If you’re trying to figure out the best application to manage your photos on your Mac device, then we recommend using Mac’s Photos app. The Photos app on Mac is probably the simplest but the most effective photos application you can use to manage your photos.
Learning the intricacies of the Photos app isn’t as difficult as other projects it to be. The interface is simple and easy to understand and navigate, so you’ll probably figure it out on your own even when the most complicated task is required. Moreover, your photos are displayed in vibrant hues and tones, as what Macs are known for, so you’ll enjoy working on them. All you need is to understand the basic steps to get you started.
What is the Photos App on Mac?
Before going into the different tasks you can accomplish on the Photos app, here’s an overview of what the application is and what you can expect.
The Photos app for Mac is one of the basic photo management tools in the market. It’s termed basic mainly because of its simplicity, but don’t be fooled because the application is actually powerful. In fact, one of the reasons why Apple developed this particular app was to provide users of the Mac, iPad, iPhone, and the iPod touch a photo management experience unique to Apple products. It turned out to be so successful that Apple stopped the development of their other photos management software on Mac called iPhoto and Aperture to mainly focus on Photos.
How To Print Photos From Photo App On Mac Computer
Navigating the Apple Photos App and Getting Started
The Photos app was specifically designed for easy navigation. This means that if you’ve ever used iPhoto or Aperture, you’ll find that most of the tools are familiar. On the other hand, if you’ve never used a photo management tool before, it will still be easy enough to figure out what each tool is for and where it’s located.
When you export an image from the Photos app in macOS, you may not be getting the whole deal. In the export menu, you need to select either JPEG, TIFF, or PNG, and if you don't make any adjustments to the quality settings, it'll likely be compressed. If you need the original full-resolution file or want to get the video that's attached to a Live Photo, there's a simple way to do it.
However, the first step of managing your photos is to organize them properly. One of the best ways to do this is to keep your photos in a central location, mainly the iCloud. With your photos on iCloud, you’ll be able to access them from any device, not just your Mac laptop.
To enable the iCloud photo library, simply go to the settings and click on Turn on iCloud Photo Library. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll need to be signed in with your unique Apple ID to change the setting.
Once the iCloud library is enabled, you’ll need to manage the storage space. If you have a large number of photos in your collection, you might need to upgrade your storage plan.
How to Select Multiple Photos
Managing your photos would certainly be a tedious task if you have to manually select each photo one by one. Fortunately, with the Photos app, you can select multiple photos and accomplish whatever task you need to do with them, such as deleting them or moving them into different folders.
To select multiple photos, follow these steps:
- Click on the first photo.
- Hold the shift key.
- Click on the last photo. This will select all the photos between the first and last photo you clicked on.
Another way to select the photo is to drag your mouse around the group of photos you want to select. This will enclose those photos in a rectangle, thus automatically selecting all within the rectangular boundary.
How to Find Photos
If you have a rather large collection, it can be quite a difficult remembering where certain photos are located. If you can’t find the photo or you don’t want to spend so much time searching for it, click on the built-in search bar and type in a keyword. If you saved the photo using that particular keyword, then the photo will appear in the search results.
How to Remove Photos from the Library
There may come a time when you’ll no longer need certain photos. Since each photo does take up space, deleting those you don’t need can free up space for photos you likely want to keep. To remove photos you don’t need, just take these steps:
- Select the particular photo you want to delete.
- Press the Delete key on your keyboard to remove the photo.
- The application will confirm if you want to delete the photo, simply click on the Delete button.
- If you need to delete more than one photo, here are the steps:
- Select the photos you wish to delete by holding the Command key and clicking on each photo.
- Once all the photos are selected, press the Delete key and confirm the deletion.
Note that Apple won’t permanently delete the photo just yet. The deleted photos will be stored in the recently deleted folder for 30 days. You can check out this folder if you need to restore some photos. After 30 days, the photos will be deleted permanently.
How to Ensure the Photos App Works Seamlessly
The photos you take are an important part of your life. As such, you would want to ensure that they’re available for you to view any time you need to. The best way to make sure that the Photos app, as well as other apps on your Mac, works as you need it each and every time is to take care of your Mac. A great tool that will help you keep everything in working order is by using a 3rd party cleaning software like Tweakbit MacRepair. With this powerful tool, you’ll be able to find and fix problems on your Mac before they affect its performance.
See more information about Outbyte and uninstall instructions. Please review EULA and Privacy Policy.
How To Print Photos From Photo App On Macbook
- January 02, 2020
- 18 min to read
Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.
But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.
1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)
Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.
2. Luminar (7 days trial)
Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.
Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.
How To Print Photos From Photo App On Mac Free
Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.
3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)
Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.
All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?
Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!
4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)
As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.
Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.
Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.
5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days)
Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 (Trial link)
How To Print Photos From My Computer
Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.
In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.
7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)
How To Print Photos From Photo App On Mac Desktop
Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.
Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.
8. Google Photos
Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.
Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.
9. PhotoScape X (Free)
A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.
The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.
How To Use Apple Photos
The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.
10. Gimp (Free)
Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.
Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.