Best Photo Editor App For Mac

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Apple Photos, a free program built into the macOS and iOS systems, is our choice for the Best Free Photo Editor for Mac users, because it lives up to the company’s philosophy of fun technology that's simple to use. Compared to Corel PaintShop Pro and Adobe Photoshop Elements, Apple’s application is simpler and less powerful, but it fits the Apple lifestyle. As such, it's a playful app for saving, organizing and sharing your photos, and it offers a nice set of editing tools and easy access to your entire photo library on your various Apple devices through iCloud.

A No-Nonsense Interface

Apple Photos' interface is clean, simple and direct, so that your creativity is enabled by easy, uncomplicated shortcuts rather than the deep layers of functionality found in more feature-rich programs (such as Affinity Photo or Photoshop Elements).

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Best 20 Photo Editing Apps for Mac, Best Photo Editing Apps for Mac, Photo Editing Apps By Mac, Photo Editing Apps for Mac, Top 20 Photo Editing Apps for Mac, Top Photo Editing Apps for Mac All of us want to capture those precious moments so that we can relive them at a later point in life.

The iOS version has four main tabs: Photos, Shared, Albums and Memories. The desktop version adds a fifth section: Projects.

Pixlr Editor was once available as a downloadable desktop app for Windows and Mac, but earlier this year its developer announced that the free photo editor would be going online-only. Install Movavi Photo Editor on any Apple personal computer compatible with Mac OS versions 10.7–10.13, for example, OS X Lion, OS X Yosemite, OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra. The app is so easy to learn that you don’t even have to know the basics about how to edit photos on Mac. You can get to work on your MacBook Pro or Mac mini right away.

Photos and videos are organized by years, collections or Moments (individual days), and can come from a variety of sources: your phone or camera, your iCloud account, other people’s iCloud accounts (shared with you) or your computer (synced via iTunes). Because iCloud works with Windows, Apple Photos can even access photos and videos stored on a PC.

In Memories, the app uses various algorithms to create 'surprise' collections or movies of images that are related by date, place, people and so forth. Periodically, the auto-created Memories offer a pleasant visual recollection; other times, they combine a hodgepodge of images that are not very meaningful.

In the desktop app's Projects section, you can create photo books, greeting cards, calendars and prints. The options for these projects are very limited compared with those offered by other photo print services. (To find out what we liked and disliked about Apple’s print services, check out our reviews of Apple Calendars, Apple Photo Books and Apple Photo Cards).

Photo Apps For Mac

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Organizing and Finding Your Photos and Videos

Apple Photos gives you some control over organizing your photos, videos and albums. Specifically, you can create, name, rearrange and delete albums; add or remove individual photos or groups of photos and videos to or from an album; mark favorites; and hide photos or videos. On the desktop version (but not the mobile version), you can also add a description and keywords, which then can be used as search criteria on all devices.

The search engine is nice, but it doesn't extend to full object recognition. For instance, when I searched for 'dog,' it found most, but not all, of my dog pictures. When I searched for 'tree,' it found none of my tree pictures.

As on Google Photos, Apple Photos has a map view that shows where your images were captured (if you had geolocation features enabled when you took them). A very nice extra feature of Apple's geolocation is that when looking at the map detail for a specific photo or video, you can click to view nearby images, too.

Apple Photos did a pretty good job of recognizing faces, but it was no better or worse than every other app we've tested. More useful is its People album and functionality, which make it easy to find, identify and group specific individuals in all of the pictures of people in your library.

Memories

The most significant recent addition to the app is the new Memories section. Apple Photos scans through your library of photos and videos to create a collage card or slideshow movie of images that the app thinks are related (based on location, event, scene categories or people). These Memories pop up almost as surprise gifts, and after Photos is installed, it can take days for any to be displayed (even if your iCloud library is already quite extensive). If you like what you see, you can save the Memory to your Favorite Memories album and share it. You can also create your own memories from an Album or Collection.

A handful of Memory options let you choose a different 'mood' from 11 styles that define the title font, soundtrack and transitions. If you save the Memory, you have access to more meaningful custom options: change the title, choose a font style, select different music, set its duration, and add or delete images.

Best Photo Editing Software For Mac 2017

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Photo & Video Editing

Apple Photos' editing tools don't require much skill or time, but they are deeper and richer than what Google Photos offers.

In addition to tools for auto-enhance, red-eye removal and crop/rotate, the Apple Photos mobile app has thumbnail sliders to easily alter multiple aspects of a picture. For instance, under Adjust, you can simply slide an indicator over a thumbnail variation to alter the lightness or color intensity of a picture. The one-click filters are coarse, but they can create some nice effects. You can also trim a video and save it as a new clip, adjust the slow-motion section of a video and mark up a photo by typing text or using your finger on the screen.

The desktop version of Photos adds sharpen, white balance, levels and a clone-like retouch tool to the mix. There are also Apple and third-party extensions that can plug into Apple Photos.

Sharing & Compatibility

Sharing is as simple as can be. With just a couple of taps or clicks, you can share your photos and slideshows via Message (text), Mail (email), iCloud Photo Sharing, Notes, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr, and you can even save a PDF to iBooks or share across Apple devices through AirPlay.

Apple Photos organizes, edits and shares not only photos and videos, but also Live Photos (the iPhone's burst capture of sound and movement before and after a photo is snapped on an iPhone 6s or later).

The newest version of Apple Photos is compatible only with more recent hardware that has 64-bit processors, such as the iPhone 5s or newer. Even if your older phone or laptop can update to the newest operating system, the new Memories tab will be missing from the app's interface.

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iCloud

When you set Apple Photos to use iCloud to sync your image library, any changes you make to a picture or video in the app are updated on all of your devices that use iCloud, including your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, Mac, iCloud.com and, yes, your Windows PC.

You get 5GB of iCloud storage for free, but that isn't enough for most people's image libraries. It costs 99 cents a month for an additional 50GB of storage, $2.99/month for 200GB, $9.99/month for 1TB or $19.99/month for 2TB.

The My Photo Stream feature, which doesn't count against your iCloud storage limit, uploads your newest photos to iCloud, which holds up to 1,000 Photo Stream images for 30 days. If you want to keep those pictures, you need to download them to your computer or mobile device.

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Bottom Line

For Mac and iPhone users who want to have and share the fun of their photos and videos, Apple Photos is a great choice. It's easy to use, and offers uncomplicated sharing and full access to your image library on your various devices. What's more, it provides a nice level of editing options to give you a sense of fun personalization and even some artistic satisfaction. However, for consumers who want more control over the finer details of photo editing, we recommend either Photoshop Elements or, for advanced users, Affinity Photo.

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When you think of image editors on any platform, your mind goes straight to Photoshop. For most of us, paying Adobe’s high costs will get us an app that does more than we really need or care to do. As a result, we feel Pixelmator will win the hearts of most users on the Mac. It handles just about every image editing task you’d think to throw at it, and for less than the cost of two months of a Photoshop subscription.

Pixelmator

Platform: OS X
Price: $30
Download Page

Features

Layer-based workflow allows for flexible adjustments
Several image adjustment tools for a variety of options
Layer styles save time when creating common effects
Includes a robust set of filters for image alteration and manipulation
Supports importing and exporting several popular image formats
Several helpful retouching tools, including a healing brush helps you easily remove unwanted blemishes and even objects in photos
Beautiful filters for quick image enhancements, color changes, and popular “retro” looks
Support for OS X Mavericks features like tags, multiple displays, and App Napp
Excellent brushes and painting tools
Over 160 awesome effects
Open and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, and many other popular formats
Save images in iCloud for automatic syncing across all your Macs
Share photos directly from Pixelmator via email and to popular social networks
Works seamlessly with existing Photoshop documents

Note: This doesn’t even begin to dive into the features in Photoshop, which are too long to name here. You can visit Adobe’s official Photoshop page to learn more, but even they don’t detail every single feature. Your best bet is to make use of their 30-day trial and explore for yourself.

Where It Excels

Pixelmator does so much for such a low price. Thanks to Adobe, we’ve come to expect powerful image editing tools to cost at least a few hundred dollars. You can buy Pixelmator for only $30 and it’ll do most everything you need. Cost-efficiency doesn’t make an app worth buying, of course, but you can do so much with this one that it’s hard to believe the price is so low.

If you take a look at the feature set you’ll notice it looks a lot like Photoshop’s. You won’t find some things (more on that later), but it can do the tasks most of us care about. You can repair photos with the healing brush, manipulate the structure of an image with the liquify tool, make all sorts of color adjustments with common tools like curves and levels but also employ filters for quick edits, save to a variety of formats (including Photoshop), and a ton more. Pixelmator has shapes and drawing tools, too, in case you’re creating images that aren’t just photos. You can add styles to those shapes, photos, or other elements quickly. The same works for layers. Pixelmator works a lot like Photoshop but with a more user-friendly and attractive interface. If you don’t feel like paying for Adobe software anymore, a small learning curve will have casual Photoshop users working well in Pixelmator very quickly.

Another huge advantage? Pixelmator is very fast. You don’t have to wait for much of anything. It utilizes a lot of OS X core technologies to stay optimized, and in version 3.0 FX the developers rebuilt its engine with speed enhancements in mind. The software just runs very quickly. For those with older hardware who feel Photoshop chugs along at too leisurely of a pace, Pixelmator will operate with less lag.

Where It Falls Short

You’ll realize Pixelmator isn’t Photoshop in several areas if they pertain to you. It doesn’t have a Camera RAW plug-in, which is immensely useful for those who shoot in RAW. It’s practically an application in itself. Pixelmator also can’t handle HDR (only through artificial means) animation, 3D rendering, color management, fine-grained space-efficient web image export, and a variety of other specific tasks that you may or may not need. For most, these shortcomings will not matter. To photographers and designers, however, they might. Of course, if you focus on photography and require complex editing you may prefer using Photoshop Lightroom anyway, and can use Pixelmator for your other image editing needs. Regardless, if you don’t need anything mentioned here you won’t feel Pixelmator falls short at all.

The Competition

If you don’t want to pay the hefty cost of Photoshop, you’ve come to the right section. Here are a few options that can help you do some of what Photoshop can do for a much lower price.

Adobe Photoshop ($19 per month) still reigns king as the image editor of the “elite” but not of the people. If you need to handle more complex tasks or have every feature imaginable at your disposal, you want Photoshop. Of course, you’ll have to pay for that privilege. Photoshop, as many of us know, doesn’t come cheap.

GIMP (Free) has been the go-to open source image editor for awhile, and it can do many things Photoshop can do. If you prefer Photoshop’s interface, however, you might want to check out GIMPshop (Free) instead, as it is basically the same program made to emulate the style of Photoshop.

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Apple Photo Editor App