Nor can you add text or shapes, or make selections. You can’t sharpen or blur individual spots in the picture, for example, or fix the brightness/darkness of regions of the picture. There’s a Heal tool, but there’s an absence of pen or brush-based tools in the Edit toolkit. If it’s image editing features you are interested in you can apply the same Instagram-like filters as are available in the iOS version of the app, but you can also adjust light and color, switch to black & white, eliminate red-eye, adjust white balance, reduce noise and sharpen.

You can also search for all your photos with cats, plants, or the sea in them, for example. Add a year to the search to see every photo of that person in that year. Searching for images can be made easier by identifying People in them so that you can, for example, see every image featuring a particular person in your library. You can assign photos to Albums and Shared Albums and Projects. It arranges your pictures and videos into the same Years, Collections and Moments as on iOS. The app is a great tool for organizing your photos. It’s not a professional image editing app, but it is easy to use and will do for basic to moderate photo management, and quick image tweaking. Photos has more in common with Photos for iOS and very little in common with Aperture. When Apple replaced iPhoto with Photos in 2015 it also stopped selling another photo app, Aperture, which offered more advanced image editing.

Prior to 2015 Photos on the Mac was iPhoto. It’s completely free, easy to use, and has the benefit of syncing across all your devices if you take advantage of Apple’s iCloud Photo Library (for which you will need to pay for iCloud storage, from $0.99/£0.79 a month for 50GB). Photos is the free photo editing and image library app on every Mac, iPhone and iPad.

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