The 4 Best Photo Editor Apps of 2022 (2024)

Pixlr

One great photo editor app is Pixlr. It’s free, has minimal ads, and includes lot of cool features.

One feature that stands out is that with each edit, you can press your finger down on a “before” button to see what the image looked like just before you applied that effect, which is great for deciding if you should commit to it or not.

You can share your edited image on social media as well as save it back to your phone or tablet invarious sizes like small, medium, max, or a custom size.

Some of the tools included in this free photo editor app include the standard ones like crop and rotate, but it also has an autofix, adjustment, blur, splash, smooth, sharpen, red eye, double exposure, and spot healing brush tool.

Pixlr has a set of brush tools you can use to paint various things on the image. There’s one for brightness, darken, and pixelate. They’re extremely useful versus an image-wide option because instead of darkening the whole image, for example, you can apply darkened spots to specific problem areas. There’s also a regular doodle tool.

We really love the one-tap effect and styles you can apply to pictures. You can pick from options like a pencil, sketch, poster, cross, watercolor, polly, and other styles. There are lots and lots of effects, too, in categories like atomic, creative, unicolor, vintage, too old, subtle, and soft. In the same area of the app are overlays so that you can quickly drop a burn effect right over the picture, or an effect like bubble, glitter, glaze, metal, etc.

What makes this app vastly different from some other ones is that you get to really customize the level that an effect can take on your photo. For example, if you pick a glaze overlay to apply to your image, you can use the scroll bar to lessen how much of the effect is actually seen once applied, or the eraser tool to remove the effect on only parts of the image. You can do this to multiple effects, overlays, and styles to really personalize it how you wish.

The Pixlr app also has lots of borders and stickers that, again, are just one tap away. The text tool lets you change the font type to one of several options and can be any color you want. The opacity can be adjusted for all of those things as well.

This app does show ads sometimes, like when you’re about to save your picture, but they’re not intrusive at all. There’s a good chance you’ll glance right over them.

Probably the biggest issue with this photo editor is that when you're choosing how much of an effect to apply, by sliding the scroll wheel left or right, you can't see how the effect looks until you lift your finger. Most other apps show the result in real time but, unfortunately, this one does not.

This photo editor is free for Android and iOS.

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Snapseed

Snapseed is a free photo editor app from Google. It’s really simple at first glance but does include quite a bit of editing tools.

Instead of using a scroll tool to increase or decrease the intensity or strength of effects and other tools, this app has you slide your finger to the left or right of the screen to see the changes in real time.

Another big feature not found in most photo editor apps is the View edits option in Snapseed. This lets you view a list of all the edits you’ve made since the beginning, and lets you jump back to a specific point in one tap. It's like the version history you might be used to in your online documents, but with image edits. This definitely beats hitting an undo button a dozen times, and you can even save the picture and reopen it later to undo changes.

When you first open it, unlike other apps that often have lots of buttons, there’s just a LOOKS, TOOLS, and EXPORT button. The first two, of course, are where you’ll find the editing options and the last one is for sharing and saving the image. There’s also a small Settings menu for adjusting the sizing, format, and quality of exports—you can save a PNG or a JPG with custom compression.

In the first menu is a list of one-touch effects you can apply to your image that will apply preset effects automatically. Some of them are called Last Edits, Portrait, Smooth, Pop, Faded Glow, Morning, Bright, Fine Art, and Silhouette. Tap one to instantly apply it to the picture. Once you commit to one, you can go back and apply another on top of it, which is something many photo editors won’t let you do.

Or, if you want precise control over how the tools are used, use the TOOLS menu. Many of them are common and can be found in other photo editor apps, but some are entirely unique to Snapseed. Filters and editing tools are combined into one screen.

For example, there’s a crop, rotate, perspective, and expand option but also a tool for curves, white balance, selective brightness, exposure and dodge/burn brush, glamour glow, head pose, lens blur, HDR scape, and more.

Snapseed is also a great app for applying frames and text to a photo. There are over 20 frames to choose from and several meme-like text options.

You can get it free for iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.

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PhotoGrid

PhotoGrid is a different kind of photo editor app. Instead of providing just editing tools, you can use it to make a photo or video collage, scrapbook, GIF or still meme, slideshow, poster, filmstrip, and more.

This free image editor app also works as an augmented reality camera, letting you overlay stickers and hats and other things directly onto your face in real time.

Plus, you can follow other users and keep tabs on what they post in theFeedssection of your app.

PhotoGrid is on an entirely different level than the other image editors in this list. While it does have normal editing capabilities, it doesn't seem built for that, and honestly, that's probably not why most people use this app.

On the main screen of the app are all your options. You can pick any of these: Grid, Edit, WowCam, Video, Retouch, Big Head, Scrapbook, Meme, Slide Show, Filmstrip, Poster, Pattern Venus Filter, Twinkle, and Instant Share.

These tools let you do things like combine videos and images into collages, take videos or image selfies with live stickers, build GIF memes, make new wallpapers for your phone, build stylish posters, make your head look like a balloon, and, of course, typical editing where you can add text, draw on the image, crop or rotate the photo, adjust skin tone, blur, and add a border.

This app clearly has a lot built-in to it, but at the same time, it lets you customize a lot of what you do. For example, when making a collage, you can adjust each individual image in its frame and combine other tools to round the edges, add text, import stickers, apply filters, and more. Sometimes, you can even adjust the intensity or opacity of a tool.

PhotoGrid is free for iPhone, iPad, and Android (you'll need to install the Android app manually). If you want more features, you can watch ads to get something for free, otherwise you can pay (usually around $1) to get things like more poster templates, backgrounds, stickers, etc.

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PicsArt Photo Editor

PicsArt Photo Editor is different from these other photo editors in a number of ways, but the most notable is that when you're editing a portrait, there are various tools that can automatically recognize where the person is located and isolate it from the rest of the picture to make editing a lot easier than manually tracing out the background.

Some photo editors let you adjust the strength of some of the tools, like filters, so that only part of it bleeds through to the photo. While this isn't possible with the PicsArt app, it does have an eraser tool that can remove a filter for select areas of the photo, plus an even more impressive button that will identify a face/body and immediately remove the filter from that area.

Tons of other advanced editing tools are included, too, like a crop, dispersion, clone, stretch, motion, perspective, curves, and shape crop tool.

Images can be shared with friends through the app via Remix Chat. Plus, every user has a profile page friends can visit to see what they've been sharing with the community.

You can take part in what the app callsChallengesto remix certain images and possibly win prizes. For example, one might be a picture of a woman with a bare arm where you have to apply a tattoo.

In addition to all the stickers made by other members that you can freely use as often as you like, there are also free images accessible from inside the app.

This free photo editor runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows 11/10.

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