Seeking good image/photo manipulation software


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I'm not a graphics person. in fact, I know and understand very few terms and I don't have the patience to learn. Software like photoshop or Aperture are very confusing and frustrating for me to use. I'm looking for something that will get the job done, in an intuitive fashion, without my needing to know terms/terminology or anything about graphics or photography.

Basically, what I want is photo image software that will allow me to:

- view images/photos

- write images/photos

- print images/photos

- import images/photos from disk, flash drives, or my digital camera

- eliminate red-eye

- crop photos

- censor photos (i.e. put black dots, blocks or bars over faces, private parts or other things that have to be hidden)

- resize photos

- rotate photos

- flip photos

- add text and/or captions

- rename the file on disk

- rename multiple files sequentially

- move files from one directory on disk to another (Most of the software I've seen allow you to move photos around in virtual folders called albums or rolls or some other term. I want to move the real files.)

It'd be nice if the software also allowed me to do things like change colors on images, create graphics/icons/etc. or apply special effects emboss, sepia, glow, or other special effects.

I want this software to cost as little as possible, preferably free. And it has to run on a Macbook Pro running Mac OS 10.x. Aperture 2 looks like it has a lot of the features that I'm looking for, except the editing but, as I said, I find it difficult and confusing to use; I'm looking for something simpler that also has basic editing. Aperture also fails on a basic level as far as file manipulation goes - it keeps around multiple copies: a master and multiple versions so if you rotate a picture for example, and then save it (export) you get a new version. I want *one* file on the disk - the same file and picture that Preview, iPhoto, Photoshop, or other software would see; I don't want to have to hunt down different versions, a master, or whatever when I want to view or print a photo nor do I want to take up 2-4x the disk space for all my photos (and I have a lot of them).

Thanks for any advice.

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You could use iPhoto for managing your library of photos and doing red-eye removal and some of the effects you want. Then, for true photo editing, you could use something like Acorn.

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You could use iPhoto for managing your library of photos and doing red-eye removal and some of the effects you want. Then, for true photo editing, you could use something like Acorn.

iPhoto doesn't have the file management tools that I want. Either that, or I can't find them... for one thing, while I can change the "title" within iPhoto, I can't change the name of the file on disk. I can export a new file, creating another copy of the photo with the new name, but I can't rename the original.

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