There’s a near-endless sea of free and paid photo editing tools at your disposal. While many of them offer powerful features that can completely transform an image, most of the time you only need the app to tweak a few small details. For that kind of quick-and-dirty editing, I’ve found myself using the built-in Windows Photos app almost exclusively. If you’ve been ignoring it, allow me to convince you that it might be worth another look.
My photo editing needs are simpler than you think
I don’t do heavy photo editing in my day-to-day
Before we get into the built-in Windows Photos app, I should say I’m not a professional photographer or even close to an enthusiast. I barely know my way around apps like Adobe Photoshop. I’m just a regular guy who takes pictures of things in my life, and some of those end up online.
Most of my work as a tech writer is focused on the content itself, and while photos are part of that, they’re rarely the main focus. I usually take close-up shots of tech devices and gadgets on my desk, and I only need basic edits like adjusting highlights and shadows, brightness, contrast, removing small dust specks or hairs, cropping, and resizing.
I’m not aiming for perfect, just functional, clean photos—and for that, the Windows Photos app has worked surprisingly well.
Windows Photos quietly turned into a surprisingly capable editor
The default app covers most of my basic edits
When the Photos app was first introduced as part of Windows 10, it was little more than a basic gallery viewer. Fast forward to today, and it now has a long list of powerful editing features you might not even be aware of.
It can handle all the basic things you’d expect from a photo editor, like cropping and rotating images, adjusting light and color, applying filters, and adding simple markup. It’s about as good as any other basic photo editor, at least for my purposes. The same goes for videos—it’s a decent basic tool, similar in spirit to the Windows Movie Maker app it effectively replaced.
However, Photos also supports some surprisingly advanced features. For example, one common task in more advanced editors is adjusting the background. Photos can automatically detect the subject in the foreground and separate it from the background, letting you blur it to create a kind of faux portrait mode effect.
That’s just the beginning. Photos also lets you add to or remove from a mask to fine-tune the selection, which is useful if you want to completely remove or replace the background with a solid color.
But if I had to single out a feature that convinced me to start using Photos instead of other tools, it would be Generative Erase. This little magical eraser recognizes the part of the image you want to remove and uses generative AI to guess what should be there based on its surroundings.
There’s nothing more annoying than taking what you think is a perfect picture, uploading it to your PC, and only then noticing a tiny strand of pet hair when you zoom in on your monitor. As a cat owner, this happens to me all the time, and the eraser helps keep my sanity in check because it lets me easily remove stray hairs and tiny dust specks from my mousepad. It can even remove smaller reflections.
Of course, the eraser only works as well as you know how to use it. You can’t go overboard with it and still expect the same results as those ultra-advanced generative AI erasers that can remove entire people, which you’ve likely seen in tech demos. If you try to remove every single speck of dust, you’ll end up turning parts of the photo into a blurry mess.
That said, as long as you keep your expectations realistic and your editing needs basic, Photos will serve you just fine. If that’s not enough for you, you should definitely consider something like Adobe Photoshop instead.
Windows Photos can’t do everything
While Photos is great for basic editing that covers about 95% of my needs, there are a few edge cases where I still need to turn to other tools—one of which is another built-in Windows utility.
I typically take photos in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the most natural aspect ratio for viewing photos online is 16:9, which is what we typically use at How-To Geek. Although Photos has a resize option that lets me adjust width and height in pixels, it can only handle one image at a time.
So when I need to resize a batch of photos quickly, I use Image Resizer in Windows PowerToys instead. I simply select all the photos I want to resize, right-click, and choose Image Resizer. From there, I can adjust my resize settings and quickly resize the images to the right resolution and aspect ratio without having to do any manual adjustments.
The other situation where I turn to a different editor is when I want to spice up my photos with visual elements. For this, I use Canva because it offers a range of basic free elements like crosses and plus signs, emojis, stickers, and more.
“Good enough” is usually all you actually need
Basic tools can often replace professional ones in the real world
If we’re being honest, the best photo editor for most people isn’t Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixelmator, or GIMP—it’s the one that’s already installed and designed to be straightforward. That’s exactly what makes Windows Photos the best overall option for me.
Will an image you edit in Windows Photos in 20 seconds be as polished as one you spend 15 minutes refining in Photoshop? No, of course not. But if all you need is a quick way to clean up a photo before posting, Windows Photos is usually more than enough.
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