Shelf apps exist because macOS assumes you know where a file is going before you pick it up. You usually do not. Dropover is one of the best answers to that problem: shake the pointer while dragging and a small shelf appears to hold what you are carrying. Droppy grew up around the same problem, which makes this one of the closest comparisons I can write, and one where the right answer genuinely depends on you.
Two shelves, or one shelf and a Basket
Dropover has one idea and does it thoroughly: a shelf appears where you shake, you can have several, and each can be pinned, previewed and acted on. Droppy splits the job in two. The Shelf lives at the notch: drag anything to the top of the screen and it opens to take it, a fixed place you learn once. The Basket comes to you: jiggle during a drag, or have it appear the moment any drag starts, or on a key you hold, and it flies in beside the pointer.
With Multiple floating trays on, shaking while one floating file tray is open starts another, and the Tray Switcher shows every open one, so you can sort one pile into several destinations in a single pass.
Both reveal a shelf with a shake during a drag. Droppy adds instant appear on every drag, a hold-key trigger, and a fixed shelf at the notch you can drop on without shaking at all.
Dropover resizes images, extracts text, zips files and runs your own scripts, with Instant Actions that run on drop. Droppy converts, compresses, zips, makes folders, removes backgrounds, and sends to AirDrop, Mail or LocalSend from Quick Action tiles.
Dropover uploads to its own cloud, iCloud Drive, S3, Google Drive, OneDrive or Imgur, with passwords and expiry. Droppy makes a Droppy Cloud link in one drop, or uploads to Dropbox or Google Drive.
Dropover is a shelf app. Droppy is also a clipboard manager, media player, launcher, screenshot and recording tool, and 43 droplets.
Dropover is free to download with Dropover Pro at $7.99 once. Droppy is $9.99 once for two Macs with lifetime updates.
Dropover's features from dropoverapp.com and its price from the Mac App Store, checked September 27, 2026.
What happens to the files
A shelf is only as good as what you can do from it without dragging again. Droppy's answer is two layers. Quick Actions are shown in both file trays: Drop, Transform for converting and compressing, and up to two share tiles you choose, so a file can go to a cloud link, AirDrop, LocalSend, Mail or Messages, or iCloud Drive. Then there is the right-click menu on a group, which acts on all of it at once.
Conversion is local. Drop an image on the notch, choose Transform, pick a format, and a moment later the finished file is ready with a button to find it, without anything being uploaded. The same converter does video to audio, PDF pages to images and audio between formats.
Where Dropover is ahead
Dropover has spent years on the shelf alone and it shows in the edges. It uploads to more places, including S3, OneDrive and Imgur, and its links can carry a password. Its custom actions run AppleScript, Automator and shell tools, so power users can make a shelf do nearly anything. It has watched folders, shelves in the Dock, desktop widgets and recent shelves in the menu bar. And it is in the Mac App Store, which some people and some companies require.
Where Droppy is ahead
The notch shelf needs no gesture at all, which is the fastest drop there is when the pointer is already near the top. The floating file tray and the file tray share one set of actions, so a pile gathered anywhere can go anywhere. Droppy Cloud turns a group into a single share page in one drop, with no account on the other side. And the shelf is one part of a larger app: the clipboard, the music, the screenshots and the launcher are the same app you already paid for once.