Best Photo App For Mac 2018

It’s no longer enough for a photo editing application to be great at what it does in isolation. Modern computing is defined by connected workflows. The ability to pass tasks seamlessly between devices, between contexts, and between coworkers is increasingly important.

Top Mac Apps 2018
Best Photo App For Blurring Pictures
Best Photo Slideshow Software For Mac 2018

That’s why, despite some potent new competitors, Adobe Lightroom remains our pick for the best photo editing and management application for mainstream users. Lightroom provides a strong editing and photo library management environment, but it also builds a powerful ecosystem of apps, learning resources, and community around those tools.

Download and install Brazil Football Team World Cup 2018 Dp Maker in PC and you can install Brazil Football Team World Cup 2018 Dp Maker 1.0 in your Windows PC and Mac OS. Brazil Football Team World Cup 2018 Dp Maker is developed by Free Best Photo Apps and listed under PHOTOGRAPHY. The best photo management software will land between $50 and $100. Typically, the more expensive programs will include editing tools and sharing features in addition to the organizational tools, while the least expensive will only focus on photo management and might provide a few basic editing tools.

It’s a joint pick, in fact, because Lightroom now exists as two distinct versions: the cloud-first Lightroom CC, and the familiar, more powerful Lightroom Classic CC. Both have their merits, and we’ll discuss what kind of user each is best suited for.

Get Our Best Photography Tips & Workflows

Transform your photos and edits from average to awesome with our in-depth, mobile photography course. It’s jam-packed with training, ideas, and lessons that can literally transform your photography overnight.

How We Chose

It’s important to note that this comparison is specific to photo editors that also provide Digital Asset Management (DAM) features.

This all-in-one approach is appealing not only because it provides an integrated workflow, but because it allows you to manage your photo files with more organizational control than a simple file structure would. We’re interested in tools that are designed to take you from initial import and culling all the way to final polish and export.

As a result, while standalone editors like Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator Pro, Skylum Luminar, etc. are fantastic at what they do, they are beyond the scope of this piece.

Main Criteria

That first restriction narrowed our field of contenders significantly, and from there we considered the remaining apps according to the following characteristics:

Features and processing quality: It’s all too common to see photo editors judged based on their initial rendering of a file rather than the potential results after processing. While initial rendering can be a useful data point, it doesn’t say enough about the quality of the processing engine.
We took the time to comparatively edit a variety of photos across all the apps in an effort to see which provided the best results up front, which provided the most editing leeway, and which got us from raw file to edited output most efficiently.
Design and ease of use: Though much of the core functionality is shared between apps in this category, the way tools are presented, how granular the controls are, and how customizable the interface is can all influence how you work.
We looked for something that’s relatively easy to start with, but has room for growth as your needs and skills develop.
Ecosystem: A crucial aspect of an app’s appeal is the ecosystem of supporting resources that build up around it, both from the manufacturer and from third parties.
The availability of communities, tutorials, classes, presets, etc. can not only help with the initial learning process, but also speed up workflows for more confident users.
Price and cost structure: Cost is a tricky subject, but in general we’re looking for products that have a clear, understandable cost structure and that feel like good value for money.
This is very subjective territory and we recognize that there are differing schools of thought on price ranges, single-payment vs. subscription, and so on that are beyond the scope of this comparison.

Lightroom is the Best Mainstream Photo Management and Editing App for macOS

Adobe has been firing on all cylinders with Lightroom development this year, introducing an entirely new cloud-first version of the app, establishing a strong cross-platform presence, and improving core processing tools like color profiles.

Today’s Lightroom is a refined, ubiquitous environment for managing your photo library, whether you choose the re-thought cloud-based Lightroom CC, or the more familiar, professional-oriented Lightroom Classic CC.

Features in Lightroom Classic CC

Lightroom Classic CC is the evolution of the familiar Lightroom we know and love. It borrows a limited version of the cloud syncing capabilities from its younger sibling, Lightroom CC, while retaining the robust feature set it’s always had.

This includes a powerful catalog system capable of handling thousands and thousands of photos with ease, plus the tools for triaging and organizing those photos quickly. Similarly, you have thorough metadata editing controls; a deep, nesting keyword system in place to help categorize photos by content; and a map module dedicated to managing geotagging information.

When it’s time to edit your selects, Lightroom Classic CC features very capable core editing tools, from exposure, to color balance, to detail. It’s a well-chosen assortment, and most of the sliders are more intelligent than their name suggests, performing several tasks behind the scenes to achieve their intended effect. This is particularly true of combo sliders like “Dehaze,” which performs several contrast-related adjustments in a single action.

Beyond the basics, Lightroom Classic CC includes merging capabilities for processing HDR photo stacks, as well as stitching together panoramas. These are unique to Lightroom Classic CC, as most other tools require you to handle this kind of task externally.

Once you’ve edited your shot, Lightroom Classic CC offers a dedicated print module for preparing for physical output, and you can set up digital export presets in a variety of formats and fidelity settings.

Features in Lightroom CC

New to Adobe’s ecosystem is Lightroom CC, a streamlined version of the app built around cloud storage and cross-platform sync.

Compared to Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC has no Print module or proofing tools, no Map module or support for geotags, no tethering support, no HDR or panorama merging, limited batch editing, limited keyword support, no smart collections (there are only “albums”), no face recognition, no file renaming, no adjustment history, JPG-only export (and only in the sRGB color space), and support for a single catalog only (you can’t create multiple catalogs like you can in Classic CC).

This sounds like a lot of missing stuff, but in exchange you get a number of important benefits:

A unified interface and tool set across Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and (to a more limited extent), the web and Apple TV.
The ability to sync and edit raw files and presets across those platforms (instead of just Smart Previews like with Lightroom Classic CC) and manage storage use on each device separately.
Leaner, faster operation.
Access to the Adobe Sensei cloud intelligence for smart search and organization without having to manually keyword everything.

Lightroom CC retains all the core photo editing tools from its older sibling, and Adobe has been updating it at a breakneck pace to fill in the functionality gaps. Case in point, Adobe has introduced synced presets, whereby any of your custom presets within Lightroom CC will be automatically synced to Lightroom CC for iPhone, iPad, and even on the web. For many users, the inclusion of synced presets may be the kick to jump over to Lightroom CC full-time. While there is still a large gap between the capabilities of CC vs Classic CC, this gap has dramatically narrowed over time at a very fast pace.

Note:Synced presets are only available on Lightroom CC. Presets will not sync between Lightroom CC on the iPhone or iPad and Lightroom Classic CC on the Mac.

In the meantime, being able to access and edit your raw files from any device is a spectacular feature, one that genuinely transforms the way you can think about photo processing in ways that adding a new tool here and there really doesn’t.

Unlike iCloud Photo Library, Lightroom CC lets you manage storage very precisely, so you can explicitly choose which albums should be stored locally and which should remain in the cloud until you call them down. This is crucial for phones and tablets, where storage space is often at a premium. Of course, the fact that it’s cloud-based means that you’ll need a strong internet connection to take full advantage, but assuming you have that, it’s tremendous.

While it can be daunting to trust your photo library to the cloud, in my usage, the system has been flawless—no delays, no strange errors, no missing photos. Adobe clearly spent a lot of time making sure the underlying architecture is solid, and it has paid off.

Get Our Best Photography Tips & Workflows

Design in Lightroom Classic CC

Lightroom Classic CC hasn’t changed its overall look and feel much over the years, which is both good and bad.

It’s good because it’s now familiar and those of us with years of muscle memory built around its interface won’t be forced to re-learn anything.

It’s also a bit of a negative point though. I remember when I first switched to Lightroom from Aperture (RIP), I was surprised by how cluttered it felt. There are a lot of sections and panels, and it can be a bit much to take in at first.

Once you do though, you begin to grasp the logic. The interface exists as a set of purpose-built “modules,” including Library for organizing and Develop for processing, and you can customize your Lightroom Classic CC experience to hide ones you don’t use (Web, in my case).

Within the Develop module, all the controls are glued to the right side of the screen and exist in a fixed order. It’s a sensible order, following the usual path from exposure corrections through color and contrast adjustments, all the way down to perspective and calibration tweaks.

If you find yourself following that processing path for every kind of image, then you’ll feel right at home. But it feels rigid compared to the way other competitors, like Capture One Pro, allow you to customize not only the order of tools, but also which side of the screen any given panel is attached to for a truly personalized workspace. The closest you can get to customizing your Lightroom Classic CC workspace is showing or hiding certain panels, and showing your name/logo in the corner of the window.

It took me quite a while to get used to the denser, fixed interface conventions in Lightroom, which is part of why I’m excited about the new Lightroom CC starting from scratch.

Design in Lightroom CC

By taking a clean slate approach with Lightroom CC, Adobe freed themselves to explore what a contemporary photo management and editing environment should look like.

Their main focus was on having it scale seamlessly across different devices and screen sizes. This seems like a strange idea until you experience the result in person; it allows you the freedom to choose your editing device based on what you prefer to work on. In many cases, especially for existing users, that will remain a traditional desktop or laptop computer.

In my case though, it means my iPad Pro, and I can make that choice knowing that I’m not giving up functionality. That’s the power of cross-platform feature parity.

In more concrete terms, the new interface is a lot less busy, and a lot less modular. The left sidebar is now dedicated to your photo library and the albums it contains, and the right side has become a home for different editing panels. All of these slide in and out of view, but you never actually leave the app’s main view. The tools change, but the context doesn’t.

Also notable is the very prominent search bar that now lives front and center at the top of the app. This search field is powered by Adobe’s cloud-based Sensei AI technology, which competes with the likes of Google and Apple Photos to intelligently recognize content and metadata from your images and present results accordingly. It works well, and because it is powered by machine learning, will continue to improve as more people use it.

By consolidating things into a single-window design, Adobe has made Lightroom CC feel cleaner, easier, and quicker than its older sibling for mainstream use.

The Lightroom/Adobe Ecosystem Advantage

Scale is a powerful ally in any comparison between apps, and Adobe’s tremendous reach and established history in the industry have given it an unfair advantage.

The number of resources — from both first and third-party vendors — is simply unmatched. If you need a tutorial, hundreds exist. If you want some presets to work with, you’ll find almost endless options. Forums, YouTube channels, and entire websites exist around this community.

Then there’s Photoshop. Users of both Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC have the most seamless roundtrip workflow with the photo editing titan.

This is particularly important for professional users, who will find that any gaps in editing functionality within Lightroom are handily filled by Photoshop. In this way, some pros may find themselves preferring the streamlined experience of Lightroom CC, knowing that they can toss images out to Photoshop when they need more powerful editing capabilities.

Ultimately, while features and design can be argued back and forth, ecosystem is one area where Adobe is so far ahead of the competition that it’s basically no contest.

Lightroom Cost & Pricing

Adobe is no longer offering standalone licenses for their Creative Cloud apps, a fact that has put a lot of subscription-averse people off of using their products.

For the rest of us, Adobe has two main plans dedicated to photographers: the Lightroom CC Plan, and the Creative Cloud Photography Plan. Both plans start at $9.99USD/month, but they offer very different things.

The Lightroom CC Plan gives you access to the new Lightroom CC, as well as 1TB of cloud storage for your library. The Creative Cloud Photography Plan, on the other hand, only gives you 20GB of storage, but it includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, and Photoshop. You can also increase your cloud storage up to 10TB for an additional fee.

Both plans have their merits. The former is ideal for mainstream users who won’t need the editing power of Photoshop and who will be used to cloud-based photo libraries thanks to the ubiquity of iCloud Photo Library and Google Photos. They’ll get a powerful editing tool that works everywhere, and the cloud storage functions as an offsite backup of their image library too, a service you’d otherwise have to pay for separately.

The Creative Cloud Photography Plan is a good fit for advanced users and pros. It gives you the full spectrum of Adobe’s photography apps, and assumes that you’ll prefer to use local catalogs in Lightroom Classic CC, hence the stingy default cloud storage quota. It’s easy to get more storage though, so for a bit more money you can have the best of both worlds.

Runner-Up: Capture One Pro is the Best Professional Photo Management and Editing App for macOS

Despite casting a wide net with its two incarnations, Lightroom can’t possibly encompass the needs of all photographers. Luckily, this leaves room for some excellent competitors, the most impressive of which is undoubtedly Capture One Pro. Now in its 11th edition, Capture One Pro is a proven powerhouse, trusted in high-end studios all over the world.

Many of its adherents swear that it provides superior processing to Lightroom, a claim that’s difficult to test. While it’s true that the default rendering tends to be more pleasing, that only accounts for the starting point (and Adobe’s new Adobe Color profile in Lightroom closes the gap by providing a rather…familiar rendering).

In my usage, I do prefer the output I get from Capture One Pro, but that has more to do with the nature of its tools than their capability. They’re almost always more granular, more sophisticated, and more customizable, allowing for different approaches to processing. While the tools are more complex, understanding them allows me to get to a pleasing result faster than I can in Lightroom, despite having significantly more experience using Lightroom.

Color tools are vastly superior, offering a powerful wheel-based editor with precise controls for making adjustments to specific color ranges, and a dedicated skin tone module. Similarly, where Lightroom gives you a basic “Split Toning” tool, Capture One Pro provides dedicated highlight, mid-tone, and shadow color balance wheels, each of which has its own hue, saturation, and lightness adjustment control.

In the Curves tool, Capture One Pro goes beyond the RGB curve with a very useful “luma” curve that can manipulate contrast without affecting color saturation. Speaking of contrast, where Lightroom has a single “clarity” control, Capture One Pro has four clarity algorithms you can switch between, each of which behave differently. It also provides a dedicated “structure” tool for refining micro-contrast (separate from the sharpening tool). And for adding that finishing touch, you can choose between six grain algorithms instead of just one.

What’s more, all of these adjustments can be made on layers, like in Photoshop, with dedicated masking tools and opacity controls to help tailor the effect to taste.

These are just a few examples of where Capture One Pro’s tools take a step beyond what Lightroom offers. Features like annotations, sessions, tethering, Photoshop round-trip support, and more really push the envelope for professional usage.

In terms of workflow and capabilities, the biggest advantage is in Capture One Pro’s flexibility. The interface is deeply adaptable, allowing you to add or remove tools from the sidebar, detach any tool and resize it for more precise control, re-order tools, even move the location of the sidebars entirely to create dedicated layouts, called Workspaces, that you can save and recall with a keyboard shortcut.

Compared to Lightroom, the main features that are missing are the same degree of cross-platform support, cloud sync, and a few specialized features like HDR/panorama merging, or an equivalent to things like Survey view for culling shots.

And all of its power comes at the expense of intuitiveness. Capture One Pro is more daunting to start with than either version of Lightroom. Also, while it’s been around for years and has a large user base, it still has nowhere near the ecosystem richness that Lightroom has, with relatively few third-party preset (or “style” in Capture One parlance) packs. Credit where credit is due though: Capture One Pro has an extremely active YouTube channel that’s constantly putting out excellent tutorials and hosting webinars to help people get started.

Capture One Pro’s flexibility extends to pricing as well. You can choose to purchase a perpetual license for $299USD, which gets you all updates until the next major version. Or, you can get a subscription license for as low as $20USD/month (annual subscription with monthly billing). Pre-paying for the year saves you 25%, for a total of $180/year.

Capture One Pro is unashamedly focused on professional users, but the growing library of tutorials make it a great choice for ambitious beginners as well. Still, it’s very much an “old-school” sort of app, built around the idea of bringing home your photos, importing them into a computer, and editing them on that machine only.

Other Contenders

While Capture One Pro’s track record, polish, and processing quality cement it as our runner-up, there are a number of other extremely promising competitors that deserve a mention.

Apple Photos

While we’re fans of iCloud Photo Library as a general photo management solution, people who are looking to take their photography seriously may run into the limitations of Apple’s service.

For one thing, handling of raw files is rudimentary and inconsistent across platforms. File management in general is a lot less refined, with almost no export options, and only two choices for file storage: keep a local copy of everything, or trust Apple to manage local/cloud storage distribution for you (“Optimize Storage”). The unpredictability of the latter makes for an untrustworthy system when you need to be sure that a certain album is available when you need it, even offline.

That being said, organization is good: Apple Photos includes the ability to create smart albums, and handles face and location data, along with keywords. Search is also very good, competing favourably with Google Photos and Adobe’s Sensei.

If you work primarily with JPG files, Apple Photos makes for a simple, seamless pick that’s built right into your Mac and offers affordable storage tiers for more storage.

DxO PhotoLab

The second is DxO PhotoLab, the successor to DxO Optics Pro.

In many ways, DxO’s processing is a bit ahead of the curve. It had a tool called ClearView long before Lightroom introduced Dehaze. It had Smart Lighting before Capture One Pro added a Brightness slider. And, of course, its PRIME noise reduction algorithm is legendary, capable of cleaning up images that I would have thought unsalvageable in other editors.

Thanks to its parent company’s extensive research and review of imaging technology, PhotoLab also has sophisticated camera/lens combo correction profiles to optimize sharpness, distortion, and aberration more precisely than any other app.

Setting aside its uncertain future, PhotoLab falls short on a few fronts. Firstly, its interface is cramped, and many of its best tools are hidden in the clutter. For instance, PhotoLab has a secret weapon that I love: the ability to impart a color rendering from classic cameras. I often use this to apply a beautiful classic Canon color tonality from the 1Ds Mark III to my Olympus photos for a pleasing starting point.

Unfortunately, the tools for organizing and culling photos are rudimentary, exports are slow, and PhotoLab doesn’t support Fujifilm cameras at all, which cuts a lot of photographers out of the picture.

Still, it’s a capable, affordable choice that starts at $129USD for the Essentials version, though you should probably spring for the $199USD Elite edition for access to the best tools.

ON1 Photo Raw 2018

One of the newest options in this space is ON1 Photo Raw 2018.

Photo Raw is an amalgamation of several formerly-separate apps or algorithms that come together to form an extremely feature-rich choice.

It has a dedicated skin retouching module similar to Capture One Pro, it features native HDR and panorama merging like Lightroom, and comes complete with a comprehensive and intuitive set of image editing tools.

Certain tools, including the marvellous Dynamic Contrast, are separated into an Effects tab rather than the normal edit area. I would prefer they all live in the same area, personally, but it’s not a big deal.

One area that does deserve its own module is the Resize tab, which provides amazing resizing results tailored to your intended output, with presets for print and screen. The algorithm running under the hood is the famous Genuine Fractals one, known for producing very detailed, natural looking enlargements even when pushed to extremes.

ON1 Photo Raw 2018 is a very close contender for the top spot, but its relative youth as a product has some consequences, like the quality of the image having changed noticeably even since launch. Improvement is great, of course, but it’s hard to build workflows around a tool that’s still growing.

Still, this is one scenario where taking a chance on a newcomer can be a great idea, and the price of entry is a reasonable $120USD for a perpetual license, or $130USD/year for a perpetual license along with free upgrades to the next version and a bevy of extra content and monthly loyalty rewards.

Darktable

It wouldn’t be fair to discuss this category of apps without considering the open source options.

Darktable is very much an open source version of Lightroom. It shares a similar interface paradigm, similar features, and of course has the tremendous advantage of being completely free. In some areas, particularly the degree of control over masks, Darktable is superior to all the others.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with open source software, there’s an off-putting lack of interface polish, user experience sensitivity, and accessibility to new users. The app’s many editing tools are often cryptically named, and the interface is decidedly non-native feeling, to the point where it might leave you disoriented unless you have some familiarity with Linux software (Darktable is available on macOS, Windows, and many Linux distributions, but is clearly built for the latter).

If you’re willing to read the manual and the idea of getting powerful editing and organization tools for free appeals to you, then Darktable is a very capable option.

RawTherapee

The last contender is probably the most powerful image editing suite available. It is also the least accessible.

If Darktable is the open source version of Lightroom, then RawTherapee is like an open source version of Capture One Pro designed by a syndicate of alien engineers who are aware of human beings only as the inconvenient creatures that report bugs and otherwise interrupt their pursuit of the über editor.

Using RawTherapee is an exercise in humility. Its dense, terrifying interface is home to a labyrinthine array of tools that bear only a passing resemblance to their relatives in other apps. Wherever Lightroom hides five obscure, inscrutable parameters from you by consolidating them into a single slider marked “Contrast,” RawTherapee will reveal all those hidden parameters and invite you to manipulate them.

Have you ever heard of the l*a*b color space? Do you know what wavelet editing is? Have you been clamoring for 13 different choices of algorithm for raw file demosaicing? If so, RawTherapee is the editor for you!

Get Our Best Photography Tips & Workflows

Conclusion

With such a low barrier to entry (thanks to the smartphone revolution), it’s no longer just dedicated hobbyists and professionals looking to manage and edit photographs. Everyone can benefit from a good system for organizing, processing, and sharing their shots.

Adobe’s developing Lightroom ecosystem is the ideal choice for most people because it caters to a broad range of needs, from beginner to professional, and does so with the support of a huge community of users, experts, and developers.

While it’s true that other options sometimes exceed Lightroom’s capabilities, they tend to do so in specialized ways that don’t impact a normal workflow.

Beyond the details of functionality, though, the main appeal of Lightroom is its forward-thinking, device-agnostic approach to managing photos. It feels decidedly modern, and while it makes ambitious promises, Adobe is certainly well-positioned to deliver on them.

If you’re in the market for an all-in-one approach to organizing and editing your photos, Lightroom should be your first stop.

There are a bunch of great apps you can install on your Mac—no question there. Separating amazing apps from must-have apps is the hard part, and we don’t want you to spend hours analyzing the Mac App Store (or scouring the web) to find the very best and most useful apps. We’ve made a list of champions across four categories: productivity; Internet and communications; music, photos, and video; and utilities.

The Lifehacker Pack is an annual snapshot of our favorite, essential applications for each of our favorite platforms. For our always-updating directory of all the best apps, be sure to bookmark our App Directory, where we profile amazing apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS each week—browser extensions, too.

App Directory - Tips, Tricks and Hacks for Doing Everything Better | Lifehacker

Everything you ever wanted to know about App Directory. News, stories, photos, videos and more.

Productivity

Alfred (free-ish)

You can do a lot with Spotlight in macOS, but Alfred is still our favorite application launcher for yourMac. This easy-to-use tool can do so much more than pull up apps, files, and and keyword-driven automation. Plunk down £19 for the Powerpack, and you’ll get a clipboard history, access to workflows (that you can use to combine different actions, hotkeys, and keywords to do even more), hotkeys, 1Password integration, and even text expansion. In other words, paying for Alfred covers a number of activities that you’d have to download separate apps for—some featured in this very Lifehacker Pack. If you’re a new Alfred buyer and feeling little overwhelmed, be sure to check out our beginner’s guide to the app to get a handle on all the amazing things you can do with it.

If you don’t want to pay anything for an app launcher that has similar (but fewer) features under the hood, check out LaunchBar 6: free, if you don’t mind a little bother here and there. That, or consider tricking out Spotlight.

Bear (free-ish)

This cutely named app is one of the best note-taking apps you can get, with one small caveat—to synchronize notes between your devices or use custom themes, you’ll need to pony up $15/year for the app’s subscription. Otherwise, Bear is completely free to use (and looks great).

Within the app, you organize your notes by hashtags rather than unwieldy folders. You can also link notes to one another, which makes it a lot easier to chain together related thoughts instead of having to dump everything into one giant Super Note or remember that you had a few things to say, split into different notes, about a particular topic. Install Bear’s browser extension for Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you’ll be able to create new notes from whatever portion of a webpage you select. Also, Bear makes it easy to import notes from other services, including Apple Notes, so you really have no reason to not give it a spin.

If you need to sync notes and don’t feel like paying for it, consider apps like OneNote, Google Keep, or Simplenote—all good choices, but none that can beat our Bear for usability and looks.

aText ($5)

Who would have thought that text expansion, otherwise known as typing shortcuts, would be so expensive? While it’s true that you can create these kinds of shortcuts yourself directly within macOS, a full-fledged text expansion app is going to save you a lot of time and trouble. We like aText if for nothing else than its price—$5—given that much-loved alternatives like Textexpander ($3.33/mo on an annual plan; $45 for an older standalone) and TypeIt4Me 6 ($20) are anywhere from a bit to a lot more expensive.

As for aText, using it is simple. You set it up so that whenever you enter little words or phrases, the app drops in something else. So, you can finally correct that annoying “ducking” issue forevermore,

Text expansion, also known as typing shortcuts, can save you hours of typing each day. You type a small word or combination of characters and it’ll expand into full, complex sentences that you often use. We love aText because it offers so many great features and only costs $5. If you haven’t yet jumped on the text expansion train, it’s time.

Todoist (free-ish)

For simple note-taking and note-organizing, you can’t go wrong with Todoist. The app is completely free—unless you want to pay $39/yearly for more advanced features like automatic reminders, backups, themes, and an activity overview, to name a few features. Otherwise, the basics are great. It’s easy to create and synchronize tasks (and subtasks) across all of your Todoist-using devices, and browser extensions (including a Gmail addon) will help you make Todoist, and your growing task list, an ever-present part of your daily life. You won’t have that same kind of experience with plain ol’ Notes, especially if you’re trying to access your items on multiple platforms.

If you’re a big Google fan, we also love Google Tasks, which you’ll find directly integrated into the latest version of Gmail (and as a direct app for iOS and Android). You can also add to-do items into our note-taking app, Bear. The app Things 3 is a super-comprehensive task manager, but it costs quite a bit: $50 for Mac, $10 for iPhone, and $20 for your iPad. If the first item on your to-do list is “rob a bank,” however, it’s a gorgeous, fully featured app. And if you want to harass yourself about things you have to get done on your Mac, consider giving the quicky Effortless a try—which drops a countdown timer for your tasks directly into your Mac’s menu bar.

Google Drive and Office Online (free)

We don’t really have to introduce Google Drive, because Google’s offerings should be pretty well-known by everyone at this point. Docs and Sheets are great, free tools for creating and collaborating on documents and spreadsheets (of course), so much so, that a number of businesses solely rely on Google’s offerings instead of anything fancier or pricier.

If you’re a Microsoft convert, or you really love Word and Excel, you can access basic, online versions of both programs directly from Microsoft—no Office 365 subscription needed. If you’d rather work offline, Apple’s Pages and Numbers are the obvious, free choices, and LibreOffice is still the best open-source office app around.

Airmail ($5)

If you really don’t feel like fussing around with Mail, which is fine enough for most macOS users, consider giving Airmail a try. It’s been our favorite third-party mail app for some time given its low price and ample customization. It also hooks into a ton of other third-party apps and services, including Trello, Evernote, your favorite cloud storage service, and Apple’s mighty Workflow app (on iOS, that is).

If you don’t need power options and want easy, simple email, the free Spark is definitely worth checking out—especially since it can help you automatically sort your inbox to make it feel less like an ever-growing pile of things you’ll never read. Boxy 2 is great if you’re a Gmail user who wants the powers of its Inbox app on your desktop (and don’t mind paying $5 for it), and Mailplane 4 ($30) is a solid app if you prefer an interface that looks like the regular ol’ Gmail. Power users might want to investigate Wavebox ($20/year), which lets you access Gmail, Inbox, Outlook, and all sorts of other amazing web apps directly from one, easy-to-use interface.

Internet and Communications

Google Chrome and Firefox Quantum (free)

The browser you use is likely going to be dictated by the browser you’ve been using. In other words, if you’re a Google Chrome loyalist, it’ll probably take a lot to get you to switch over to Firefox Quantum (if you’re at all intrigued). And if you’ve been with Firefox from day one, you’re probably a lot less likely to want to move all of your bookmarks, extensions, and other settings over to Chrome.

So, which browser is best? It’s not so much that one excels over the other; it’s more important to say that both, finally, are pretty competitive. Depending on the benchmarks you look at—here are a bunch from ZDNet, for example—the browsers appear evenly matched for speed. I haven’t gone through and assessed the most-recent version of each, but I have used both Firefox Quantum and Google Chrome, and they both feel, well, fast. That said, Chrome still feels a bit like a hog when you’re trying to load a ton of tabs at once, but it’s pretty good about using less of your CPU and memory than other browsers.

If you don’t like either, Opera is a viable alternative that’s actually pretty speedy in its own right—and we can’t complain about its built-in VPN, either, nor its awesome integration of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram directly into an easy-to-launch sidebar.

Goofy and Franz (free)

Years ago, it felt like everyone used one chat client to cover a bunch of services (ICQ, AIM, IRC, Jabber, et cetera). Most people nowadays probably have their favorites locked in: Messages for texting, Facebook Messenger for everything else, WhatsApp for sending government secrets or expiring pictures of your booty, Discord for any and all things gaming, Slack for all things not-gaming, et cetera. So, rather than go into detail with all the more obvious apps, we’ll highlight two unique ones.

Facebook Messenger, as you know, requires you to be on Facebook to use it. If I’m correct, you used to be able to essentially connect Facebook’s service to Messages itself, so you could send and receive your Facebook chats without having to have your browser open all the time. And if I’m right (again), you can no longer do that. Instead, you’ll want an app like Goofy, which basically drops the Facebook Messenger interface into a simple application that you can access from your desktop.

We’re also fans of Franz, which offers the same treatment for a variety of other services (as well as Facebook Messenger). If you don’t want to keep 20 programs open to chat with people, Franz lets you access apps like Slack, WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger all from one, single interface.

Skype (free)

Everyone also probably has a video chat app they love to use. And there are plenty to pick from: FaceTime, which comes baked into macOS by default; the aforementioned WhatsApp; Google Hangouts; Houseparty; and even good ol’ Facebook Messenger itself.

If you’re looking for a standalone messaging app that can do it all—for personal and business use, too—we still recommend Skype, which Microsoft recently overhauled. Its interface feels cleaner (and comes with a dark mode), it’s still as easy as ever to send text messages, video messages, and files to contacts, and you can even @ message your friends to get their attention.

That said, we live in an time where most messaging apps have some kind of video or calling component—or so it feels. So if you need that human contact beyond simple texting and emoji, odds are good that you can already do it in the chat app you love.

Music, Photos, and Video

VLC (free)

VLC is the best media player you can put on your Mac, period. It works perfectly with minimal fuss once you install it, and it can play almost any file you throw at it. If you’re a power user, it has a sea of options that would take the entire rest of this article to describe to you.

We enjoy all the improvements VideoLAN tosses VLC’s way, including its new support for 10-bit color depth and HDR, 360 videos, and improved decoding that allows less-powerful systems to play full 4K videos—even if that’s overkill for your Mac’s display resolution. You can drop a number of plug-ins and extensions into VLC to extend its functionality, and you can even use the app to stream videos to your Chromecast, if you’ve allowed Google to get a foothold into your Apple-only household.

HandBrake (free)

HandBrake is a free video conversion tool that, when coupled with an app like MakeMKV, will turn you into a ripping and converting powerhouse. HandBrake is pretty easy to use, but there are still plenty of settings that might give you a little anxiety when you first load the app. We have a guide to help out with that. Once you’ve mastered the basics, queuing up multiple videos and converting them to all kinds of different formats will feel second-nature. Also, don’t forget to grab VLC, mentioned above, so you can actually watch all of your creations.

Adobe Bridge CC, digiKam, and Google Backup and Sync (free)

Apple’s standard Photos app does a pretty decent job organizing your sprawling photo, thanks to collections, tags, and the ability to view photos by when (and where) they were taken. You can even do a little light editing, too.

If you need a little more organizational oomph, consider Adobe Bridge CC—completely free to use, even though you might have assumed it was a paid app. You can’t do a lot of editing in Bridge (well, any retouching, really), but what it lacks in tools, it makes up for in data. You can easily see all sorts of compelling metadata about the images you’ve taken, and organizing them via ratings, keywords, and labels is easy. Well, setting it up is easy. Actually organizing your sprawling photo library might take a little time, but it’ll be worth it in the end, trust me.

The open-source app digiKam has organizing, editing, and a UI that’s fairly similar to what you’d find in Adobe Bridge CC. If you’re not used apps like Adobe’s Lightroom, digiKam might feel a bit advanced—possibly even overkill for your needs—but it’s a powerful app for pro users that would rather spend their cash on camera hardware than more software.

Google Backup and Sync isn’t a photo organizing app itself, but it’s what you’ll want to use to get your photos uploaded into Google Photos—a great online tool and compelling alternative to iCloud as a result of the unlimited storage space you get for photos. It’s easy to create collections and share photos with others (Google will even make suggestions for you based around where and when you’ve taken your shots). And we also like that you can get pretty creative with your searches when sorting and organizing your sprawling photo library.

Spotify ($10) and Amazon Music Unlimited ($8)

Which music streaming service you pick is largely a matter of preference: one might carry your favorite band, one might have an app interface you greatly prefer, one might have all your friends on it. If you aren’t into Apple Music for these, or any other valid reasons, Spotify is the next obvious choice (sorry Tidal). It has a huge library, its social features are great, and we love the thought it puts into its playlists—human-curated and automatically generated.

If you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you should also consider checking out the company’s Amazon Music Unlimited service. You’ll have to pay $8 on top of your Prime subscription, but that still makes it slightly cheaper than an Apple Music ($10) or Spotify Premium ($10).

Pixelmator ($30) and Affinity Photo ($50)

Pixelmator is one of the best image editors on the Mac, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Though its $30 asking price might seem high, it’s a bargain considering all the incredible editing tools you get to play with—rivaling more comprehensive apps like Adobe’s Photoshop CC for a fraction of the price. (And if you want features like Touch Bar support, automatic color adjustments, and advanced compression—as well as HEIF exporting—you’ll want to pick up the pricier Pixelmator Pro for $60)

Affinity Photo is a compelling, albeit costlier alternative to Pixelmator that’ll set you back $50 for a professional-grade suite of tools, including full RAW editing and a UI that looks a lot like the Photoshop you might prefer (but don’t want to pay a subscription to get). That includes support for “Personas,” which mimics Photoshop’s Workspaces feature by allowing you to set your screen’s many options and buttons based on whatever it is you’re working on—if you prefer one set of tools for a simple editing and another set of tools for something more complex, like pre-processing images for print.

If you’re looking for basic image editing and your Mac’s built-in Photos app isn’t enough, you can always give the open-source app GIMP a try. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in price.

Utilities

Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mega (free-ish)

These cloud storage services should all be household names at this point. We’ve covered their costs, and their peers’ pricing models, pretty extensively. Which one you go with depends on your budget, preferences, and needs. Dropbox is a great, all-encompassing solution for cloud storage, but you’ll need to get creative to get more than 2GB of free space with the service. Google Drive is a no-brainer, since you get 15GB of space and can easily synchronize files to your laptop or desktop to work on them offline.

With Mega, you get 50GB of free cloud storage to play with and a handy app (MEGAsync) that you can use across your Windows and Mac computers. Mega does have an annoying transfer quota of around 1GB or so in a 24-hour time span, but that’s a small price to pay for a free 50 gigs. Take that, thumbdrives

qBittorrent or Deluge (free)

Ever since Transmission had all those malware issues some time ago, and uTorrent filled its installer full of crap and cryptocurrency miners, we’ve been on the hunt for a simple BitTorrent app, and we’ve settled on qBittorrent. It’s an open-source downloading tool that should look pretty familiar for anyone who has used an app like uTorrent or Transmission previously. No big surprises with qBittorrent’s UI or features. We like that the app is ad- and crap-free, is completely open source, and can automatically quit or shut down your PC when your download is done. Deluge is a good BitTorrent app alternative, but the app hasn’t been updated since May of 2017 (when we wrote this), and we prefer something with more active development.

Backblaze ($5/mo)

Top Mac Apps 2018

If you want to keep your important files on the cloud, rather than a Time Machine backup, that’s fine—you might not have spare storage sitting around, after all. Backblaze is our new top pick for backup services, since it costs half the price of Crashplan (previously great) and does all the same things. Install the app, pick the files and folders you want to back up (encrypted, no less), and hope you never have to use the service’s restoration features.

The Unarchiver (free)

If you have file archives that your Mac can’t open, give The Unarchiver a shot at them. It’s free, it’s quick, and it does a good job of opening that which your Mac cannot open itself. It also works directly out of Finder, so you won’t have to (annoyingly) open up a separate app before you take a crack at your archives.

Best Photo App For Blurring Pictures

A good alternative is Keka, which is also free, also opens a bunch of different archive formats, and can even be faster than The Unarchiver depending on the archive format and size. If you have issues with one app, try the other, and you might find that it does a better job extracting your files.

Best Photo Slideshow Software For Mac 2018

(This story originally ran in July 2016, written by Alan Henry. It was updated in July 2018 by David Murphy.)

Comments are closed.