That's in large part because it borrows and expands upon the iOS 8 design language for Photos: Using clean, simplistic white space, the app divides your images up into the same Moments, Collections, and Years as on iOS. It also uses tabs at the top for Shared Photo Streams and Albums, and borrows the same editing conceits from the mobile version. But just because the Photos for OS X interface is simplified, that doesn't mean it's lost its underlying power. The Photos team could have followed the iMovie '08 or iWork template and gutted the program to its core for this redesign, leaving out all features but the essential ones — but they deliberately chose not to.

They've taken lessons from those launches, and Photos for OS X actually sports a surprisingly robust feature-set. No, it's not Aperture. It's got a long way to go before it's ever going to be Aperture — and honestly, Apple may be ready to cede the true pro-editing market to Adobe and the like. But for the vast majority of users — beginner to prosumer alike — Photos for OS X is more than enough for your photo management needs.

The moments, collections, and years view is fun, but where Photos for OS X showcases its power is in Albums. Smart Albums and nested folders are at your beck and call, ready for you to organize accordingly. Apple's face-recognition algorithm, Faces, has been reimagined as a special sort of smart album, and sports all the same features (and bugs) as its iPhoto predecessor. There are new special smart albums, including Timelapse, Favorites, Slo-mo, and Bursts; they automatically collect images and video from those categories for your perusal. As someone who got increasingly aggravated over iPhoto's sluggish, bloated looks and behavior, Photos for OS X feels like a breath of fresh air. It's speedy, even with 10,000+ images and videos of different sizes and shapes weighting it down, and I can run it in the background on a laptop while going about my day to day.

It's intuitive: I can find images much more quickly than I could in iPhoto, and do what I need to them. And it's smart: Add in iCloud Photo Library, and I can, for the first time, have my entire library virtually at my disposal without having to worry about external drives or taking up disk space. (Mostly) effortless management I can go a little overboard when it comes to managing my photographs. In my pre-iPhone days, I had a carefully pruned and meticulously-arranged library, with all my events split out into special albums. That all, unsurprisingly, went out the window when the iPhone came into my life. When you're taking hundreds of photos a month, that meticulous management becomes maddening, and eventually impossible without extra hours in the day.

Photo Editor For Mac

Especially if you wanted to keep those photos on your iPhone for later viewing. And so, I tried cloud services, like the now-acquired Loom and Picturelife. I tried keeping everything in folders, labeled by the date. I finally ended up dumping my old iPhoto Library and every miscellaneous photo and video I could find into a Dropbox folder labeled 'PHOTO MESS, CLEAN UP SOMEDAY'. That day, I am thankful to say, is here.

On the Mac I first got an inkling that Photos for OS X might be something special when, in its earliest beta, it handled me throwing a gigantic Dropbox-hosted iPhoto library into it without complaint. It took a few hours, sure, but all my photos were imported.

Then I tossed in sixty folders' worth of random iPhone images I'd been offloading. No complaints there, either. A few duplicates, most of which were weeded out during the import process. But at the end of the day, I had every photo and video I'd ever taken that was still available to me, all unified under one roof. Now, unorganized, you might think that such a unification would prove disastrously messy. But though I poo-poohed Moments and Collections when I first saw them in Photos for iOS, they're a fantastic way to quickly find photos of certain events: I know when I took the photo, so, it reasons, I should be able to quickly find the photo itself. Photos's beefed-up search field is also a nice companion for quickly finding people, places, times, and keywords or filenames, though it lacks the boolean operators to make it a true powerhouse.

(Of course, that's what Smart Albums are for.). Like in iPhoto, you can still add keywords to photographs; rating systems and flags are gone, but the beefed up keyword manager lets you add keywords to that effect. The new Favorites function also easily lets you flag images you want easily accessible. In the iCloud Of course, Photos for OS X is just part of Apple's overall Photos equation., Apple's online service, opens up photo management to all your devices. And best of all: Do something once, it syncs everywhere else. This solves one of my biggest, oldest iPhone photo management irritations: I can manage albums on my Mac and have them sync to my iPhone, and vice versa.

And sync from my laptop to my desktop. For the first time, I'm not worried that I'm going to have to redo my entire management strategy over for each device I own, or worry about syncing special albums over to my iPhone via iTunes. It's all there, and it's all seamless. Mostly all there. Sadly, smart albums and Faces are currently exempt from this syncing, though I'm hoping we see that integration down the line.

(And while Apple's at it, smart albums you can also edit on the iPhone wouldn't be too shabby, either.) iCloud Photo Library. If Photos for OS X is meant to be your photography home base, is the service that spreads those images to the world. It syncs all your photos with all your devices. It integrates iCloud Shared Streams to bring your pictures to your friends and family. And it does so in a secure, smart, and controlled manner. It's the first of iCloud's sync services that I can honestly say, in my multiple months of testing, 'just works.'

And as anyone who's tried to manage images online before knows, 'it just works' is pretty darn important when it comes to your digital memories. Photos can't disappear. They can't be duplicated into a million copies. They have to sync seamlessly, quickly, and not send the end-user into a panic because they're suddenly missing chunks of their lives.

ICloud Photo Library isn't perfect, and it's more expensive than I'd like. But here's a quick breakdown for those who want to know exactly what they're getting into when they flip on that switch. What is iCloud Photo Library? We've got a much more thorough piece on this matter linked below, but essentially: iCloud Photo Library is a separate service you can enable in both Photos for OS X and Photos for iOS that uploads every image you've taken or have stored on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac's library to iCloud. That includes iPhone or iPad photos and screenshots, video, and with any imported DSLR or other photos you've added to your Photos library on your Mac.

You don't need to use iCloud Photo Library to use Photos for OS X or iOS, but if you choose not to, you won't get any of its benefits: your images won't sync across devices, you can't optimize storage for your devices to save disk space, and you'll have to manually back up your photos elsewhere. The pros After several months with Photos for OS X, iOS, and iCloud Photo Library, I'm pretty familiar with its ups and downs.

Thankfully, there are far more ups and downs, at least in my experience. It just works — really! As I said above, perhaps the biggest bullet point in iCloud Photo Library's 'pro' column for me is that, for once, Apple's iCloud team has a rock-solid 'it just works' sync product.

Even during my early beta-testing days, I had no issues with iCloud losing or dropping images from my library. I had only one sync error, which came from accidentally turning iCloud off on my MacBook before it had finished syncing up that library; as a result, those half-uploaded photos disappeared from my other devices.

But they remained on my MacBook, and repopulated on my iPhone and other Macs as soon as I re-enabled iCloud sync. Now, I should caution anyone who attempts to turn on iCloud Photo Library on Day 1 of Photos for OS X's existence: I'm guessing that the relatively seamless experience I've had during the beta will be bogged down quite a bit when millions of people attempt to upload their 10,000+ photo libraries to iCloud. In general, I might suggest waiting a few days for things to calm down — I don't think you'll lose data, but you'll likely slow your internet to a crawl trying to upload massive amounts of images over several days. You really can access your photos from anywhere — and manage them, too Previous to iCloud Photo Library, I used Loom and Dropbox's Carousel features to keep master copies of my images. This was great for having access to my full image library, but it was only really accessible while I was online, and there was no real way to organize it beyond pre-built rough date scroll along the side. Deleting images from Dropbox's Carousel was also a royal pain — the app was built more for hiding images then deleting them.

With iCloud Photo Library, my images are accessible everywhere — and when I'm offline, I can still view low-resolution thumbnails of any pictures I haven't downloaded locally to my machine. I can even manage my library while offline: Delete an image while you're away from internet access, or add it to an album, and all of that syncs when you pop back online. Your edits also sync across your devices Forget having to make multiple copies of your images to edit them: iCloud Photo Library syncs your non-destructive image edits across your devices, meaning that you can start editing an image on your iPhone, finish the touchup on your Mac, or undo it all on your iPad. All hail optimized storage iCloud Photo Library's Optimize Storage option automatically and smartly takes a percentage of your device's storage space for high-resolution versions of your photos; any images or video that can't fit in that space are stored as low-resolution thumbnails. This space is variable, too — it doesn't take up every speck of free space you have, instead appropriating a portion of your free space to photo storage, and it adjusts smartly on the fly.

If you need to download an image stored on iCloud, you need merely to tap it; your older downloaded images will be removed from the device to make room for the new ones. This is awesome not only for small-storage iOS devices, but also for laptops: I love being able to carry around my 'entire' library on my Mac without also having to lug a 500GB external drive for that library's full-resolution Raw photos.

Secure, strong backups While iCloud Photo Library's primary goal may be to provide you with the same library on all your devices, it also keeps a copy of that library safe and secure in iCloud using Apple's CloudKit framework. In the unlikely event of a hard drive malfunction, waterlogged iPhone, or other hardware disaster, your images will be safe and sound and ready to redownload. The cons For all that I like about iCloud Photo Library, it still has its flaws: For me, they aren't dealbreakers, but they might be depending on your needs. The iCloud storage cost Though Apple's iCloud storage costs are lower than they've ever been, they're still not as inexpensive as their rivals.

Apple doesn't use advertising or data brokering to subsidize the costs of storage, but for $10/month, you can only get 500GB of storage in comparison with Dropbox or Google's 1TB, or Amazon's unlimited storage option with Prime membership. For me, the ease of use on my iPhone and Mac outweighs the extra expense, but it still seems like a poor play from Apple if the company wants the majority of its users to use iCloud Photo Library with Photos for OS X and iOS.

You can't choose not to sync certain photos CloudKit, the infrastructure behind iCloud Photo Library, uses 128-bit AES encryption for transit and storage, so it's secure, but even so, there may be some images you'd prefer stay offline — whether for job or personal reasons. Unfortunately, iCloud Photo Library is an all-or-nothing affair: If you want those photos offline, you'll have to move them out of Photos for OS X or iOS to do so. It's tied into Photos for OS X and iOS If you're a die-hard Lightroom user, iCloud Photo Library won't help you — it's designed solely to work with the. And given that Photos for OS X doesn't currently support a good external editing workflow, that may end up being a dealbreaker for anyone who wants to do pro-level editing but have those edits sync across their iOS devices.

There's also the question of reference libraries: Officially, iCloud Photo Library doesn't support syncing with a referenced (external) Photos for OS X library, because of the potential for sync conflicts. There is a (cumbersome) workaround that involves multiple libraries and turning iCloud Photo Library on and off, but it may not be worth it for people who regularly need access to referenced images.

Bottom line For me, iCloud Photo Library is an excellent way to bring my images and video to all my devices, albeit a slightly-more-expensive one. It boasts impressive sync capabilities, offline photo access, and easy management and backup, even for gigantic libraries.

But it also has a few caveats that, while not dealbreakers for me, may be for others. For those unsure what camp they're in, hopefully I've cleared up iCloud Photo Library's pros and cons to help you make the decision that's right for your workflow. Slide to edit Let's get this out of the way: Photos is not Aperture or Lightroom. Photos is not trying to be Aperture or Lightroom. If you need a professional photo tool, Photos is not the tool for you. Look elsewhere.

That said, Photos has an impressive amount of power packed inside a relatively simple-looking editing screen. It may not be a professional editing tool, but it feels light-years beyond iPhoto. On the surface, that's not particularly evident: Open the Edit menu, and you'll see six basic tool options at your disposal: Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust, and Retouch. The first three work almost identically to their iPhoto counterparts, offering a quick one-touch button for tweaking brightness and contrast in your photo; rotating your image; cropping it to your liking; or applying a simple retouching clone brush. Filters, a carry-over from Photos for iOS, is similarly simple, letting you choose one of eight Instagram-like filters for changing your photo's tone. It's in the Adjust menu, however, where the real power lies.

At first glance, it looks like Photos for OS X has taken the same three slider-based edit controls found in Photos for iOS — Light, Color, and Black and White — and left it at that. But Apple didn't stop there. You can also add a host of different adjustments to your editing workspace, including a histogram, levels, and white balance, along with sliders for sharpening, defining, reducing noise in, and vignetting your image.

No, these tools won't replace a full-featured editing program like Lightroom. And frustratingly, Photos doesn't currently support opening its files in an external editor, so you'll have to copy and recopy any image you want to bring elsewhere to tweak. But for the vast majority of users, these tools are more than enough for them to get what they need done. I'll actually go a step further and say that for newer photography enthusiasts, these tools might help them learn more about the composition of their images and how to properly edit them. The sliders provide for control and understanding in a way that complex editing screens just don't; they're less intimidating, and as such, give users a chance to play and grow with their controls, adding them as necessary.

It's such a smart way to offer tools for the vast majority of users without making anything too simple or too complex, and one of Photos's great triumphs. One rather curious omission: Photos for OS X doesn't support action extensions, as does its iOS counterpart. It would have been an excellent way to integrate third-party editing software into the app, but I'm assuming it got dropped due to a general lack of polish time. I'm really hoping we see it pop up in future versions of Photos, however. And, of course, all these edits sync with iCloud — so you can start editing on your iPhone, pick up on your Mac, and share it on your iPad. And if you don't like what you've edited, you can hit reset and start all over again, thanks to Photos's non-destructive adjustments. The sharing life We take pictures for two primary reasons: for our own personal memories, and to show off to other people.

As such, it seems kind of ridiculous that we keep the vast majority of our images locked up on our machines, hidden in backup after backup — you could have taken the funniest cat picture the internet has ever seen, only for it to be lost amidst 2000 other pictures. Photos doesn't want that to happen. Photos wants your images to get to whomever you want them to — whether that's your iCloud Photo Sharing family, Facebook friends, Flickr buddies, Twitter birds, iMessage chums, AirDrop amigos, email dudes, print pals, or more. The app, like its iOS counterpart, has an entire section dedicated to iCloud Photo Sharing: Here, you can share entire albums privately with your friends and family (or publicly on the web), as well as comment on and like images from their shared streams. The other major way for your photos to leave Photos for Mac is with the Share sheet: Click the share button, and you can send images to iCloud, Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and any other service that builds a third-party share extension. Interestingly, there's even an 'Add to Aperture' option in there for folks who still have Aperture installed; Apple representatives previously told iMore that the Share sheet wouldn't allow third-party 'Open in'-type tools, but who knows?

Maybe we'll see an option to 'Send to Photoshop' — even if that's just sending a copy of the photo to the program, instead of a true external editing option. There's one other area Apple is focusing on when it comes to sharing: printing.

This isn't particularly surprising: iPhoto has had the capability to print photos, cards, calendars, and books for quite a few years, and Photos seems the natural successor to take on such projects. Books and cards have been revamped, here, with new layouts and easier controls; prints, too, get a refinish, with a new option for automatically-sized images, which will print at three heights to a number of widths. Primarily designed for panoramas, I can see auto-sized prints also being useful for people who like to hand-crop their images rather than be contained to specific sizes. In the age of and digital frames, paper prints may not have the luster they once had — but there's still a market for it, and Apple is happy to provide. The bottom line After years of iPhoto's bloat, ever-increasing iPhone photo management issues, and random folders of images scattered within my computers, Photos for OS X is a breath of fresh air. It syncs with my other computers and iOS devices.

The app has eliminated the cruft of iPhoto without taking away its magic and accessibility to beginners, and iCloud Photo Library offers a photo management revolution for those who have previously found themselves siloed on each individual device. It's not perfect. Faces is still disappointing in its facial recognition. Duplicate photo recognition only happens during import; there's no way to trigger a 'find duplicates' command in your library at will. (If you have iCloud Photo Library enabled, it theoretically performs automatic duplicate merging every time your device connects to iCloud, but those who have chosen not to enable it are out of luck.) And search, although promising, could use work. Nor is it a true Aperture replacement.

There aren't any brushes, to my great disappointment. The loupe is gone, replaced with Multitouch pinch-to-zooms, as are some of the more advanced management features. And you can't edit your images in an external editor, or properly work with a reference library unless you disable iCloud Photo Library. But as app reimaginings go, it's the best Apple has ever accomplished.

Photos for OS X feels solid and steady in its 1.0, and the features I'm missing are more wish-list items than dealbreakers. This won't be true for everyone, of course. But for the general Mac population, this is the photo management tool they've been looking for. And I can't wait to see what Apple does from here.

Photoshop is the most comprehensive image editing and graphic designing software. But all of these features also make it hefty on your system. Especially if you need a tool with just some basic features for day to day image editing needs, then going for Photoshop is certainly not a wise option. So, what you can do is to try a nice substitute for Photoshop that can help you with your image manipulation needs. Here are 18 free Photoshop alternative tools, both downloadable software as well as online tools, to do on-the-go basic image editing. These tools are available on different platforms and offer different features for particular editing needs.

So read on to pick the right one for your specific requirements. Read also:. Free Photoshop Alternatives Gimp works across several different platforms and is probably one of the best free alternatives out there so far.

Gimp has a huge user community, with a great list of tutorials on the official site. Platform(s): Windows, iOS, Android Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

Platform(s): Windows, iOS, Android Krita is based on the open-source platforms like Linux and Unix. The tool is a great choice for those who like to make illustrations and textures.

Platform(s): Windows, iOS, Android Xara Xtreme is a powerful, general graphics program for Unix platforms including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X. Formerly known as Xara LX, it is based on Xara Xtreme for Windows, is simple to use and learn and has a clean user interface with few floating dialogs, palettes, menus etc. Platform(s): Windows, Linux ChocoFlop is an image editor for Mac OS X, based on the CoreImage technology. Designed exclusively for your mac, it works real fast and is currently in beta stage and is available freely. Platform(s): macOS Mac Preview You may think this is just any normal image preview tool, but the fact is Mac’s Preview can perform some incredible image editing tasks.

Platform(s): macOS Pixelmator is one of the best photo editors for Mac that can perform simple editing tasks to machine learning-powered intelligent image editing. You can edit even the largest photos with ease and emulate as many Photoshop tools as you need. And there is also an iPad version. Platform(s): macOS Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework.

Based on GIMP’s technology it features gradients, textures, and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes and multiple layers and alpha channel editing. Platform(s): macOS Online Tools Aviary is a photo editing app created by Adobe. It has a complete list of color corrections, filters, and effects. BeFunky is a quick and easy-to-use image editor.

You can crop, rotate, resize, enhance, and sharpen an image along with other features. Canva is an amazing online tool allowing you to create a large number of designs, from a Facebook cover to a presentation. They have lots of pre-made templates for each type of the design, so you can just customize them and download.

It has various features for different types of editing, but if you need a more powerful solution, you need to search elsewhere. This tool is simple to use, just click and drag and you get a dazzling photo effect. Fotor is available on almost any platform, in web or desktop versions. It allows you to enhance the image, crop, rotate, or add a vignette. PicMonkey is a web-based design and editing tool with a lot to offer. You can start editing from scratch or edit an existing picture from web or computer. It requires Flash plugin.

Pixlr is an online photo editor similar to Photoshop with a solid toolset. You can upload an image, and adjust it as you like. It requires $15 per year subscription, but it’s totally worth it. To use Pixlr you require Flash though.

With PiZap you can play around with basic edits, like crop, contrast, and saturation, and add filters, stickers, text, or borders. Despite the old design and weird logo, it’s an easy-to-use online editor. You can create a collage, postcard, and edit an image. Sumo Paint is an amazing quick online photo editor. Many advanced features are available only in paid Pro version, however, you can resize, crop image, and get swatches for free.

Bonus: More Tools Another amazing image editor for OS X, Acorn is called the ‘image editor for humans’. It includes advanced features and filters for image editing. Besides, the interface is familiar to Photoshop.

Mac Simple Image Editor

Platform(s): macOS Affinity Photo is a budget version of Photoshop. It’s fully packed with advanced tools and easy to use.

It also has end-to-end CMYK 16-bit per channel editing and RAW processing. Platform(s): macOS Sketch is a professional software for designers. It has lots of different features allowing you to create everything from a postcard to a complicated application interface. You can enhance its features with plugins. Platform(s): macOS.