Your Mac has several features tucked away that are designed to provide flexibility to people who want it but stay out of sight for folks who don’t. That also means there’s potential for some missed opportunities if you aren’t looking. Luckily, some of the best hidden features, like the built-in Picture-in-Picture mode in Safari, are easily accessible.
Much like other modes, PiP in Safari will let you shrink a video you’re watching down to a small floating window you can move around so you can work on other tasks while you watch. There are also multiple ways to enable the feature, which we’ll detail below for you.
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How to find Safari’s PiP button
If a video is playing in Safari, go to the address bar at the top of the window, right-click the blue audio button to the right of the website URL in the address bar and click Enter Picture in Picture. The video will then automatically move to a floating window.
You can also mute the tab and configure auto-play settings from here.
The floating window playing the video will appear above all other open applications, including Safari, and will snap into any of the four corners of your desktop. You can adjust the size by hovering the mouse over the window’s borders and corners and then clicking and dragging to make it bigger or smaller.
The window also has two buttons: One to pause/play the video and the other to snap the floating window back into the web browser. You can also just close the floating window with the X button on the top left.
The floating video window can be moved and resized across your desktop.
More ways to enable Picture in Picture on MacOS
If you don’t see the blue audio button in the address bar or have multiple videos playing in Safari, there are two other ways to use Picture in Picture.
The first is by clicking the PiP button in the video’s playback controls. Not every video player will have the PiP button, so you’re limited in use. The PiP button appears as two rectangles with an arrow pointing from one to the other, but you can also just hover your mouse over the various buttons to find the Open Picture in Picture mode option.
You’ll find Picture in Picture between the AirPlay and Full Screen buttons on YouTube.
If you don’t see a PiP button, you can right-click the video and see if you get an Enter Picture in Picture option. On YouTube, you have to right-click twice to get the correct menu, but you may only need to right-click once on other websites to find the PiP setting.
You can also use this menu to enter full screen and show the video player’s controls.
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