It is easy to enhance a photo and fix flaws in the Photos app on the Mac, but editing dozens of photos is a pain. Well, it used to be. Now you can batch edit photos and process them in bulk.
If you are running the Apple Photos app on macOS Ventura, you can open a photo, enter edit mode, make a series of corrections to the exposure, color, brightness, saturation, and other attributes. You can then apply these edits to one or multiple photos in the Photos library with just a few clicks.
Modern cameras are very good at automatically choosing the right exposure, aperture, shutter speed and so on and most often the photos we take are acceptable. It is becoming harder to take a bad photo no matter how inept we are. However, among all the good photos are some that will be not so good. They may be too dark, such as when the sun is in the shot, or snow photos come out grey instead of bright white. A common problem is that the horizon is not straight.
Corrections can be made in the Photos app on your Mac and if you have a series of photos with the same problem, you can edit the first and then automatically apply the fixes to the rest. You can batch edit photos with ease.
Bulk editing photos is not just for fixing faults like exposure and you might want to apply some special effects to ordinary well-exposed photos. For example, you could turn them into black and white, apply a vignette, and other artistic effects just for fun.
Before we take a look at batch editing photos in Photos on the Mac, here are some more photography articles on RAWinfopages for Apple users:
- How to edit live photos, convert live photos on Mac, iPhone
- Find photos using smart searches in iPhone Photos app
- Customize Apple Photos memories and apply filters for free
1: Select a photo
Open the Photos app and find the group of photos you want to batch edit. They will probably be close to each other, but they don’t have to be. All you need to do is to click one to view it.
2: View a photo
A larger view of the photo is displayed in the window and in the top right-hand corner is an Edit button. Edit one photo and we can apply changes to them all. Click Edit.
3: Edit, fix, enhance a photo
A panel appears on the right side of the photo and it is packed with effects, enhancements and fixes for light, color, noise reduction, sharpening and more. Use them.
Expand each of the sections and make whatever changes you need to the image to fix it, enhance it, or apply artistic effects. When you are happy with the results, click the Done button at the top of the edit tools panel.
4: Copy your photo edits
Return to the thumbnails view of your Photos library. Ctrl+click the photo you just edited and then select Copy Edits on the menu that appears.
5: Batch edit photos: Select and paste
Select one or multiple photos that you want to apply the same edits to. Cmd+click single photos, or click the first and Shift+click the last of a series of photos. You can combine the selection methods, so Shift+click a series of photos and then Cmd+click extra ones to add to or remove from the selection.
Now just Ctrl+click one of the selected photos and choose Paste Edits on the menu that is displayed. The exact same edits are applied to all of the selected photos.
You may have videos in your Photos library, so what happens if you select a video and paste the edits from a photo? You may be surprised to discover that the effects are applied to the video too. This is a great way to make a collection of photos and videos all the same.
