Seashore: Easy to use Mac OS X image editing application for the rest of us | Hacker News Reader

Seashore: Easy to use Mac OS X image editing application for the rest of us

github.com

106 pointstosh86 comments

I sincerely recommended Pixelmator Pro to anyone for image editing on Mac. if you are coming from Photoshop, some parts of interface will make you puzzled, but if you free you're mind, got will enjoy it greatly.

I was expecting someone to post a comment along the lines of "Pixelmator is great for picture editing on macOS"; it is one of the best Mac editors.

But I'm also delighted to see your username pop up :) I used quite a few of your wallpapers back in 2002, when I was making desktop customization packs for Windows XP, and I have fond memories of them.

thank you very much :-) those were the times!

Goddamn what a small world, thanks for the memories Vlady. I was just a wee lad when I found your stuff way back.

I'm still drawing and publishing :-) although not as often, I must admit. Btw I do draw in Pixelmator Pro now, it fits my drawing habits really well.

Vlad your work circa ~2006 inspired me to go to design school (which I failed out of and went into computer science instead haha). So thank you :)

I'm glad I've discovered you and your artwork thanks to these comments :)

I haven’t enjoyed an image editor as much since Photoshop 5 in the 90s. Both the old Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro have been commercial software I really felt like I needed and want to buy.

It feels modern and natural on macos. It’s pretty sophisticated, but the feature set I use is easily within reach and it’s intuitive to me. Modern Photoshop is an awkward behemoth. The GIMP has always been functional but painful.

The newer stuff like workspaces for different types of editing seemed odd, but I do flip between the illustration layout and photo layout and enjoy that.

I like the price for the software. It feels very reasonable to me and brings me back to the feeling of supporting developers’ work.

Adobe is so expensive and invasive. It just feels abusive. I also pay for Omnigraffle, but it’s high enough it feels like a burden vs supporting developers.

I am not a professional and just use it occasionally for design, documents, and personal photos. I thought I’d share that, since it colors my view.

Yup. Pixelmator pro is my go-to image editor. Right after Preview.

Unfortunately with Adobe I'm a victim of a self-imposed sunk cost fallacy. Even though Adobe drains my bank account every month for $20 I can't throw away 20 years of practice and muscle memory on Illustrator and Photoshop.

If you are into the Photoshop experience, you might want to look at Affinity Photo. It is modeled after photoshop and the price is a very reasonable one time fee. You will have a little bit of a learning curve as it is not identical to PS but it is much closer than any other photo editor.

Unfortunately you are also kind of stuck of you have to deal with agencies or designers on a regular basis. Affinity Photo and Designer are really good and I use those sometimes for parts of workflows when I’m stuck elsewhere, but they pretty often misinterpret files created in Adobe proper

Why through away? stop for 1 month, try out Pixelmator. If you don't like it, go back. It's cheap.

I tried Seashore a few years ago but it was completely unstable. The link says they've done a lot of bug fixes to make it work on more recent macOS releases so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

EDIT: Downloaded and tried it. Glad that the UI is simpler than Gimp but it's actually less obvious how to use it. Sad, because I think there's real promise here. Hopefully Glimpse comes to macOS.

Same, but if I’m being honest, I won’t check it out. There’s so much competition in this space that I don’t need to.

I paid for Pixelmator Pro recently because I needed to do a repetitive task. It comes with several useful Automator actions that were exactly what I needed.

Plus it’s new ML features are great. I used it to enlarge a jpg 4x with no loss in resolution. It’s not always perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.

I love FOSS and wish Seashore success, but past experience plus healthy competition means I don’t feel the need to.

Didn't know Glimpse, looked it up and unfortunately the project is "on hiatus": https://glimpse-editor.org/posts/a-project-on-hiatus/

Wasn’t the whole point of that fork just to change the name/branding because some people thought the acronym “GIMP” was offensive?

Not surprised that it’s dead now.

Not true. Glimpse editor wasn't just a fork with moderate name and logo. It had come with improved installers and some UI tweaks. And there was a future plan to complete overhaul for UI as Glimpse NX.

The reason for the project's stagnation was lead developer's departure due to request from their employer (Oracle, if my memory was correct).

I'm still missing MS Paint. MS Paint is unmatched on intuitiveness and simplicity.

This App is nice but the moment I launched it, it started forcing me make decisions: I had to decide how large the canvas should be. I don't know? Let me see the default so I can decide if I want it bigger or smaller.

When I move my cursor over the canvas, it indicates that I am doing something wrong("forbidden" icon next to the cursor). Why don't you first give me the tool that can do something on that canvas so that I can get my feet wet?

I'm sure when I learn the app a bit I will see how simple and powerful it is but with MS Paint everything makes sense immediately, it's just the pinnacle of intuitive image editing.

I think macOS needs an image editor that aims for the simplicity of MS Paint. The professional stuff is out there and it's really good but we still don't have an app for stitching a few random images together and put a text on top as easy as with MS Paint. Preview can do it, Preview is actually very powerful and can do amazing things with PDF and such but it's total pain in the ass to use it to edit something.

I have Photoshop because it comes along for the ride with Lightroom but there are a fair number of times when I want simple cropping or resizing and/or maybe one or two very basic operations. For things like that, pulling out Photoshop feels like pulling out a shotgun to swat a fly in that not only is it massive overkill but it's not even a good tool for the job.

Does Preview fit the bill? You can crop, resize, rotate, and add basic annotations to images with it.

I don't think I realized you can crop with Preview. Yes, that's pretty much what I was looking for. (I think the issue is that it's basically hidden behind the selection tool.)

a lot of great functionality is built-in but also hidden behind menus or have strange names on mac.

I know right? For cropping/rotating I would often airdrop the image to my iPhone, crop and rotate there and airdrop it back to my mac. Sure, there's the Photos app that can do that just like on iPhone but it complicates the library management with importing and exporting.

As saagarjha mentioned, you can use Preview for that. Just open the image in Preview and you can crop, rotate and adjust color of an image. You can also export to different file format.

You can also rotate directly in the Finder. Right-click on an image, chose Quick Actions and then choose Rotate Left.

I know I can use Preview but it's very annoying. Everything is behind a menu and it is counterintuitive and slow.

The Finder rotate does only 90 degrees and doesn't do cropping.

I wouldn’t use Preview as a primary editor but a lot of edits are simple rotate from portrait to landscape, crop out the boring parts, or adjust the exposure and Preview is a quick way to do that for a few photos. If you need to do more in depth changes or for more images, I would use one of the photo editing apps. My own favorite is Affinity Photo.

Cropping isn't behind a menu, isn't counterintuitive, and isn't slow.

Select the part of the image you want to keep. Press Cmd K. Done.

What's intuitive about Cmd K? Because cropping kind of resemble K because in Uzbek cropping is "kesish" therefore K is the first letter of cropping?

Just open the image in Preview and you can crop, rotate and adjust color of an image

If you only need to rotate, you can rotate any image or video file right from the Finder by pressing Command-R. No need to even open a program.

Have a look at https://jspaint.app/

They have a GitHub page, which says that an Electron app is on its way.

Ah the very old MS Paint :)

When I used Windows, The two indispensable apps that I used every day were Notepad and Paint. Notepad was great if you wanted to copy and paste some text and strip out all of the formatting quickly. And MS paint was great for quickly annotating a screenshot. Today I use Skitch and Sublime Text on Mac to accomplish the same goals.

Would you pay for an MS Paint equivalent on macOS? If so, how much? How much oi it was annually?

5-10 USD one time sounds fair, annual sounds like a big nope.

4.99$ or 9.99$ one time fee or 1.99$ a year feels about right for me. I would prefer the one time fee because I don't expect it getting regular updates(I'm fine with paying again for large version updates. I'm already paying for iStat Menus, Affinity Designer, BetterTouchTools and they all work with this business model). It is a utility that I would use every now and then, so subscription feels wrong.

Annually? Eww.

I feel the same with Gitkraken. There has literally been nothing added to it since the first release that I would pay for, but as a subscription they have to tweek it.

$20 one time is all I need. I think Jetbrains has the best model for this.

There are a bunch of these already. They’re either free or $5-20 one time. Discovery/marketing will be your challenge with this.

There are no alternatives that nailed it. I think if the OP successfully crates something on par with MS Paint it can spread by word of mouth because there's no good answer for the question of "how do you put these two images next to each other and add a text on top of it".

If it is literally exactly the same thing, I would pay $50 one time for sure.

Check out Paintbrush for Mac.

I have it, unfortunately it's nowhere nearly as usable as MS Paint. For example, you can't drag and drop an image into the canvas.

Acorn, maybe? That's what I use for quick edits when I can't be bothered with a more complicated image editor.

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

I didn't know about Acorn, it looks pretty good. So far I really like the UI. It's not like MS Paint but lightweight Photoshop, which is also good for quick editing.

Thanks! Though, it's bit on the pricey side of the scale for an occasional usage.

MS Paints was neither simple nor intuitive it was easy to use and with the ease of use came a lot of bad habits and with the habits bad jpgs, giant tifs with 256 colors and the list goes on and on. MS Paint is and was a menace.

Okay, how do you put 3 images next to each other and add a text on top of it on a Mac?

Let's say you are creating some variation of this meme: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/American-Chopper-Argument

How does solving a random task make the software good? As I said it’s easy to use but it’s bad software. It’s non conformant to nearly all standards the encoders are decades old… it’s bad AND not maintained. Even Microsoft knows it that’s why it’s EOL.

I do this very frequently on Mac. Here’s how I do it. I paste all the images into Microsoft Word. You can paste anything into Microsoft Word. Then I take a screenshot and then I annotate it with Skitch.

Well, I don't have MS Word, I don't use it enough to pay for it. I also would like to do some small changes to the images(maybe laser eyes? maybe draw some lines to emphasise an emotion?).

I also recall Word being not very easy with alignments.

Well, I don't have MS Word, I don't use it enough to pay for it.

So use Pages. It came with your Mac.

I also would like to do some small changes to the images(maybe laser eyes? maybe draw some lines to emphasise an emotion?).

Preview. It also came with your Mac.

I can do it on Preview if I try hard enough, the idea is that it shouldn't be a hassle.

If you look at my original post, I say that Preview is very powerful but hard to use.

I find it pretty easy to use. Perhaps I just have more practice than you do.

You could also use LibreOffice or Google Docs. I just meant that for my use-case (arranging images, plain text log files, syntax-colored code, and tables together in one place, quickly) prior to final annotation (big red arrows connecting the dots)

You can do all of that in Preview. Preview has built-in editing tools including shapes, text, and more.

I originally mentioned it and explained what’s wrong with Preview.

It is actually built into the OS: +shift+4.

> +shift+4

Macintosh uses “⌘” as a command modifier key, not the Apple logo. The Apple II series used the Apple logo. The only reason Mac keyboards used to have the Apple logo on the command modifier keys is because Apple once made keyboards that worked on both the Mac and the Apple II GS.

That’s a screenshot

Click on it and it turns into a little ms paint type area

I still miss Adobe Fireworks. Easy and enough features to get the job done quickly.

Fireworks was awesome. When I need that kind of experience these days, especially the smooth vector-pixel crossover aspect, I use Real-DRAW PRO in Wine.

https://mediachance.com/realdraw/ ($25)

Why?

This is not meant to be mean. I really want to know. Gimp is honestly great. Coming from Photoshop the UI is a bit confusing at times, but once you figure it out it's a great piece of software.

To me, Seashore (I haven't downloaded it... just looked at docs) is just Gimp with less features. Am I missing something?

GTK apps feel pretty clunky under macOS, with GIMP feeling moreso than other GTK apps with its various oddball UI patterns that don't even fit in with a GTK Linux desktop (like its layer palette with what looks like a standard list view but behaves nothing like a standard list view). It also doesn't handle multiple monitors well (alerts popping up on a different screen than the document window is on). In summary, it's pretty unpolished option among image editors that run on macOS.

Also, GIMP isn't the most lightweight of software out there… it can be overkill depending on needs.

I am using Acorn. Nice little app.

It's low ceremony: load image, makes some changes, save, done. Most other image editing apps take too long and almost force you to save in their format. Acorn has its own format when you are actually making a project of it.

Acorn has been my go-to image editing app for a long time. Over a decade. It does layers, channel operations, composable filters. Really easy interface. Completely worth the low cost.

Acorn is probably the closest we'll get to a native macOS app that is analogous to Paint.NET from the Windows world, and it's worth the money if one is a Paint.NET cult member. Pinta (open source Paint.NET clone) is available for Macs but it's just as buggy as it is on Linux.

Huh they made Paint.NET closed source - what a strange backwards step.

Would you consider it strange if it were your project and after years of life in open source and being used by millions it didn’t pay the bills?

I think you’re confused - it’s free.

You’re absolutely right. I thought it had a different donation scheme than it actually does. Thank you.

+1 for Acorn.

I was somewhat of a power user of Photoshop which I pirated throughout my youth. When I grew too old for that sort of thing, it seems that my need for editing images just kind of disappeared. I am not sure why, really.

Every now and then, I need to edit some image though. I tried using Gimp a number of times but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Paint.net was fine on Windows though it felt a bit limited (at the time. I am sure it's great now). However, when I discovered https://www.photopea.com/ I felt straight at home. It runs in the browser and it's free. Amazing! I still don't use it often but when I do, I love it.

> I tried using Gimp a number of times but it always rubbed me the wrong way

Same here. For a while, I thought it was just my over-familiarity and reliance on Photoshop and mspaint. And to some extent, it certainly was, and is.

But over time, I eventually tried out Affinity, Krita, Pixelmator, photopea, and a few others. And they just worked; the UI just felt "right". The icons, shortcuts and menu and window layouts made sense and were intuitive even for the tools I hadn't used before.

So I've wrapped back around to thinking, nah, maybe GIMP's UX direction is just plain bad. Or bad for me, at least. It could be the case of some things having become a de facto standard that GIMP willfully eschews, but I have tried to go pure GIMP for long stretches and always walk away with a unique sense of pure frustration.

For a very long time there were not enough developers to deal with Gimp problems on macOS. Things have changed recently with Lukas Oberhuber who work on macOS's Gimp, and the upcoming Gimp 3.0 version is expected to have much better UI.

I wanted to like Gimp but could never get over the UI. I found Affinity Photo and that has been fantastic.

Affinity Photo is another good option.

I would like something like this for linux, any recommendations? I usually run some Image Magick command or open Krita simple editing, and it feels like overkill. I thought about configuring imv[0] to have some common editing features, but didn't take the time yet.

[0]: https://sr.ht/~exec64/imv/

Pinta and Xnviewmp covers 95% of my common needs. Been using Xnview for 10+ years.

Pinta or KolourPaint maybe?

GraphicConverter is the traditional image editor for Mac (since System 7, I believe).

It's got all the basic functionality like transparencies, and is highly scriptable.

Although I never did get around to paying to remove the 30-second startup delay, I am a happy user. Maybe I should pay for it now I can afford it!

I'll stick with www.photopea.com

wow, nice work! i'm wondering nowadays what's a good resource to start learning objective-c?

i kind of would prefer it instead of using swift if anybody can point out curated resources, that would be wicked! i have an idea to learn a bit of smalltalk to grasp the main concepts before.

Or you can just use Krita that is both multiplatform and free.

what is an X image

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