Manatee is a file repair and conversion utility for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It opens damaged files and writes out everything it can still read — sometimes all of it, sometimes a partial recovery with clear reporting.
Key Features
Repair Rebuilds broken structures without touching your original file:
- Video (mp4, mov, mkv): Rebuilds the index a video needs to play
- PDF: Repairs the cross-reference table, then checks every page
- Archives (zip, docx, xlsx, epub): Rebuilds from entries still on disk
- Subtitles & Text (srt, csv, txt): Fixes encodings and cue timings
Convert Drop first, then pick the target format — once per kind. Handles mixed folders of photos, clips and documents in one go:
- Images: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF
- Video: MP4, MOV, GIF (remuxed without re-encoding when possible)
- Audio: MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC
- Documents: DOCX, RTF, plain text, subtitles to SRT
Reduce Shrinks files to fit specific limits rather than just "smaller":
- 16 MB for WhatsApp
- 20 MB for Email and Discord
- 1 GB for Slack
- Custom size support
Clean Strips metadata you never meant to send:
- Photos and RAW: EXIF, GPS, camera serial, maker notes
- Video and audio: Metadata and chapters (streams copied untouched)
- PDF: Author, title, producer, keywords
How It Works
- Drop a file or folder onto the window, the menu-bar icon, or from Finder's right-click menu
- Manatee reads what survived using the engine built for each file kind
- A new file appears beside the original — yours is never touched
Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded — all processing happens on your Mac
- No account, no analytics, no crash reporter
- Only network requests are license check and update check
Pricing
$9 one-time purchase. Lifetime license with updates included. Every Mac you own. 24-hour trial first, no card required.
