- 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.
There are a wealth content of apps arriving and updating on Mac App Store every single day, which makes it nearly impossible to keep track on the latest and greatest. We've compiled the best of the best Mac apps 2020 that remember your passwords, organize your notes or to-dos, make data backup, edit the media files, and connect your friends etc. Sep 13, 2020 Best photo manager apps for Mac reviewed 1. Gemini 2: The duplicate photo finder. The first step to getting your photos organized is to remove all of the. Photos: Best photo organizer on Mac. Here’s the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. JetPhoto Studio 5 is a good image management tool that can organize photos based on tags and locations. The program can create albums and organize them as well. A strong feature of the program is its sharing ability. The photos can be shared directly with services like Flickr, Jet Photo server, and more.
The Best Tools to Organize and Manage your Photos on a Mac Organizing your pictures can be a big problem no matter what operating system you use. Especially if you usually take a lot of photos with your phone or camera, then copy them to a PC and don't immediately spend some time to organize them, you will end up with a huge pile of files with. Oct 25, 2019 How to create a new library with Photos for Mac. You can create a new library for your photos at any time with Photos for Mac. To do so, make sure that you quit Photos and reopen it with the following method to get the Library options. Hold down the Option key on your keyboard. Double-click on Photos on your Mac.
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.
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)
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)
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
![Best app to organize photos on mac desktop Best app to organize photos on mac desktop](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134253651/600136239.jpg)
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.
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.
Are you desperately trying to find a photograph stored in your computer's hard disk drive that is required for an urgent and well-paying assignment, but are unable to do so because you do not remember the odd name assigned to it by your digital camera or smartphone?
Why You May Need A Photo Manager
You can be sure that chances of finding that image may be next to impossible, especially if you have tens of thousands of images with many of them being duplicates in your computer's storage media or even in external storage media such as portable hard disk drives or in a cloud server. The harsh reality is that you did not use a photo managing software.
A Stitch in Time – Even Professional Photographers Use Them
Even professional photographers, such as those employed by newspapers and magazines, shoot thousands of photographs every week and take care to rename their digital photographs and store them in appropriate folders.
Nowadays, even these professionals depend on photo manager software, known in technical parlance as photomanager, to sort their photographs.
Easily Sort Images By Color, Date, Event, Country, City and More
These programs, apart from helping them to find their required images almost instantaneously, allow users to sort the photographs under different categories such as overseas, political, month and year, and much more.
Quickly Navigate to:
Find and Remove Duplicate Photos
These programs also search the hard disk drive on which it is installed to find duplicate copies of the same photograph, allowing the photographer to keep the best one and delete the others.
The Best Photo Organizer Software Reviewed
We shall be reviewing the five best photo management software to see what makes them click (pun not intended).
1. Movavi Photo Manager
This is, unarguably, among the best manager photo software available. Offered by the leaders in photo editing software, this picture organizing software saves you time, effort and energy while fetching the photos you want instantaneously.
Picture Sorter
You need not bother about arranging your pictures, as the program, once installed, allows you to sort and organize your images by GPS coordinates and date. This image catalog software allows users to sort their photographs in different folders.
Automatic Photo Album Creator
You can use this photo cataloging software to easily create different albums. For example, you can sort your photographs and save them under different folders.
Organize Photos into Folders Easily and Tag Them
This picture organization software, by default, creates “family,” “hobby,” “landscape,” and “travel” folders. However, you can create as many additional folders as you wish by clicking on the “create new tag.” Once done, this photo catalogue software shows you the number of photographs under the different folders.
Delete Duplicates
If this digital photo organizer software finds multiple copies of the same photograph, it will point that out too. You will be shocked to see the number of duplicates that you had saved in different folders. Now you have the opportunity of deleting them and freeing up disk space.
Edit Multiple Photos At Once
How many times have you wished that you could collectively edit multiple photographs simultaneously? You can effortlessly perform tasks like flipping, and rotating multiple photos with the click of a mouse button with the help of Movavi Photo Manager.
Organize Photos in Any Format
I expect a professional picture management software to handle different types of picture formats, and Movavi did not let me down. In fact, it opened all picture formats I threw at it. I loved its ability to handle RAW formats as this permitted me to upload the highest quality photographs directly from my camera to my computer.
The vendor's website claims that their photo organizer app handles many photo formats including BMP, GIF (not animated), JPEG, DPX, JPEG 2000, JPEG-LS, PIC, PNG, Sun Rasterfile, TARGA, TIFF, XBM, and RAW formats, but you can be sure that it accepts almost all types of format, including vector and bitmap.
If you still do not believe professional photographers who call it the best photo organizer, download a free version, install it, and check its features.
Price
Movavi is an affordable photo manager that costs only $39.95 and is available both for the Windows and Mac platforms. This is the best program for those seeking a professional digital photo manager.
Available for Windows – Yes
Available for Mac – Yes
2. BigMIND Photography
You might not believe that some of the modern generation photo organizer programs contain artificial intelligence too, and take the job of storing photographs to a higher level through storage. This is exactly what BigMIND Photography excels at.
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Cloud Storage and Backup – Organize A Lifetime of Photos
This photo archive software allows you to store up to 4TB of data on their cloud servers. This means you do not have to store the images on your device and can download it from their servers by logging on to it. This is more than enough secure photo storage space for a lifetime.
Even though some modern age extremely high-resolution cameras output images that are as big as 250MB in size, the storage provided by BigMIND will still be way more than enough.
Facial Recognition
It also doubles up as a face recognition photo software, thanks to its artificial assisted facial recognition option. It can scan through pictures for faces and has a 90% accuracy for detecting emotions as well.
Search Through Images by Location, Camera Type, Date, Size and More
Cloud data backup is its forte. You can set up this cloud-based image management software to backup images by types as well. While initiating the backup, you can select the file location option, which makes it easy to create an all-around backup plan.
I, unhesitatingly, declared it as the best photo storage software, due to its large cloud-based picture storage space.
I loved the way the software recognizes faces, allowing me to filter them in different categories. Post recognizing a face, you have the option to add a name to it, making indexing and searching your photographs a simple task.
Frankly speaking, I was happy with the storage capacity, the number of devices that I can use on an account, as well as the pricing structure.
NOTE: BigMIND can even organize and backup videos, documents and audio files.
Best App To Organize Photos On Mac Desktop
![Photos Photos](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134253651/379465917.jpg)
BigMIND – Organizing Images
BigMIND – Organizes Audio Too?
Pricing
The best plan of BigMIND Photography costs $23.33 per month for 5 users and for 15 devices with 4TB storage, the 2TB storage plan costs $13.33 per month for 3 users and 9 devices while the lowest plan of 1TB costs 6.67 per month for 1 user and 3 devices.
According to me, this image manager software is best suited for both amateur and expert photographers as well as for photography enthusiasts who love to shoot images on their mobiles.
If your need is more on the storage side, the image organizing software provided by BigMIND will suffice as it combines organization with the security of your photos and provides the storage space you'll need for life.
Available for Windows – Yes
Available for Mac – Yes
3. Magix Photo Manager
I depend heavily on this photo organizing program and can safely say that it is among the best images management software available.
To add icing to the cake, the vendor of this photo archiving software offers the basic version free. However, if you want to have full control of your digital image manager and want to harness the full power of this digital photo organization software, I recommend you go for the deluxe version, which costs only $49.99.
You can download a trial version of the full-blown deluxe version to test it out.
Like most popular image cataloging software, the free version of this photo sorter has a host of amazing abilities.
Detect and Delete Duplicate Photos
This digital photo management software can easily detect duplicate photographs on your computer and delete them, saving precious disk space.
Batch Process Photos Simultaneously
This best photo album software boasts of a batch processor too, which allowed me to update the metadata of several photographs at once.
Password Protected Zipped Files
You can depend on this digital photo organizing software to password protect zip files so that only individuals with whom you have shared the password can extract the images.
NOTE: Magix organizes both photos and videos.
Share Photographs to Social Media Sites
Call me crazy, but you can use this digital picture manager to share photographs to social media sites like Flickr and Facebook, directly from the software.
Import Photos from Camera, Scanner, Cloud Services, and Other Media
The deluxe version of this picture catalog software allows you to directly import your images from various cloud services. If this is not enough, this picture library software allows me to import media directly from my camera or scanner.
Supports Various Photo Formats
This personal image manager effortlessly manages a wide range of photo formats including RAW images.
While writing a photo album software review, I always give preference to programs that have filters to enhance the image. The deluxe version of Magix allows me to do just that.
Great Support and Forum
This company has the best technical help support staff I have ever seen, plus their website has a useful forum.
Available for Windows – Yes
Available for Mac – No
4. BlazePhoto
Priced at $29.95, BlazePhoto appears to be a fast and effective image collection software.
Upload and Share Pictures to Facebook, Flickr, and More
Although it is not an online photo organizer per se, it allows you to share your images via email as well as upload your favorite pictures to Flickr or Facebook for online sharing.
Edit the Images – If You Need to
This is one of the few image management tools that permits you to edit, share, as well as view your photographs from portable devices as well as your computer's hard disk drive. Make use of this picture organizer program to flip your photos or crop and resize them.
I love photo organizer software that permits me to adjust saturation, hue, contrast, and brightness. This photo management system allowed me to do all these: remove red eye plus add text, clips, filters, and frames.
Locate Your Photos from Wherever they Are Stored
Its image management systems allowed me to locate photographs from my camera, scanner, hard disk drive, and much more.
Apply Effects – If Needed
This amazing digital picture organizer software also has other effects such as equalize, stretch, and normalize. I also noticed other special effects in this digital image organizer software such as windy, motion, music, gray, and emboss.
Correction and Conversion
You can correct overexposed or blurry images in a few seconds with the help of this digital photo library software.
Simple to Use
What makes this digital photo catalog software unique is its simplicity of use. Even a novice editor can correct photographs as well as manage digital photos.
Best App To Organize Photos On Mac On Macbook Pro
Easily Create Slideshows and Albums
In addition, BlazePhoto allows me to store and share my photographs in various ways. It allows me to convert photos into video slideshow, DVD or CD slideshow, as well as HTML albums. One can also export them to other storage media, print the output or even send to family and friends via e-mail.
The vendor also offers a free version that you can use for evaluation purposes.
Available for Windows – Yes
Available for Mac – No
5. Cyberlink PhotoDirector 10
I doubt if you are a serious photographer if you have not heard about this awesome digital photo gallery software.
Make no mistake, in as much as PhotoDirector is an editor, it is equally an organizer as it helps you to store, share, backup and easily retrieve your photo files.
Storage and Backup of Photographs
Like BigMIND, PhotoDirector also has a cloud storage capacity with a CyberLink Cloud storage space of 25GB. With this, you can access your media creations or photographs from anywhere in the world.
You can backup your photo files just as easily as saving a file on your PC. You can easily retrieve them as well.
The advantage the cloud storage has is that your photo files will not be affected should your computer crash or when you perform a system upgrade. All your media files, together with all settings, can be easily restored.
I would go as far as to say that it is, unarguably, the best online photo library software going by catalog management software reviews and the ability of PhotoDirector to safely store, organize and backup your photographs.
Versions and Pricing
It is available in two versions: PhotoDirector 10 Ultra and PhotoDirector 365. Ultra costs $69.99 while version 365 costs $37.99 for a single year license which is an average of $3.17 per month. If you choose a monthly payment for version 365, you'll get to pay $14.99 per month.
The above prices are as a result of the discounts offered at this time.
Powered by an artificial intelligence engine, this image database management program has everything that you might have dreamed about.
Save Time with ‘One-click Photo Presets'
Are you wasting time creating split tones on your color pictures or trying to convert them to black and white? You can perform this job in a matter of seconds with the help of the included “one-click photo presets.”
This is one of the rare programs, which, apart from being the best for casual users, provides lots of features to professionals too.
The biggest advantage of this photo management system is that it allows you to complete difficult editing tasks with a few clicks of the mouse button.
Capture Photographs from within PhotoDirector – when Connected to A Camera
The latest version of this program has a new feature called “tethered shooting.” This permits you to capture photographs from a connected camera directly from within the program. You no longer have to load the images on the software before editing them.
This feature comes in handy when you are creating a stop motion animation or in case you are shooting inside a studio.
Ease of Use
I loved the way the tools are clearly set up as tabs, a clear shift from other similar programs that tend to lump all things into a single palette, which could be confusing for new users.
The latest version also has new features such as:
• Background music download for slideshow creator
• Layer clipping mask
• Layer mask
• AI style effects
• Adjustment Layers
• Advanced text editing in layers, Content-aware clone
• Layer grouping,
• Importing of GIFs as a multi-image sequence
• Additional watermark templates
• Enhanced lens correction, and much more
• Layer clipping mask
• Layer mask
• AI style effects
• Adjustment Layers
• Advanced text editing in layers, Content-aware clone
• Layer grouping,
• Importing of GIFs as a multi-image sequence
• Additional watermark templates
• Enhanced lens correction, and much more
The Best Digital Picture Software for Organization
I have reviewed five different photo management software. To be frank, they are all good programs as I was pleased with the performance of all of them.
However, after reviewing all of the five programs that manage digital photos, I can safely say that Movavi, PhotoDirector and, perhaps, BigMIND Photography (for those who need plenty of picture cloud storage space) are together the best digital pictures software for managing photographs.