The Likely Future of Apple Photos Is What Photomator Is Now

Early this week, I pulled a colleague into a video chat and shared my screen with him, asking if he was familiar with Apple Photos. He said yes, and proceeded to let me continue. That was when I told him what he was looking at wasn’t Apple Photos.

No, he was looking at Photomator but he would be forgiven for not noticing — these apps already look nearly identical. Seeing as Pixelmator, the developer behind Photomator, created its apps to fit seamlessly into an Apple experience, the fact its program looks similar to an existing Apple product isn’t too much of a surprise. You really have to look closely or start clicking on edit options to get Photomator to start differentiating itself from Apple Photos, but even then it still feels like a first-party Apple software.

That’s why it’s not hard to imagine Photomator just being absorbed into Apple Photos once the acquisition of Pixelmator is complete. While I choose to believe that Apple will revive the Aperture name and function, I can’t ignore the more likely scenario here.

Side by side, you have to really be paying attention to notice the difference between Photos and Photomator.

It’s not necessarily a bad choice from a business perspective, either. Photos is free and adding Photomator editing capabilities on desktop and mobile will give every iPhone and Mac user access to significantly better photo editing than they have now, rolled into an app they already use.

Trying to keep my expectations low, this is likely the very least Apple would do with Pixelmator. It could be the most, too, but I remain hopeful that it didn’t want Pixelmator for just one of its apps.

The difference only becomes obvious when you move into the Edit pane.

Last week and earlier this week, we wrote that Apple has the opportunity to really shake up the creative application space and build a suite of apps that rivals Adobe’s. The fact that Final Cut Pro exists gives me hope that Apple will support high-end workflows. Final Cut Pro spent the majority of the last 10 years kind of just coasting, but the last few years has seen some significant investment from Apple and seen robust expansion of both the base app’s capabilities and peripherals like Final Cut Camera and Final Cut on iPad.

It at least appears as though Apple has greater software aspirations, so I would be understandably disappointed if all they had in mind for Pixelmator was easy access to a quick way to make Photos more useful. That said, it is a very likely scenario I’m prepared for.