Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor
Details
- External ID
- 47733385
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor
- Website domain
- apple.com
- Launched
- April 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 13
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6658097686375322
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- bulk photo editor for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While basic batch image adjustments can be built with Core Image and SwiftUI, building a high-performance RAW editor with real-time 60+ MP image processing, portrait AI masking, and local ML retouching requires specialized graphics programming.
What it would actually take: The app requires a pipeline built with Apple's Metal framework, Core Image custom kernels, and LibRaw/Core Image RAW decoders for hardware-accelerated batch operations. The hard parts include achieving real-time slider responsiveness on 60+ MP uncompressed RAW files, custom shader pipeline optimization for tone curves and HSL mixers, and integrating CoreML segmentation models for smart portrait retouching without memory exhaustion. This requires deep macOS graphics pipeline and Metal shader expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ComfyUI - AI image/video generation workflow engine, Capture One - Lightroom alternative for batch editing, ImageMagick - CLI tool for batch image processing, Retrobatch - batch image processing tool, Lightroom - photo editing and batch processing
Concerns raised: App Store listing still shows old subscription option, confusing users, Pricing transparency - labeled as free but has one-time charge, Interactive visual adjustment needed for per-photo tweaks on similar batches, CLI tools feel heavy when needing small adjustments without rerunning pipeline, OSX lacking basic features like actual size image viewing
Feature requests: More interactive visual adjustment interface for tweaking individual photos, Ability to apply edits to many photos then tweak few without starting over
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 231 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #88 of 232 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 161 days after the earliest competitor.
- Fast, Lightroom-compatible RAW photo editor for Linux and macOS · hn · 2026-09-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- WeddingPhoto App · ph · 2026-09-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Video2LivePhoto · ph · 2026-09-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- PicPick · hn · 2025-12-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Instant Photo Album · ph · 2026-09-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Frames · ph · 2026-09-14 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Second Eyes · ph · 2026-09-18 · 65 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I thought merging two photos with AI would be a weekend project. Nope · hn · 2026-04-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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