Built a native macOS viewer for SEG-Y data - sharing in case it's useful
Hey everyone,
I wanted to share a small tool I built mostly for academic and research purposes, hoping it might be useful to some of you here.
I work primarily on my macbook and found that there really aren't many lightweight, macOS-compatible applications for quickly inspecting and visualizing seismic data. Of course, you can always fire up Python for these kinds of tasks, but I really didn't want to be writing or digging up scripts every single time I needed to quickly open a SEG-Y file, check the headers, or browse through some traces without spinning up heavy software via remote access.
So, I there is now SwiftSeis (spec-driven developed, not vibecoded... I hope 🙂). It’s a native, standalone macOS viewer written in Swift and Metal. It’s definitely not a full interpretation suite, but it's been quite handy for what I need.
What it does right now:
- Loads SEG-Y volumes: Uses memory-mapping, so it opens large files quickly without eating all your RAM.
- Header & Trace Inspection: Lets you easily inspect textual (EBCDIC/ASCII) and binary headers, plus individual trace values.
- Fast Rendering: Hardware-accelerated variable density and wiggle trace overlays.
- 2D/3D Interactive Viewer: Scrub through Inlines, Crosslines, and Z-Slices.
- Coordinate Auto-Detection: Automatically finds common byte offsets (like Petrel, etc.), with the option to override them manually.
- Image Export: Lets you export high-res screenshots of your current view.
I decided to open-source it and provide pre-built releases. If you're on a Mac and occasionally just need a quick GUI app to look inside a .sgy file, you can grab the latest app bundle here: https://github.com/olxxi/SwiftSeis/releases/
The repo is:
https://github.com/olxxi/SwiftSeis
Since this started as a personal/internal tool, it's very much a work in progress, so bugs are to be expected. If anyone ends up trying it out, I would absolutely love to hear your feedback, bug reports, or ideas for features that would make your lives easier.
Hope someone finds it helpful!