Best Free Photo Editing App for Mac: Alternatives to Photos

Photos is the free photo editing and image library app on every Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s completely free, easy to use, and has the added benefit of syncing across all your devices if you use Apple’s iCloud Photo Library (for which you have to pay for iCloud storage, starting at $0.99/£0.79 per month). month for 50 GB).

Prior to 2015, Photos on the Mac was iPhoto. When Apple replaced iPhoto with Photos in 2015, it also stopped selling another photo app, Aperture, which offered more advanced image editing. Photos has more in common with Photos for iOS and very little with Aperture. It’s not a professional image editing app, but it’s easy to use and sufficient for basic to moderate photo management and quick image adjustments.

The app is a great tool for organizing your photos. It arranges your photos and videos in the same years, collections, and moments as on iOS. You can assign photos to albums and shared albums and projects. Searching for images can be made easier by identifying People in them, so you can, for example, see every image of a specific person in your library. Add a year to the search to see all of that person’s photos in that year. You can also search for all your photos with, for example, cats, or plants or the sea.

If you’re interested in the image editing feature, you can apply the same Instagram-like filters available in the iOS version of the app, but you can also adjust light and color, switch to black and white, red eye eliminate, adjust white balance, reduce noise and sharpen. There is a Heal tool, but there are no pen or brush based tools in the Edit toolkit. For example, you cannot sharpen or blur individual areas of the photo, or correct the brightness/darkness of parts of the photo. You also cannot add text or shapes or make selections. For a quick edit, you can click the Auto Enhance icon, which adjusts the color and contrast for the image, usually making images look brighter and more colorful. For advice and help, read Edit in Photos for Mac.

Photos is both very easy to use and allows you to edit and enhance images, easily share them directly with friends and family (via shared albums) or on social networks such as FaceBook. But if you want more in terms of editing tools, you may need to look further afield. In that case, check out our alternative options below.