There aren't many Mac photo management apps that aren't geared towards a specific purpose, but among the few we think Lyn is the best for it's speed, wide format compatibility, and good integration with popular online services.
At the core of the experience is an app that’s built from the ground up for Mac OS X, which makes Pixelmator a very fast image editor, even on older hardware. Features you’d expect to find in much pricier packages are present, like a healing brush, curve adjustment, level tweaking, and a ton of filters. Photo Retouch Pro, developed by a company in Monaco, is a surprisingly good program, and could be considered the prince of OS X image editors. But it needs more development before it can dethrone the king.
Lyn
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $20
Download Page
Price: $20
Download Page
Features
- Progressive display on single or multiple monitor configurations
- Load images of virtually any size
- Multi-threading to take advantage of multicore CPUs
- Compatible with High Dynamic-Range (HDR) images like TIFF float as well as Radiance and OpenEXR
- Common metadata parser: EXIF, Camera's maker note, GPS, GeoTIFF, IPTC
- Image navigation with Apple Remote Control or Magic Trackpad
- Fullscreen and slideshow
- Full IPTC editing with user-defined presets
- Batch convert and rename
- User-defined places
- Non-destructive editing for image transformations
- Easily browse your iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom libraries (Mac OS X 10.5 or later required)
- Facebook, Flickr, 500px, and Picasa Web Albums sharing (Mac OS X 10.5 or later required)
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Where It Excels
Lyn is a very versatile photo manager that works the way you want to work. If you're coming from iPhoto, it can read your iPhoto library as-is. If you just want an app for viewing a folder structure currently on your drive, Lyn can handle that as well. However you want to manage your photos, it can adapt. Additionally, it can handle pretty much any type of image you through at it. The app, overall, is very versatile. When you want to put your images elsewhere, it also integrates very well with online services like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa so you can easily share your images. On top of all of that, Lyn is very fast at loading image previews. That is exceptionally helpful for people with large collections.
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Where It Falls Short
There isn't much to complain about with Lyn. It manages your photos, works quickly, and integrates with likely every online service you'd want to use. What you don't get, however, is some of the special features you'll find in applications like iPhoto. Lyn doesn't provide facial recognition or organize using Apple's 'event' structure. You also can't order books, cards, and other products directly from the app. If you really care about those things, you're probably already happy with iPhoto. If not, you should be using Lyn.
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The Competition
iPhoto ($15), our former reigning champ, is a really great, simple, feature-rich app that mostly just suffers from being a bit bloated and slow. It's also not fantastic at organizing an enormous collection of photos. Nonetheless, it's cheap and manages to do a lot. If your photo library isn't enormous and you have plenty of disk space, iPhoto is a good choice.
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Picasa is an obvious choice if you use Picasa on the web. If that's your photo sharing service of choice, you'll probably want to use the desktop app as well.
Flickery is essentially a desktop interface for Flickr. It'll cost you $10 (although you can try it for free for 15 days), but that price may be worthwhile if you're primarily a Flickr user and want an iPhoto-like interface that's dedicated to the service.
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If you're really serious about your photos, you may prefer managing them with the pricey, more professional Aperture or Lightroom. Aperture is like iPhoto for pros, and Lightroom is a similar take on the same concept.
Then there's what I do: I put photos in folders in Dropbox. I can quicklook everything in the Finder, the thumbnails can be made large in icon view, everything automatically syncs online, it's easy to share the files, it syncs with my iPhone the same as iPhoto, and I can access every photo from my phone with the Dropbox app. I chose to do this because all the photo management software I used was too slow and bloated. I wanted something quick. It's not a solution for everyone, but if you just want to organize your images without hassle it works very well.
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Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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Even if you can't afford to purchase photo editing software, you can still find free software to create and edit images. Some are developed by individuals, and some are feature limited or an earlier version of a more advanced program. In some rare instances, there are no strings attached, but most often you will need to provide information to the company by registering, or endure ads or nag screens.
Mac Os X Disk Image
Though these are all stand-alone applications you also might want to take a look at the free mobile apps from Adobe. They include:
Also don't forget there are also mobile apps from SketchGuru, Skitch, and a number of other Android and iOS imaging apps such as Instagram which gives you the ability to play with images by applying a variety of preset effects and filters to your images.
Finding the Best Photo Editing App for You
The key decision behind using any imaging application lies with what the requirements are for the task at hand. You need to closely research the product and get really clear on both the product's strengths and its weaknesses. Also, take the time to look at the work others have created with the product. For example, if you are looking to create simple graphics or to touch up family photos, then an application without a serious number of filters and effects may just fit the bill. On the other hand, if you want to do compositing and add effects then a limited feature set may not be ideal for your needs.
Also, it is important that you check out whether the application has been updated recently. A lack of updates is the first clue that this software may just be on its last legs. Also just doing a simple Google or Bing search around the application will tell you volumes. For example, Picassa, one of the apps mentioned in this piece has been withdrawn. That's the bad news. The good news is its feature set has been folded into Google Photos which is free.
GIMP for Mac OS X
What We Like
- Interface familiar for Photoshop users.
- Fully featured, despite being free.
What We Don't Like
- Might not be updated frequently.
- Lacks adjustment layers.
GIMP is a popular open-source image editor originally developed for Unix/Linux. Often lauded as the 'free Photoshop,' it does have an interface and features similar to Photoshop.
Because it's volunteer-developed beta software, stability and frequency of updates could be an issue; however, many happy users report using GIMP for OS X without significant problems. GIMP is not compatible with Mac OS 9 and earlier.
Pinta
Pinta is a free pixel-based image editor for Mac OS X. One of the most interesting aspects of Pinta is that it is based on the Windows image editor Paint.NET.
Pinta offers the basic drawing tools that you'd expect from an image editor, as well as some more advanced features, such as layers and a range of image adjustment tools. These features mean that Pinta is also a viable tool for users looking for an application to allow them to edit and improve their digital photos.
Image Tricks
Image Tricks is a fun and easy to use free image editor for Mac OS X. It is an application that encourages experimentation and offers the ability for a wide range of effects to be combined and applied to pictures.
Image Tricks is an ideal application for less experienced users to achieve creative results, thanks to the range of filters and masks that are available. There is also a paid Pro version that offers more filters, though you can see the effects that they produce in the free version, without saving them.
GraphicConverter X
What We Like
- Works with a huge variety of formats.
- Cocooner function allows non-destructive editing, preserving original image.
Image Editor For Mac Free
What We Don't Like
- Can be difficult at first.
- Cluttered interface.
GraphicConverter is a multi-purpose graphics tool for converting, viewing, browsing, and editing hundreds of image types on the Macintosh platform. If there is a file format or image processing task that your existing software can't handle, chances are that GraphicConverter can do it if you're willing to tackle the learning curve.
Image Editor On Mac
GraphicConverter is a worthwhile tool to have on hand but needs some serious work in the usability department. The application is not free, but you can use the shareware without time limitation if you don't need batch processing features.