With macOS, it’s easy to transfer your files, photos, and other data from a Windows PC to your Mac. Work with popular file types such as JPEG, MP3, and PDF, as well as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
Adobe’s Photoshop is now 25 years old and is arguably the pinnacle of photo editing. But, at £8.57/month, it’s also much more expensive than most people can afford, so here are 25 alternatives for 25 years of photoshoppery.
The five best …
Pixelmator - best for Mac
£22.99 - OS X
Pixelmator is arguably the best photo editor on a Mac. It handles even the largest photos with ease, replicates as many Photoshop tools as are generally required, as well as Photoshop file support, and has an excellent heal tool that can interpret what’s around it and fill in detail.
Excellent for quick touching up of photos to detailed manipulation for novices and pros alike. There’s even a very capable £7.99 iPad Pixelmator app with many of the same tools and ease of use that make the Mac app great.
Paint.net – best for Windows
Free - Windows
Paint.net started life as a simple replacement for Microsoft Paint, but evolved with new features such as multiple layers and more advanced photo editing tools. Today it is one of the fastest free photo editors for Windows, with a capable feature set that stops just short of some of the professional manipulation tools.
Excellent for quick edits, crops and the majority of daily photo editing. Best of all, it’s free.
Adobe Lightroom - best for bulk-managing photos
£99 - Windows, OS X
Arguably the best photo manager, Adobe Lightroom has enough tools, even for professionals, to avoid having to open up a separate image editor, including some of Photoshop’s healing and manipulation tools. It also has a solid collection of batch processing and automated correction tools based on lighting, lens and camera models, which makes it fast for most jobs.
Aviary Photo Editor - best for mobile
Free - Android, iOS
Aviary is a solid image editor with very capable image touch-up and resizing tools, now owned by Adobe. It’s straightforward interface makes it easy to use and has more to offer than most mobile editors obsessed with Instagram-style filters.
Autodesk Pixlr - best in the browser
Free - Windows, OS X, Android, iOS and web
Pixlr is a free jack of all trades photo editor with a solid tool set for almost any project. The web app is one of the most fully featured, while its mobile and desktop apps are also solid. Some of Pixlr’s most advanced features require a $15 a year subscription, but it has the backing of Autodesk, making of some of the best computer-aided design tools.
The best of the rest …
PaintShop Pro
£48 - Windows
Photoshop’s long-standing rival. PaintShop Pro is cheaper than its juggernaut of a rival but similarly specified. It lacks some of Photoshop’s most advanced features, and is bettered by some of its newer often-free competitors, but is still a capable editor.
Serif PhotoPlus X7
£79.99 - Windows
PhotoPlus is a solid all-round image editor for Windows from the company that created Affinity Photo for OS X. It has a decent set of tools, including lens correction tools and other favourites of photographers. The only downside is that many of the advanced tools require more manual manipulation than some other programs and therefore it isn’t as beginner friendly.
Photoshop Elements
£79.10 - Windows, OS X
Photoshop’s cut-down cousin Elements has improved dramatically over the last couple of years from a tool to avoid to a photo editor for everyone else. It has many of the same tools as its bigger brother, save for the advanced Content Aware Fill and a few other professional tools. Solid for most tasks, although free or cheaper tools with similar features are available.
Acorn 4
£22.99 - OS X
Another excellent image editor for OS X, Acorn is billed as the “image editor for humans”. It’s packed with advanced tools and filters but has a stripped back, simplified user interface that is designed to be familiar to Photoshop users and easy to pick up for notices.
Affinity Photo
Free - OS X (in beta)
Affinity Photo attempts to be Photoshop on a budget, but not dumbed down. It’s fast, packed with advanced tools and is aimed at professionals. Part of that tool set is end-to-end CMYK 16-bit per channel editing, RAW processing and a Photoshop Content Aware Fill-like tool called Inpainting.
Gimp
Free - Windows, OS X and Linux
Despite the unfortunate name – GNU Image Manipulation Program – Gimp is one of the most capable free open-source photo editors available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It has some very powerful tools, but isn’t as user friendly as some others.
Aperture
£59.99 - OS X
Apple’s long-standing photo organiser and editor, Aperture is one of the most efficient ways of tweaking groups of photos, and making and reviewing small adjustments. The magnifying loop tool is particularly effective. It’s simpler to use than many of its competitors and can be used in conjunction with iPhoto.
Apple Photos
Free - OS X
Photos is Apple’s replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture, which will be available in the spring. A preview was made available of the app, which is fast, with enough tools to make photo management and tweaks easy.
Picasa
Free - Windows, OS X
Picasa is Google’s photo manager and editor. It plugs into Google+, but is a solid simple organiser and can be accessed through the app or on the web. It has enough tools to quickly tune photos, with a few fancy filters thrown in.
ACDSee Pro 8
$99.99 - Windows
ACDSee is an Adobe Lightroom analogue with photo management at its heart. It is fast and effective, but has limited metadata sorting and no automatic correction based on lens profiles. It has enough editing tools to improve the odd photo, but some of it can be a clumsy mix of destructive and non-destructive editing.
The cheaper ACDSee 18 lacks some of the more advanced features but could be a good option for photo management.
Preview
Free - OS X
Apple’s built-in image and document viewer for OS X is a bit of a dark horse. Underneath its simple viewing exterior hides a fast and effective image editor that’s perfectly capable of cropping, resizing, reformatting and simple touchups. It is particularly good at editing a bunch of images at once.
Microsoft Paint
Free - Windows
Microsoft’s original image editor. It’s changed a bit in recent years and is still a solid, basic image editor. It’s worth a go for nostalgia’s sake at the very least, or for simple cropping and resizing jobs that really don’t require something as powerful as Photoshop.
Sumo paint
Free - web
A Photoshop facsimile in the browser, the free Sumo Paint is an excellent quick photo editor. Many of the advanced tools are only available in a $19 pro version, but for straightforward touching up of images, resizing and similar the free editor does the job.
PicMonkey
Free - web
PicMonkey is free, browser-based image editor with a solid feature set for simple photo touchups, adding text to images and adding frames. Images can be taken from a computer or various cloud services, including Dropbox and Flickr. A paid-for upgrade removes the ads and gives access to more fonts and effects.
FotoFlexer
Free - web
Billed as “the world’s most advanced online image editor” it has numerous features for most types of editing. Image manipulation tools are just a simple click and drag-a-slider away, but most tools have little in the way of guidance so beginners might struggle. Those looking for more powerful fill features will need to look elsewhere.
Ribbet
Free - web
Ribbet, despite it’s odd name and frog logo, is a quick and easy-to-use online image editor that does most of the editing for you, making it excellent for beginners or simple jobs. A few advanced tools are available, but better options are out there.
Fotor
Free - Windows, OS X, iPhone, Android and web
Fotor is a free image editor that’s available on just about any platform either in app or web app from. It has a good selection of tools, each with an easy-to-use sliding scale of effect. Batch editing is a bonus, as are the filter tools.
BeFunky
Free - Android, iOS and web
A quick and easy-to-use image editor that apes Instagram on the iPhone and Android, but with a few more tools. The web app is similarly simple, and solid for quickly customising photos before sharing them.
Snapseed
Free - Android, iOS
Snapseed is Google’s mobile image editor that’s been sidelined after it was acquired to be integrated into Google+. But the app still works and its tools, filters and easy-to-use touch controls are still some of the best around.
Photoshop Touch
£3.99 to £7.99 - Android, iOS
Photoshop Touch is Adobe’s touchscreen focused mobile variant, but it isn’t nearly as powerful or feature rich as its namesake. It has a selection of photo filters and some decent touchup tools, but it’s biggest selling point is integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which is useful for desktop Photoshop users.
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.
Updated: August 9, 2019 Home » Freeware and Software Reviews » Photoshop & Image Editing
Here is a complete list of 12 free alternative photo organizer, free of charge as oppose to ACDSee 10 Photo manager, they may not be the best but it does what it says – organize your images. Honestly, I find the build in Windows Explorer good enough for my daily photo browsing. Unless you are a power user, I do not see a need to purchase a photo viewer software when there are so many free software available.
Alternative Article ➤ 5 Free Online Photoshop Alternative Photo Editor
For those into James Bond or Sherlock Holmes investigation, this 2 simple tools might be useful – 2 Free FBI, CSI and CIA Software To Analyze Photoshopped Photos, it enables you to verify the authenticity of a photo, especially fake photos on Facebook.
↓ 01 – Adobe Bridge [ The Best ] | Windows | macOS
Is it really true that Adobe Bridge (the full version) is totally free to download and use forever, and I don’t have to pay for it or have a subscription? The answer is yes, it’s absolutely true – although not that many people know about it because Adobe hasn’t really publicized it widely.
Bridge CC gives you centralized access to all the files and assets you need for your creative projects. Organize personal and team assets, batch edit with ease, add watermarks, and set centralized color preferences. Bridge simplifies your workflow and keeps you organized. Works great on Microsoft Windows 10.
- Support for Retina and HIDPI displayers with the ability to scale
- Automated cache management
- Ability to quickly organize and stack panoramic and HDR images
- On-demand thumbnail and metadata generation
- Option to import photos and videos from your mobile device or digital camera on Mac OS
- Flexible batch processing
- Drag-and-drop file flexibility
- Centralized color settings
↓ 02 – Nikon ViewNX-i | Windows | macOS
Inheriting the comfortable operation of the conventional ViewNX 2 software, ViewNX-i features enhanced usability of the browsing functions, such as Photo Tray that lets users temporarily store files from various folders, for smooth operation when editing movies or printing still images.
ViewNX-i collaborates with both Capture NX-D that allows detailed adjustments to still images, and ViewNX-Movie Editor that offers easy movie editing. Furthermore, it is compatible with web services, providing smooth access. Make the most out of ViewNX-i to experience full enjoyment of your images with the same excitement as when you shot them.
↓ 03 – Apowersoft Photo Viewer | Windows
Apowersoft Photo Viewer supports various image formats and PDF files. It can also directly view HEIC/HEIF files on Windows directly. When viewing HEIF images, you can also save it as JPG, PNG or other formats. Aside from viewing images, you can also take screenshots, edit images and upload them in seconds.
With its friendly interface and powerful functions, Apowersoft Photo Viewer brings you the best experience in viewing images. It adopts efficient computing technology so that you can view an image the moment you click it.
↓ 04 – nomacs | Windows | macOS | Linux
nomacs is a free image viewer for windows, linux, and mac systems, which is licensed under the GNU Public License v3. nomacs is small, fast and able to handle the most common image formats including RAW images. Additionally it is possible to synchronize multiple viewers. A synchronization of viewers running on the same computer or via LAN is possible. It allows to compare images and spot the differences (e.g. schemes of architects to show the progress).
↓ 05 – digiKam Photo Manager | Windows | macOS | Linux
digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX. The people who inspired digiKam’s design are the photographers like you who want to view, manage, edit, enhance, organize, tag, and share photographs under Linux systems. digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application, which makes importing and organizing digital photos a “snap”. The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections.
Helps you to handle, edit and publish photos from your digital camera. All functions that you need to manage your photos and to impress your family, friends or customers with your photos are included in one piece of software. Easy to use and install. It is built around three basic functions: import, improve, impress.
↓ 06 – FastStone Image Viewer | Windows
FastStone Image Viewer is perhaps the closest software to ACDSee. FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, retouching and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen.
Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG).
↓ 07 – XnView | Windows | macOS | Linux
XnView is provided as FREEWARE (NO Adware, NO Spyware) for private or educational use (including non-profit organizations). XnView is an efficient multimedia viewer, browser and converter. Really simple to use! Support of more than 500 image formats. No Adware, No Spyware. XnView has all the basic features covered, and the best part is, it is modern and simple. XnView also provides a convenient Screen Capture module and Windows ™ TWAIN & WIA interface to capture images. Some other notable features of XnView are:
- Metadata support & Editing (IPTC)
- JPEG lossless Transforms
- Duplicate File Finder
- Batch Processing
- Batch Rename
- Print Module
↓ 08 – PhotoQt | Windows | Linux
PhotoQt is a simple, yet powerful and good looking image viewer, written in Qt, published as open-source, and completely free. Photo comes with a variety of features. Most features you would expect from a image viewer should be there. All features of PhotoQt are very easy to use. Should you happen to be confused about some feature, have a look at the settings. Pretty much everything can be adjusted in PhotoQt, and every setting comes with a short explanatory text.
↓ 09 – PicaJet Digital Photo Management | Windows
PicaJet offers direct import from your camera, image sharing via email or Web gallery, automatic photo enhancement, personal ratings and categories, as well as printing features. The photo organizer allows you to view your images by rating, keyword, or date/timeline and you can categorize your images by simple drag and drop.
In addition, it offers editing features to correct red-eye, cropping, image sharpening, and level adjustment. Additional features include direct CD/DVD burning, an image search engine with support for EXIF/IPTC/XMP data, slideshow maker, and a tool to generate a Web gallery from perfect templates. Version 2.5 build 495 has fixed troubles with running under domain network. PicaJet is a powerful, feature-rich, but highly customizable and convenient digital photo management and image database software that will efficiently organize your fast-growing digital image collection.
- Automatically organize thousands of photos in seconds
- Import from digital cameras, folders, CD or DVD, scanner or web-cameras
- 3D-acceleration support
- Auto-create categories using folders names
- Auto-create categories using IPTC keywords
- View image metadata (EXIF and IPTC)
Microsoft Photo Editor Para Mac
↓ 10 – Album Shaper | Linux
Album Shaper is an Open Source OpenGL-based Slideshow Viewer, it strives to be the most friendly, easy to use, open source application for organizing, annotating, framing, enhancing, stylizing, and sharing your digital photos. Album Shaper embraces open formats like XML, JPEG, and XSLT, while supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix users who speak a multitude of languages around the world.
↓ 11 – Fresh View Multimedia Organizer | Windows
Fresh View gives you the ability to organize and view multimedia files (images, audio, video). Watch movies, listen to music, and view graphics in a slide show. Image files in a folder can be displayed using a number of views, including a thumbnail view that lets you quickly see what your images are without having to open them.
You can convert graphics from one type to another, print, and even create an HTML album. This easy-to-use software supports 86 different formats (more and more added regularly). This software is 100% free, no ads, no spyware.
Paint For Mac
↓ 12 – WildBit Viewer | Windows
WildBit Viewer is compact & fast image viewer with slide show and editor. Eye catching interface within blazing fast folder, file list and thumbnail viewer. Viewer includes also Image Info with Image EXIF meta data JPEG and TIFF support and IPTC (IIMV4) information (like PhotoShop file info) from JPEG and TIFF, Thumbview has changeable views, sorting and thumbnail predefined sizes for fast thumbnail size setting.
WildBit Viewer also includes shell toolbar, you can drop your favorite folder there and use it as an organizer. It also includes image compare. In Compare you can compare images side-by-side. In Favorites you can save list of favorite images and load list later on and you can create custom show in to Slide Show also that list you can edit with Custom Show List Editor.
With Slide Show you can view images within 176 different transition effects. Slide Show includes now multi-monitor support for fast switching between two monitors. WildBit Viewer supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF and TGA (over 70 formats).
↓ 13 – Pictomio Image Management [ Discontinued ] | Windows
Picture Editor For Mac Free
Pictomio is a software application for managing, categorizing, searching, and archiving photos, videos and other media files, and allows you to generate animated 2D and 3D slideshows. The extensive capabilities of the latest programmable 3D graphic cards are utilized for image decoding and displaying slideshows.
The Pictomio software is composed of different parts: a photo browser, slideshow editor and slideshow viewer. Features: Image Manager, 3D Image Carousel, EXIF Editor, Liquid Zoom, Library, Image Rating, Album and Categories, Tools, Slideshow, Video Viewer. Pictomio is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.
↓ 14 – Inzomia Image Viewer [ Discontinued ] | Windows
Inzomia image viewer 3 is a very fast free zooming image viewer that will allow you to spend more time viewing pictures and less time waiting. It prepares the next image in the background as you are viewing. It has fullscreen mode and a number of layouts for different types of work. It can show zip and rar image archives. It remembers zoom. It has XML support to integrate into custom solutions. The Inzomia image viewer is available in two versions, one for commercial use and one free for non commercial use.
- Stop waiting for images to load, the inzomia image viewer prepares the next image in the background as you are viewing.
- Use all the screenspace for your images not a user interface. The inzomia image viewer has fullscreen mode and a number of layouts for different types of work. This allow you to use as much of your computer screen as possible for what is important.
- Save time by viewing zipped image archives directly without the need to first extract the image files.
- Organize and manage your digital photo collection with ease using thumbnailed image playlists that remembers zoom and rotatation.
↓ 15 – PicPerk Image Viewer [ Discontinued ] | Windows
PicPerk is an image viewer and editor that support most common graphic formats, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PCX, WMF, and TGA. The application enables you to open a specific image file and also enables you to open a folder and view and edit any image included in it. Along with the usual assortment of file operations, such as convert, copy, move, rename, delete, and print, PicPerk features thumbnails and full-screen viewing, zoom functions, and 33 image-editing effects, including crop, resize, and red-eye removal.
In addition, PicPerk features tools to display slide shows, to set and remove the desktop wallpaper, and to associate file types with it. In addition, PicPerk features tools to display slide shows, to set and remove the desktop wallpaper, and to associate file types with it.
↓ 16 – Google Picasa [ Discontinued ] | Windows | macOS | Linux
Note: Picasa is not available anymore, however, you can still download Picasa [ Microsoft OneDrive ] from archive.org. Transfer, find, organize, edit, print, and share images, all with this easy-to-use product. Watch Picasa automatically organize all your pictures into elegant albums by date. Having all your photos in one place means no more time wasted searching for folders or files. Take your photos further with Picasa from Google.
- The program works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras; it detects your USB driver and imports pictures into albums.
- Editing tools include cropping (standard or custom), removal of red-eye, and enhancing–even switching from color to black and white.
- Create slide shows set to your MP3s.
- E-mail photos with Picasa’s built-in client to take the guesswork out of compressing images, and order photo-lab quality prints or print at home with no mistakes.
- You can also make instant backups to CD (or to other hard drives) of your photo collections, to organize your photos using labels and stars (just like with Gmail), to write captions for all pictures, and to organize videos as well as pictures.
↓ 17 – Roxio MediaTicker [ Discontinued ] | Windows
MediaTicker is more than just a photo browser or newsreader – it’s the ultimate RSS media reader. Its unique scrolling format provides you with access to unlimited news headlines, photos, articles and forums while keeping it neatly out of the way so you can actually get on with your day. RSS feeds with thumbnails and full-size images are displayed right in the ticker, so instead of clicking on a text link for “Giants Win Superbowl LX”, you can click on a photo of the winning touchdown! RSS feeds that don’t have thumbnails will be displayed as text links along with a snapshot of the website from where the feed originated.
Get even more digital media with MediaTicker 3, which adds support for video files, more RSS feed types, and new media search options. Now enjoy your video collection the same way you enjoy your photo collection in the ticker, and add ANY RSS or Atom feed for even more news and blogs. Plus, you can now save your RSS feed list on your Roxio MyAccount so you can access your feeds from any MediaTicker or internet connected computer, or even from multiple computers simultaneously!
↓ 18 – Ai Picture Explorer [ Discontinued ] | Windows
Ai Picture Explorer (AiPICX) is an all-in-one graphics application that views, edits, enhances, manages and organizes photos — plays multimedia too. It empowers digital photo enthusiats with advanced batch image processing and conversion capabilities. Included Batch UnZipper extracts multiple ZIPs unattended. Integrated batch rename, move and delete functions seamlessly integrate with its Slide Album to help collectors review organize and delete image collections. Content providers (and collectors) can create thumbnailed HTML catalogs for DVD/CD media or simply track contents of removable media with contact sheets or comments and 3D navigation buttons. Novices will appreciate our Web Pages for Dummies wizard.
Its Slide Album can quickly find and thumbnail entire drives (or offline volumes on DVD/CD) and organize images by visual content to find modified duplicates – aside from database queries by date, size, keyword … Our proprietary Image Analysis routines can quantify and rank picture quality. You can also create impressive slideshows (or presentations) with choice of 173 cool effects, variable delays, windows-in-windows, gamma, background color, rotation, comments and other properties (per slide).
Picture Editor
↓ 19 – iBrowser [ Discontinued ] | Windows
iBrowser is an efficient image viewer and browser. It is optimized for fast thumbnail preview of folders with a large number of images. All popular graphic formats are supported. Image viewerPower features make iBrowser the best choice for everyday use. Among these features customizable interface layouts, advanced memory management, slideshow, format defining by signature, full screen view, animated images autoplay, copying to clipboard, intelligent large files support, set as wallpaper function, windows shell extension.
↓ 20 – Firehand Ember [ Discontinued ] | Windows
Firehand Ember is, very simply, the easiest to use, fastest, most feature-rich and highly-rated photo viewer and organizer available for your Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, NT 4, or Windows 2000 computer. If you create graphics, work with websites, use a digital camera or scanner, collect pictures from the Net, or simply receive photos from time to time from friends and family via Email, you need Ember. Version 7.2.1 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.