Mac Photos Editing Shortcuts

The photo editor in the Mac Photos app includes a lot of shortcuts that can help speed up editing, especially if you need to make adjustments to a range of photos. You can enter and exit editing mode quickly, move between photos without leaving the editor, jump to different editing modes, and compare the original to your adjustments easily. You can also fine-tune cropping and rotations.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
So let's look at some keyboard shortcuts and other techniques to help you edit photos in the Mac Photos app. So you've selected a photo here and you want to go and Edit it. There's a keyboard shortcut that will get you there and that's Command, Return. Hitting Command Return will edit the current photo. While you're in there editing you can use Command, Return to get out as well.

Once you're in there it takes you to the Adjust mode. You've got Adjust, Filters, and Crop. You can use A, F, and C keys to move between these. So F takes you to Filters, C takes you to Crop, and A can take you back to Adjust. So when you're adjusting a photo no matter what you're doing to it you can always compare it to the original to see where you're at. There's this button over here that does it but the M key is an easier way to do it. Hold down M and you see the original photo. Release M to see the version you're working on with all of your adjustments. This works in any mode.

Now sometimes when you're playing with colors and things in Adjustments you want to zoom in on the photo. You can do that with Command and the key with the Plus on it. You can zoom in. It's not changing or editing the photo when you do this. You're just viewing a smaller area. You can do Command and the minus key to get back out.

Now in Crop you've got some shortcuts as well. So you've got to notice here on the right there's the Aspect list here. It might be closed so you may have to open it. It defaults to Freeform which means you can grab a corner or an edge and make any kind of cropping that you want. But you can do other things as well. For instance, if you switch to the original it will stick to the current ratio. So if you drag a corner in it's going to only allow you to have a photo of the same width and height ratio. The same is true for any of these other things here. If I go to square and I drag a corner in or an edge it's only going to stick to square. Now I can always use the Reset button to get back to where I was.

One handy thing you can do is when you have a set aspect ratio, anything besides Freeform, if you drag a corner you can see the opposite corner stays there. If you drag an edge the opposite edge stays there. But if you hold the Option key down and you drag it uses the center instead. So that's really handy. A lot of times that's what we really want. Not to be able to go quickly to an edge like that.

Now if you want to rotate your photo you can drag this here and it will rotate it. But sometimes this moves so fast you can't quite get exactly what you want. If, before you click, you hold down the Option key and click it moves much slower. So as I move my cursor up and down the amount it's rotating is very slow. Like from top to bottom I'm getting just a little bit more than one degree of change. Whereas if I don't use the Option key you can see I'm getting almost fifteen degrees of change if I go from top to bottom.

So just two final ones that I want to share with you. One is if you go to Adjust here, we'll reset all of the adjustments, if you want to just use the default Enhance, which has got this button here, you can do Command E and it will enhance the photo just one step. Just one command there. Then you can use the arrow keys to move between photos. So here I am editing this photo. But if I use the right arrow key it goes to the next photo. The left arrow key goes back. If I have a whole group of photos that I want to edit I can just use the arrow keys to go between them.

You've got this whole list here at the bottom so you can see where you're at. But if you were to select multiple photos, like I'm going to select these three photos here, and do Command, Return to go into Edit notice it restricts the photos I've got visible here. Not to everything in my photos collection but just to those three. I can use the arrow keys to move between those three without going to the ones before and the ones after.

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