April 11, 2026
Subs vs sliders!
Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor
Built for speed, blasted for subs: HN splits on new Mac photo tool
TLDR: A new Mac app promises super-fast, private batch photo editing, but the comments erupted over a claimed “no subscription” pitch versus App Store subscription pricing. The crowd split between praising convenience, yelling “just use ImageMagick or a free script,” and recommending a cheaper rival, making trust the real headline.
A dev dropped RapidPhoto, a Mac app that chews through hundreds of pictures at once — crop, resize, blur faces, add watermarks, and export to every format under the sun — all on your computer for privacy. Sounds dreamy… until the comments lit up. One early skeptic asked how a single “lighting” fix could work on wildly different photos and wondered, basically, where the magic was — and why not just use old-school tools like ImageMagick. Another chimed in: skip the app and let a free command-line helper (think: a text-only tool you talk to in Terminal) script it for you.
Then came the plot twist. The post reportedly promised “no subscription,” but commenters dug up the App Store listing showing weekly, monthly, and yearly plans. Screenshots were dropped. Eyebrows were raised. The vibe turned from “cool indie tool” to “is this a paywall wrapper?” Meanwhile, veterans pointed to Retrobatch — a long-running, one-time purchase batch editor — asking why reinvent the wheel.
Not everyone was snark, though. One builder cheered the origin story — editing 2,000 photos is pain — and praised scratching your own itch. The thread became a three-way cage match: convenience app vs. do-it-yourself scripts vs. trusted, cheaper veteran. Jokes flew about “subscribing to your watermark” and the eternal meme: “Just use ImageMagick.” RapidPhoto’s features impressed; the subscription dust-up stole the show.
Key Points
- •RapidPhoto is a macOS batch photo editor that processes up to 500 images locally for privacy.
- •It supports batch cropping, adjustments, watermarking, and exports to nine formats including HEIC, WebP, and AVIF.
- •Smart cropping offers 15 aspect ratio presets and interactive per-image or batch-wide cropping.
- •AI features include OCR, QR/barcode detection, face detection with blur, and person/scene classification.
- •A free tier handles 10 images with basic formats; premium plans ($2.99 weekly, $6.99 monthly, $39.99 yearly) unlock full features.