Photos is the free photo editing and picture library app on every Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s completely free, easy to use, and has the added bonus of syncing across all your devices if you take advantage of Apple’s iCloud Photo Library (for which you’ll have to pay for iCloud storage, starting at $0.99/ £0.79 per month for 50GB).
Before 2015, Photos on 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 in common with Aperture. It is not a professional image editing application, but it is easy to use and suitable for basic to moderate photo management and quick image adjustment.
The app is a great tool for organizing your photos. It organizes your photos and videos into the same years, collections, and times as on iOS. You can assign photos to albums and shared albums and projects. Searching for images can be made easier by identifying the people in them so that you can, for example, see each image of a particular person in your library. Add a year to the search to see all of that person’s photos from that year. You can also search all your photos with cats, plants or the sea, for example.
If it’s the image-editing feature you’re interested in, you can apply the same Instagram-like filters available in the iOS version of the app, but you can also adjust light, color, switch to black and white, eliminate red-eye, adjust white balance, reduce noise and sharpen. There is a Heal tool, but there are no pen or brush based tools in the Edit toolbox. You cannot sharpen or blur individual points of the image, for example, or correct the brightness/darkness of regions of the image. 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 of the image. As a result, images tend to appear brighter and more colorful. For tips and help, read How to edit in Photos for Mac.
Photos is both very easy to use and you can edit and enhance the images, easily share them with your friends and family directly (via shared albums) or on social networks like FaceBook. But if you want more editing tools, you might have to look further, in which case, check out our alternative options below.
