagus and Hover Zoom+?

It discovers full-size images automatically. Imagus relies on per-site rules that someone has to write and maintain for each website. When a site changes its CDN, the rule breaks. MediaPiper figures out CDN patterns on its own and works on sites nobody has written rules for.

It collects nothing. No analytics, no tracking, no network requests beyond the image probes themselves. The original Hover Zoom was caught selling browsing data. Hover Zoom+ removed the tracking but still requests broad permissions. MediaPiper doesn't need to be trusted on this - it simply doesn't make external requests.

It's actively maintained. Imagus hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work with Chrome's current extension format (Manifest V3). MediaPiper supports both Chrome (MV3) and Firefox (MV2), with Safari coming soon.

Video is a first-class feature. Full playback controls, speed adjustment (0.25x to 4x), frame-by-frame advance, A-B loop markers, and screenshot capture. Imagus has minimal video support. Hover Zoom+ has basic playback.

AI image upscaling. If you're running ToolPiper (our local AI engine), MediaPiper can upscale any previewed image 2x using the PiperSR super-resolution model. The upscale runs on your Mac's Neural Engine - no cloud upload, no cost. See Image Upscale for details.

Custom rules for tricky sites

Automatic discovery works on most sites, but some have unusual URL structures that don't match common CDN patterns. For those, MediaPiper has a rule system called sieves. 12 rules are bundled for popular sites. Power users can write their own - Discovery Mode helps by generating rule code from your hover interactions.

The rule engine is declarative: rules can only transform URLs, not execute arbitrary code. This is a security design choice - even a malicious rule can't do anything beyond changing a URL.

Adjusting the experience

MediaPiper has deep settings if you want to tune things. The three most impactful:

Prefetch level. Controls how aggressively MediaPiper preloads full-size images before you hover. Higher levels mean faster popups but more bandwidth. The default (light) is a good balance. "Yolo" preloads everything visible.

Popup timing. How long you need to hover before the popup appears, and how quickly it disappears when you move away. Tighten these if you want snappier behavior; loosen them if you're accidentally triggering popups.

Minimum image size. Don't show popups for images below a certain size. Useful if you're tired of previewing tiny icons and decorative elements.

There are 70+ settings total, but most people never touch them beyond these three.

Where MediaPiper doesn't work

Some sites actively prevent image hotlinking - they serve different content depending on the referrer header or require authentication cookies. No hover extension can bypass this.

Sites that load images lazily via JavaScript (rather than standard <img> tags) may not be detected until the image actually renders in the viewport. This is a browser-level limitation.

Very aggressive CDN setups that generate unique, session-specific URLs for every request will defeat pattern discovery - there's no stable pattern to discover.

MediaPiper adds a small amount of CPU and network overhead on each page. For most sites this is negligible, but on pages with thousands of images, you may want to lower the prefetch level.

Get MediaPiper

MediaPiper is on the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons. Safari support is coming soon.

This is part of the local-first AI on macOS suite. For local image upscaling, see Image Upscale.