Simple, touch-friendly interface. Good photo browsing and searching features. Solid selection of image-correction tools. Automatically creates albums. Cool video editing effects. Cons No star ratings or before-and-after view. Cannot tag faces.
Does not support panorama stitching or selective focus. Bottom Line With the addition of slick but simple video editing tools, the Microsoft Photos app becomes a respectable entry-level media-creation toolbox. Microsoft Photos, the free photo viewer and editor included with Windows 10, gets a huge update with the.
In addition to solid image editing and photo enhancements, it now offers video editing in a touch-friendly interface. Photos also now lets you mark up images with drawings, add background music and 3D effects to videos, and search more easily, thanks to automatic object tagging. Microsoft Photos is an excellent tool for working with digital images, one that could even replace higher-end for some users.
Note, however, that it still lacks such abilities as face tagging and a map view. Note that Windows still comes with Paint, which is more about one-at-a-time image resizing, drawing, and saving to different image formats. Starting with Windows 10 Creators Update, you also get, which offers easy 3D modeling, decoration, and sharing. A Clear Interface The interface for Photos is segmented into three main modes: Collection, Creations, and Folders. Collection organizes everything by date. Creations includes both automatically created albums, albums you create yourself, and video projects.
Folders shows images by file location. From any mode, you can click on an individual photo for viewing and editing. Photos is geared toward simplicity and touch.
The Mac is still the best device for serious photo editing, so you need some serious photo editing apps to make an impact. The built-in Photos app on Mac offers several useful photo editing tools. You can crop, adjust lighting and color, set the white balance, add filters, remove unwanted blemishes, and a.
By contrast, Apple's Photos app for the Mac only supports the limited (though well-implemented) touch capabilities of the latest MacBooks' Touch Bar. In Microsoft's version, Zooming and un-zooming require a simple tap on the image or a spin of the mouse wheel. I wish, however, that there were a before-and-after viewing feature that you could use to revert back to the original during editing. A big change in Microsoft Photos' interface is the use of horizontal sliders, instead of the circular dial controls used to adjust brightness and other options. The circular controls were innovative, but they did take some getting used to, whereas the sliders are completely familiar. Photos and its new sliders work fine on high-DPI displays like that of my 4K-resolution all-in-one PC test machine. Viewing and Organizing Photos Any images and videos in your Photos user folder and its subfolders (including Screenshots) show up in the Photos app.
![Photo Photo](http://thesweetsetup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fantastical-Hero-1.jpg)
You can add any other folders on your system to view their contents in the Folders section, as well as enabling viewing of cloud folders. Including OneDrive means that any photos shot on smartphones set up with auto-upload appear in your Collection view. The Photos app also includes an Import option that works with any storage device you plug into the computer. It supports raw camera files—a plus for those who take digital photos seriously. One organizational highlight is that Microsoft Photos creates albums for you automatically, based on date groupings, just as Apple Photos does with its Memories.
The difference is that with the Windows app you can edit the albums to taste. Apple doesn't give you any input into which photos go in your Memories. Both Apple and Microsoft let you share your online galleries via links. You can also create your own custom albums, and adding shots is a snap from within the album or from the Photo view. You get options to zoom, enhance, edit, and share individual photos as you work with them. You can also play a slideshow or draw on a photo.
The drawing tool works with mouse, stylus, or finger, and the selection of tips and colors is decent. The eraser, however, is a bit blunt. It can only erase an entire stroke, rather than letting you touch up your drawing on a more granular pixel-by-pixel level.
The app is missing couple of the views I like to see in photo editing apps. For example, there's no Map view of all your geotagged photos—which includes most mobile photos. You can, however, see a map location on individual photos' File Info panels. This also reveals EXIF data and file dimensions. Photos also offers no way to rate photos with stars or apply keyword tags, though you can do both of those things in File Explorer.
Editing Photos The app's Enhance tool is probably the first thing you want to try after hitting Edit. I find that it usually bumps up contrast and saturation, fixes white balance, and often does make for a better-looking image, if one that doesn't always reflect the drabness of reality. It's pretty good with skies and knocking back highlights for a better look at the clouds, and it does a good job correcting white balance on overly warm indoor shots, too. You can adjust the strength of the Enhance tool's effects with a slider.
There are also 15 more filter effects to play with, and the strength of each is adjustable, too. Included are four black-and-white options, with different levels of contrast and sharpness. Applying one of these and then scaling back its strength lets just a smidge of color into your black-and-white shot—it's an effective and interesting technique. I am happy to see that the app lets you adjust not only exposure and contrast, but also highlights and shadows.
Color editing is also an option, and I often use the Clarity slider (similar to that in ), which controls sharpness and black point. Microsoft no longer offers selective-focus (also known as tilt-shift) or colorpop tools as it did in the previous incarnation of the app, and it doesn't offer the sort of noise and chromatic-aberration-reduction tools you get in. There are, however, simple and effective red-eye and blemish removal tools, and a vignette slider is available in the Adjust tools.
Once you've perfected your edits, you can either save a copy or overwrite the original. When just viewing, rather than editing an image, however, there's no option to save the picture as a different file type or to a different location.
Editing Video Given all the clip joining, trimming, titles, effects, and background music capacities, the features in Photos are extensive enough to merit a separate app. But Microsoft keeps things simple with a single media editor and saves you the hassle of launching a separate program. Plus, many people will use it to join still photos to create video slideshows, complete with Ken Burns motion effects. You get to the Photos app's video-editing features via the Create Menu, which offers three options: Video Remix, Video Projects, and Album. With the Remix choice, you simply select videos and photos and the app determines how to trim video clips adds effects and background music. You can edit everything it's done, or tap a big Remix button to see your content restyled.
I appreciate that you can still use search when adding clips. For hands-on video editing, you choose Video project from the Create menu; or you can select a few clips and photos and click Add to and then New video from the top menu bar. Doing this also results in a precut video project. Clips appear in storyboard view, so you can drag and drop to reorder them.
Trimming component clips is crystal clear, with markers to show in and out points, you can even slide a selection to get the same time length on a different stretch of your video. Purists will cringe, but mobile videographers will be delighted that you can produce videos in portrait orientation as well as standard 16:9 or 4:3 landscape. Even savvy phone users sometimes forget to rotate their handsets when shooting clips.
A less automated but still prefab way to produce your video is to use a theme to filters, text styles, and soundtracks. The filters come in 11 flavors from Sepia, to Loved. Unlike the photo filters, the intensity of themes isn't adjustable. Text styles run the gamut from Classic to Electric and Boom. The last applies that nifty trick of using your video content as the filling of the letters. Other consumer video editing software like and CyberLink PowerDirector only recently added this capability. Microsoft showed 3D video effects at its Build conference last May, but those differed from what's in the Fall Creators version of Photos.
Instead of using 3D models you create in Paint 3D or get from remix3d.com (Microsoft's online 3D object sharing site), you can choose from 42 prefab effects ranging from balloons to explosions to butterflies. These are fun, and the ability to anchor them to moving objects (for motion tracking) is impressive. Motion tracking is also an option when you draw on top of videos. You do this from the individual clip view rather than the video project view, however. You get a choice of a ballpoint pen, pencil, or calligraphy pen.
For when you mess up, there's an eraser. For slideshows, there's a full assortment of zooming and panning combinations. In all, Photos's video-creation tools are simple yet effective, especially for those who want to create something enjoyable but have no interest in getting into the weeds of things like timeline tracks and keyframes. Sharing and Output. Anything you do in Photos can be shared via the standard Windows 10 share icon at top right to any photo-accepting installed on your PC—Mail, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter, and so on. For photos and albums, you can get a link and have the recipient view them online via OneDrive—no account needed. For videos, you get three options before sharing: S, M, and L.
The first is lowest resolution, for sharing via email or to mobile screens. M is good for online, and L is for big screens. After rendering, you simply hit the up-arrow icon to send the current image to the destination of choice. The share panel has a new position in Windows 10 Creators Update—right in the center of the screen for maximum visibility, instead of off to the side as in earlier versions.
You can print your photos via the standard Windows 10 printing utility. There's no built-in, though, and the Windows apps for Snapfish, PhotoAffections, and Walgreens didn't offer share targets at the time of testing. Some big services like Shutterfly, Winkflash, York, and RitzPix don't even offer apps. The situation contrasts markedly with Apple Photos on macOS, which offers photo, book, and poster printing right from within the app. Of course, a simple website visit can get your Windows photos printed with the services mentioned above. If you sync your photos to OneDrive, there are printing options from that service's Photos view.
A final sharing option is to send an album to. This is an online Office component that lets you build a storytelling website. With it, you can add titles and captions with lots of design choices. It also lets you add tweets and file downloads from Facebook and OneDrive, along with custom embed code. Simple Photo and Video Editing For simple viewing, tuning up, and sharing of digital photos and videos, the free Microsoft Photos is an excellent option. After using photo and video-editing programs loaded down with menus and panels and features, it can be a joy to use one that's easy to use, clear, and has what you need for basic viewing and fixes. Of course, for really powerful photo organization, optimization, and effects, you need a full-featured application like one of our Editors' Choices, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, or Photoshop CC.
And if you really want to go to town with your videos, get, our enthusiast Editors' Choice video editor, though it's far more complex. For most users, most of the time, Microsoft Photos is a solid choice for managing, editing, and sharing photos and videos.
Viewing and organizing photos is a common thing people do on their computer. Recently, I received a mail from a reader John. He wrote that he is searching for an alternative to Photos App and what are the best image viewers for Mac.
Hello Saurabh, I have been using Mac for years, and I store and manage all my photos on my Mac Mini. I know that I can press spacebar to get a preview of the selected photo on the finder.
But I don’t like Mac’s built-in photo editing and viewing options and I don’t want to spend money on Adobe’s Image Management apps. Can you recommend me some of the best image viewers for Mac? Thanks John One thing that I don’t like with finder’s image preview is that to navigate all photos through arrow keys on keyboards, you need to select them with Command-A.
On Windows 10, Microsoft has a good photo viewing app called Photos where you can view photos and start a slideshow. Let’s take a look at some of the best image viewing apps on Mac. Best Image Viewers for Mac Sequential is a slick and good looking image viewer for Mac OS X. It supports all common image formats including jpg, PNG, GIF. Additionally, Sequential can open files in ZIP, RAR and PDF format.
One of the unique features of Sequential is that it can open CBZ and CBR formats that are used for digital comics. With Sequential, you can easily open a folder containing images and then view them in the correct order. At the time of writing, the app is completely free. Sequential for Mac is a good image viewing software Its lightweight too, making sure that it will run well even on your aging Mac Mini or MacBook Air. Xee While costs $4 on the Mac app store.
The streamlined user interface and good functionality. Xee can open all photos inside a folder and compressed archives.
After launching Xee, you can see an image and its metadata. The image viewer of Xee is fairly minimalistic and it hides al unnecessary info when you are inside a preview. Just like Sequential, Xee can also open CBR and CBZ files making it good for reading comics. One of the strong points of Xee is its good support of gestures. You can zoom and rotate images with your touchpad. If all you want is a minimal and strong image viewer for Mac, Xee is worth a look. Xee on Mac OS XnView is a popular image viewer.
The developer claims that XnView has support for almost 500 different formats. In my testing, it did open most types of image formats that I had.
As a cherry on top, XnView can also convert images to another format should you need to. XnView’s features don’t stop there. It has built-in options for applying basic fixes and filters. Also, it can create slideshows for you. In image management departments, XnView has great support for batch renaming, metadata management, and a duplicate file finder. XnView is one of the best image viewers for Mac XnView makes it a great replacement for built-in photo preview in finder if you deal with tons of image formats every day or you want some extra control with your pictures. It is free for personal use and does not include any adware or spyware.
Google Picasa is probably one of the most polished image viewers for Mac OS. Sure, Google Killed off Picasa recently, but the photo viewer app is still polished enough for most people. The Picasa Photo Viewer is fast, stable and still looks and performs as good as most other photo viewers for Mac. Rather than looking like an image viewer in Android’s Gallery app, the Photo Viewer for Mac has a similar feeling to a media player. You can press Enter key on your keyboard to see any image in the fullscreen mode, and if you need, with just one click, you can start a slideshow. Now that Google has shut down Picasa’s web service, the image upload feature will not be supported. Still, the app should run fine, and you can always use other services to upload photos to the cloud.
Even if you don’t want advanced image editing that Picasa offers, you should give Picasa a try. I have been using it on all my computers, and it has never let me down. GIMP If you have been editing photos for some time, you must have heard about. It’s a powerful image edition program that has been around for decades. It is an open source application that supports not only viewing but it also has airbrushing, fixing, penciling and a ton of other features. GIMP for Mac UI opens with a folder and file directly tree on is left pace.
Next to it is a set of thumbnail images and there are buttons with a set of commands surrounding these panes.