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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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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)

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.

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

That’s a screenshot

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

> +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.

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.