Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor
Last year, I had 2000+ photos from my wedding to edit. The shots were great, but the lighting was different in every room. Some photos were too dark, and some were too yellow. I wanted all the wedding photos to have the same look before I shared them with my family. I tried using Lightroom. I would copy the settings from one photo and paste them to the next, then adjust it, and repeat. This was very slow. If I used a simple batch edit on all photos, it looked bad because the lighting changed in every shot. After 40 minutes, I was not even halfway done. I had to choose between bad quality batch edits or fixing 2K photos one by one. I also did not want to upload my private wedding photos to a website or pay for a monthly subscription. I wanted a way to edit fast but still have control over each photo. I also wanted everything to stay private on my computer. So I built a Mac app called RapidPhoto. It lets you set the look once and apply it to the whole wedding set. The important part is that you can still quickly tweak individual photos that look a bit different without starting over. I also added a feature to change the metadata for many photos at once, which is helpful for organizing big events. The work that took me 40 minutes now takes about 90 seconds. It runs locally on your Mac with no uploads and there is no subscription.
Discussion Highlights (10 comments)
asibahi
How does the application apply the same lighting setting to all photos if applying the same lighting settings in Lightroom is not suitable for all images? What magic is being done here? (and what advantage does it have over using `magick`?)
xnx
Sounds like a great use case for a free tool like Gemini CLI. (e.g. "Adjust all the photos in this folder..."). Gemini CLI is smart enough to use ImageMagick or python to apply those changes.
cgomez
Batch photo editors already exist, like the long standing and superb Retrobatch. It’s $30-50 as a one time purchase. https://flyingmeat.com/retrobatch/ Also, oddly, this post highlights “no subscription” about their project but the App Store page shows several subscriptions and that the app actually costs $40 a year?
mzajc
> It runs locally on your Mac with no uploads and there is no subscription. From the bottom of the description on apps.apple.com: SUBSCRIPTION • Free tier: 10 images, common ratios, JPEG & PNG export • Premium: Unlock all 500 images, 9 formats, 15 ratios, and pro tools • Plans: Weekly ($2.99) · Monthly ($6.99) · Yearly ($39.99)
rajptech
The best tools come from scratching your own itch. 2000 photos is exactly the kind of pain point that no existing tool solves well enough because the big players optimize for the casual user, not the power user with a specific workflow. I built a CLI tool for the same reason — existing solutions didn't work the way I needed them to. Curious: are you planning to ship this or keep it as a personal tool?
lillesvin
If you're not afraid of working in a CLI, ImageMagick is also a very solid tool for editing lots and lots of images in bulk as long as you know what you want done to them.
onion2k
I built my own photo viewer for OSX entirely because Finder doesn't have an 'actual size' option. OSX is pretty terrible for image management.
foundermodus
Wow, that's so cool man. Gotta try this out. Thanks :))
inovica
I'd suggest adjusting your text. Sure there is no subscription, but it's also not free. There's a one-time charge. I'm not against that - just saying it would be appropriate to be more transparent
jsmith99
Capture One which is the biggest Lightroom alternative (popular with wedding and fashion industry) has pretty good tools for batch edit and getting a consistent look across a shot. It's expensive though.