How to edit multiple photos in the Photos app on the Apple Mac

The Mac's Photos app has useful editing facilities for enhancing photographs, fixing faults like brightness, saturation, contrast and so on. Here's how to edit multiple photos in batches.

The usual way to edit a photo in the macOS Photos app is to double click the thumbnail image, selected a thumbnail and press Enter, or select Show Edit Tools on the Image menu. That works with one photo, but did you know that it also works with multiple photos? What's more, you can apply the same image enhancement to multiple images.

Suppose you have several photos that are too dark, lack colour, are not quite sharp, have a colour cast, or have some other common defect. Suppose you have several photos you want to apply a certain special effect to.

Instead of applying the fix or the effect to each photo, you can select multiple photos and apply it to them all.

Select multiple photos

Open the Photos app and browse your photos as thumbnail images in the usual way. If there are two, three or four photos next to each other that you want to edit, click the first one to select it, then hold down the Shift key and click the last one. This selects them all.

If the photos are not adjacent to each other, click the first one, hold down the Command key and click the second, third, fourth and more. Each time a Command+click adds to the selection and they are indicated by a blue border.

Show Edit Tools

Back when the Photos app was called iPhoto, you used to be able to view and edit up to four images at a time. Now things are different. After selecting all the photos you want to edit, press Enter or go to the Image menu and select Show Edit Tools.

Edit one photo

The first photo is displayed and the panel on the right provides access to all the effects, fixes and enhancement tools. Use them to on the displayed image to produce the results you want.. I turned an image into a black and white one.

Go to the Image menu and select Copy Adjustments. Every change you have made to this phot has been recorded and now they have been copied.

Apply adjustments to all photos

In editing mode, the left and right arrow keys move to the next or previous photo in your multiple photo selection. Press the right arrow key to move to the next photo and select Image > Paste Adjustments.

As you can see from the menu, there are handy keyboard shortcuts to make copying and applying adjustments faster.

Edit multiple photos in the Photos app:

1. Select multiple photos
2. Press Enter to enter edit mode
3. Adjust the photo using the tools
4. Press Shift+Cmd+C to copy the adjustments
5. Press the right arrow key to go to the next photo
6. Press Shift+Cmd+V to paste the adjustments
7. Go to 5

It can be an advantage to edit multiple photos this way when you want to make them all look the same, such as for an online gallery, a slide show or presentation, or when all the photos have the same fault.