No software is immune to the AI craze, including Apple Photos. It’s an indispensable photo editing app for Mac and iPhone users that syncs your photos between those platforms and supports Live Photos, Portrait Mode, and the ProRaw format for newer iPhones. It’s free with the purchase of any Mac and offers some of the features you typically see in professional software, including HSL color editing, noise reduction, a vibrance tool, and tone curves. Generative AI remove and powerful search tools are among the updates for the latest version. If you’re a hobbyist photographer with Apple devices, there’s no reason not to use it. As such, Apple Photos is an Editors’ Choice winner for entry-level photo editing software, an honor it shares with the cross-platform Google Photos.
How Much Does Apple Photos Cost?
The price of an Apple computer, phone, or tablet is all you pay to use Apple Photos, which comes preinstalled on those devices. In fact, you can’t uninstall it from macOS without taking extreme measures that include command-line operations. If you want to work between operating systems, use Adobe Photoshop Elements or Photoshop instead.
If you want to use Apple’s cloud-syncing iCloud Photos features, you pay for any online storage above 5GB. Fees range from 99 cents per month for 50GB to $59.99 for 12TB, but the sweet spot for most users is probably the $9.99-per-month 2TB plan. The web interface for iCloud Photos is very limited, with no editing or search capabilities, something both Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive offer. But it does a good job of syncing your photos between iPads, iPhones, and Macs.
For comparison, Google Photos is free and includes 15GB of online storage; you pay $9.99 per month for 2TB. Adobe Photoshop Elements costs $99 for a three-year license. Adobe Lightroom costs $11.99 per month and includes 1TB of cloud storage. The full-featured CyberLink PhotoDirector costs $54.99 per year as a subscription, and the more professional-level Capture One and DxO PhotoLab are one-time purchases of $299 and $229, respectively.
What’s New in Apple Photos?
This latest version of Apple Photos comes with a redesign and some Apple Intelligence features. Here are all the additions and changes:
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Clean Up tool for removing distracting objects or people in a photo
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Collections automatically organize your library by topics such as Days, Trips, People and Pets, and Featured Photos
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Custom Memory movie creation based on search using names and activities (mobile-only)
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Favorites album appears in the Utilities collection in addition to Pinned Collections
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Groups in People and Pets include photos of people or pets who frequently appear together
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Improved search with event, object, and people recognition
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Recently Viewed and Recently Shared album history can be cleared
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Updated interface
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Utilities include collections like Documents, Receipts, recently edited, viewed, and shared
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Video speed control lets you slow down high frame rate video content with in and out points
Getting Started With Apple Photos
As mentioned, Apple Photos is preinstalled on macOS; there isn’t even a Mac App Store entry for it. There is an App Store entry for the iOS and iPadOS versions, however. When you first run Apple Photos on macOS, a message box with the new features appears, and the app might update your library. The software is a Universal app, meaning it runs natively on both Apple silicon- and Intel-based Macs.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
The interface is clear and easy to navigate, though you could easily miss the faint Edit option on the right side at the top, which opens up an impressive number of detailed photo-editing tools. Collection and organization options are always available in the left sidebar, and any adjustment tools you open appear in the right-side panel. That sounds like an obvious behavior, but Apple Photos didn’t always work like that. If you wanted the Levels adjustment tool in the past, for example, you had to add it as an option every time you opened a new photo.
Gone are the viewing mode buttons across the top. Instead, you navigate entirely from the left rail. It’s always present except when you’re viewing a full-screen version of a single image. Even then, you can push the cursor to the left edge to show it. That rail includes (in order) Library, Favorites, Recently Shared, and Maps sections, along with a whole bunch of Collections (Days, People, Memories, Trips, and more). A Media Types section within Collections lets you specifically view selfies, Live Photos, panoramas, and the like.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Photo Info, accessible either via the Cmd-I shortcut or the Get Info icon in the top-right set of buttons when you’re viewing a single photo, appears as a dialog in the center of the image—not as a sidebar the way it does in Lightroom and Microsoft Photos. I find the sidebar view more convenient since the dialog covers part of the photo you’re trying to look at, but you can at least move it around. The Info box shows details such as camera model, exposure settings, optional keywords, tagged faces, and a map (if location data is available). You can add a caption in this panel, and it will sync across your connected devices. You don’t have the option to view full EXIF data, however, as you can in Lightroom.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
The full-screen view works well. I like that you can zoom whether you’re viewing or editing. A button at the top left lets you quickly compare the edited image with the original, but you can’t compare versions side-by-side, as you can in many other photo editing programs. Another strange design decision is that there’s no button or menu choice for 100% or Actual Size viewing. That said, you can usually tap Z to zoom to 100%.
Importing and Organizing Photos
When you connect a memory card to your Mac, Photos usually opens its Import screen. It can handle raw camera files from popular digital cameras, including more recent formats like Canon’s CR3 and Nikon’s NEF for its Z line of mirrorless cameras. You can see a full list of camera models it supports on this page. The app even has a left sidebar option under Media Types to show only raw photos, which now includes the ProRaw format used by iPhone 12 Pro models and later (they combine the iPhone’s processing of multiple images to create a quasi-raw format). You can also shoot in raw mode on any iPhone dating back to 2014 with apps like Adobe Lightroom Mobile.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
The Library page simply groups your images by date. You can zoom from years to months to days. In previous versions of the program, Apple experimented with a tiled view that showed the photos in different sizes, but now you have only two view choices: Aspect Ratio grid and Square Photo grid. I find the first more helpful since it shows whether photos are in portrait or landscape orientation.
Your sole option at import is to choose whether to delete images from the memory card after import. I don’t recommend this because you might want the photos on another system, and the import could fail. If you want more choices on import—such as applying presets, file renaming, or keyword tagging—look to a more powerful tool, such as Lightroom or CyberLink PhotoDirector.
There are a few ways to see your iPhone photos in Apple Photos on the Mac. You can sync your iPhone using iTunes, sync photos to iCloud, or plug your phone in via the USB port, which reveals the Import button at the top right. You could also use the separate Image Capture utility, but Photos isn’t available in a file’s Open With list in Finder. Also, when I imported this way, my Live Photos turned into still. If you sync, you can edit Live Photos with the editing tools.
Once you import your photos, the application offers respectable organization capabilities, much of which are automatic. The Albums view, for example, groups images by People, Places, Screenshots, and Selfies. You can apply keyword tags, locations, and ratings to any photo and designate favorites with a heart icon. Apple Photos also lets you create custom Albums.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
A very cool and unique feature of Apple Photos is Look Up. This compares your photo with information from sources such as Wikipedia and places a button over a detected object. When you press the button, a pop-up panel provides information about the object. It worked well with birds, as the description of a Great Kiskadee above shows. The feature identified a Brown-throated Sloth, too. It had trouble identifying the tallest building in Brooklyn but aced the Flatiron Building in downtown Manhattan. You can double-click on the panel to go to the web for more info on your object.
Photo Editing
Even before you start editing in earnest, you get buttons for Auto Enhance and Rotate. To get to the editing tools, you select a photo and click Edit. A panel of tools opens and the background turns black, which is helpful for concentrating on the image. Sections in the right panel for Color, Light, Retouch, White Balance, and so on are collapsible and expandable.
Across the top of the editing screen are three main choices: Adjust, Filters, and Crop. To the right are more quick-edit options, including Auto Enhance, Heart, Info, and Rotate. A three-dot icon lets you add extension photo tools like Perfectly Clear and Picktoria. Although the list of plug-ins isn’t as extensive as what’s available for Photoshop Elements, you can find a bunch more if you hunt around the web. Once you finish with the external app, Apple Photos preserves the photo corrections.
The Enhance auto-correct tool is among the best I’ve tested. Auto-correct tools generally brighten photos, but Apple Photos also knows when an image needs darkening. I also like that it shows you exactly which adjustments it changed, something that Lightroom does, too.
The Brilliance adjustment reduces highlights and pumps up shadows simultaneously, which can help an image look more balanced (the result is similar to an HDR effect). All the lighting tools I normally look for are present: Black Point, Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows. Controls for Definition Histogram, Levels, Noise Reduction, Sharpen, and Vignette are always accessible from expandable menus, too. Curves is another pro-level tool, giving you a powerful way to adjust image tones.
I appreciate that Apple Photos’ adjustment sliders show you exactly how your photo looks with the adjustment in small thumbnails above the controls and that double-clicking returns them to their original state.
Noise reduction works as well as it does in most of the general photo software competition, though not as well as targeted apps like DxO PureRAW and Topaz DeNoise AI. It smooths out graininess, and an Auto button makes a reasonable guess as to how strong the effect should be for the current photo. Missing are any chromatic aberration fixes, lens-profile-based corrections, or perspective and geometry tools. For those, look to DxO PhotoLab or Adobe Lightroom.
The Vibrance slider takes a page out of Lightroom’s playbook. According to Apple’s help resources, it “adjusts the color contrast and separation between similar colors in the photo.” I would simply say that it provides a more realistic juicing-up of the colors than simply pushing the Saturation slider. Another tool is Definition, which, similar to Lightroom’s Clarity slider, adds midtone contrast and edge sharpness.
A right-click option lets you create a duplicate of your current edit, which is helpful. I like the Revert to Original button and right-click choice for those times when you need to start over. Each editing group has an undo arrow of its own, another helpful touch.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag )
The Crop tool includes straightening with an on-screen protractor for angle measurement. You get the standard aspect ratio presets like 1:1 and 16:9. There’s even an Auto option, if you want to let the program decide how to crop and straighten your image. That said, it didn’t impress me in testing. It gave me one funny result, leaving a person’s head parallel with the image edge but with everything else skewed since the person was leaning.
Apple Photos’ nine Filters won’t wow fans of those effects, but you can get more incremental changes by adjusting the light and color after a filter. The filters are meant to enhance images rather than slap on zany looks. You get Vivid and Dramatic options (each with Warm and Cool choices), along with three tasteful black-and-white filters. They’re adjustable with a Strength slider, as are Photoshop Elements’ highly adjustable filters. If you really want to test the limits of photo filters, check out ON1 Photo RAW or Skylum Luminar.
The Blemish Removal tool lets you select a source area, but the AI-powered Retouch tool did a fine job by itself of replacing a blemish on skin next to dark glasses. The Red-eye correction continues to be excellent, too. Its automatic mode finds the eyes and yields well-delineated, jet-black pupils.
Clean Up With Apple Intelligence
Similar to Google Photos’ Magic Editor, Apple Photos’ Clean Up tool can remove objects or people from a photo using generative AI. Clean Up shows a beautiful glowing selection area before removing selected objects immediately. Other similar tools let you erase from or add to the selection first, but Apple’s results were impressive. You can remove more objects after the first cleanup. In my test shot, a sneaker remained, but brushing over it re-created the rocks underfoot. You can simply click on an object to select it in Apple Photos; with Google Photos, you paint on the area you want to remove. Another benefit of Apple’s version is that it’s available on both desktop and mobile.
Video Editing and Live Photo Tricks
(Credit: Apple/PCMag )
Apple Photos lets you edit video content in addition to photos. You can apply not only color and lighting adjustments but also filters. And you can crop video content. What you don’t get for videos are red-eye correction and retouching. You can change the focus point, adjust the level of blur, or simply turn the blurring off.
The most fun that iPhone users will have with the Photos app comes courtesy of three very cool effects that work only with Live Photos: Bounce, Long Exposure, and Loop. The first and third are actually video or animated GIF-type effects. Bounce plays a video clip forward and backward and works well with actions such as diving into a pool; it also looks great with fireworks. Loop does what its name implies, repeating a short video endlessly. But rather than just being a simple repeat effect, Loop adds transparency to moving objects between plays for a ghostly look. Long exposure has a couple of good uses. You can use it to blur background motion, such as car traffic, or to make a stream or waterfall look glassy.
I like that you can trim the ends of a Live Photo, although the trimming doesn’t apply to the effects above. It’s nice to be able to choose which still image to send to a person who doesn’t have Apple hardware and thus can’t view a Live Photo, although the Live Photo algorithms usually pick the best frame for the still.
Smart Search
Like Flickr, Google Photos, and Microsoft OneDrive, Apple Photos lets you search based on object categories. For example, you can type “dog” or “tree” to see all your shots of dogs or trees—and very quickly. Unlike Flickr and OneDrive, though, you can’t view a page of all the detected categories with automatically generated tags. This machine-learning-based feature has greatly improved in the last few years. It used to find faces in the patterns of a bush or misidentify a rabbit as a cat, but it’s well-nigh perfect now. The latest update makes search even more natural and powerful, accurately presenting images for searches like “Photos of John’s soccer championship two years ago” or “Brian and me at the lake last summer.” Oddly, it didn’t find anything for “Brian and I at the lake last summer.” Grammar, Apple!
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
You can now search by file extension but not by camera model, focal length, f-stop, or lens. One neat thing you can do with Apple Photos, however, is search for text in photos. At the bottom of the results, you see a Text Found in the Photos section, which successfully found a lot of my images containing the word “Windows” from various tech events.
Memories
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Automated album and movie creation has been in photo software for a while. Apple Photos calls this a Memory. You can view a Memory either as a gallery or a video, and you can choose from an expanded repertoire of background music (which adjusts to the length of the video). The video produced is now editable, so you can add or remove photos and change the title, though the app decides on timing and transitions. The iOS and iPadOS versions of Apple Photos let you ask the app to create a Memory with specific people and activities, like “John and me in Cape Cod last summer.” I hope the AI-powered Memory creation comes to the desktop.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Google Photos also lets you customize its auto-created highlight videos and even adjust the length of time a photo displays, trim video clips, and switch between vertical and horizontal aspect ratios. You can easily share those online. Adobe Photoshop Elements and Google Photos both go further with auto-creations than Apple Photos, including jazzy effects and animations. The Apple Photos Memories are still effective, however.
Tagging People
Apple claims that Photos, which scans your pictures without your permission, uses better face-recognition technology than in the past. Indeed, it no longer thought a dog’s face was human as it had in previous versions. Face recognition has improved in all the apps I’ve tried that use it. Apple Photos’ ability to correctly identify faces at different angles is especially impressive.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
Once the program finds faces, they appear in the People section. You can choose favorites and confirm additional faces. Each person gets a dedicated page similar to the program’s Memories pages. These show a cover image, what the program considers the best four shots of the person, related people, and a map if there are any geotagged images with the face. You can add a tagged person to a Memory if you want or create a combined Memory with a specific group of people.
iCloud Libraries and Sharing
You no longer have a good selection of sharing options from Apple Photos on the Mac unless you intend to share only inside the Apple ecosystem. Most people likely want to share photos on Facebook, Instagram, or another social platform, but Apple no longer offers those options. Moreover, you can send photos via email only if your default mail client is the stock Apple Mail app. The mobile versions of Apple Photos let you share to any photo-accepting apps you have installed.
In the Mac version of Photos, the standard up-arrow sharing icon by default sends images only directly to Apple services like AirDrop, iCloud, Messages, and email. The extension settings let you share to few other outlets, but installing apps like Twitter and WhatsApp didn’t add any. Oddly, I was able to share to OneNote. Apple definitely wants you to save all your photos to iCloud Photo Library. It’s part of Apple’s push to move all your data to iCloud. The company even makes an iCloud app for Windows, which can view Shared Albums (but not Shared Libraries).
Fee aside, iCloud Photos is a good service, especially if you are committed to the Apple ecosystem. It automatically makes all your images from all your Apple devices available to all the others. You can choose to download full image file sizes or compressed files to reduce the drain on your hard drive. It’s also what enables iCloud Photo Sharing, which creates persistent albums that you and those you share with can add photos to at any time. Google Photos and OneDrive have a similar feature.
Photo and Book Printing
For physical output, Apple Photos has respectable printing options, with Contact Sheet and custom aspect ratios. However, it’s not as advanced in this regard as Lightroom Classic, which includes soft proofing and custom layouts. Apple no longer offers first-party book printing, but you can install integrations with well-known printers like Mpix and access them from the Projects menu.
Verdict: Free and Powerful Photo Editing for Apple Users
Apple Photos is more than adequate for most photography novices and offers editing tools powerful enough to satisfy those who want some extra control. AI tools like object removal and smart search only add to its value, and iPhone shooters especially benefit from tie-ins with their phone’s camera. We wish the software had better sharing options, but that’s a minor complaint, given that it doesn’t cost anything extra to use. Apple Photos is an Editors’ Choice winner for entry-level photo software, alongside the equally capable and more generally available Google Photos.
The Bottom Line
If you own an Apple device and aren’t a professional photographer, you should use Apple Photos to edit your pictures.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
