Best Photo Editing Apps for Every Skill Level
Finding the right app for your editing workflow depends on what you actually need. You might want to remove blemishes, adjust exposure, or try a photo editing app to make you look skinny — and the app market has tools for all of it. Some are free, some cost a few dollars a month, and a few are buried in settings menus that take time to figure out.
The best photo editing apps stand apart because they balance power with ease of use. Whether you shoot on a phone or import RAW files from a mirrorless camera, you’ll find a solid option in the list below. We’ll also cover a common frustration: why can’t i move apps to sd card, which trips up a lot of Android users who download several editing apps at once.
Top Photo Editing Apps Worth Installing Right Now
Top photo editing apps for mobile fall into two categories: quick-edit tools and full-feature suites. Lightroom Mobile handles both well. You can apply a preset in under 10 seconds or dial in HSL sliders and noise reduction over 20 minutes. Snapseed is free and gives you 29 tools including selective adjustments and a healing brush that works on details as small as 5 pixels.
If your goal is body reshaping and you want a photo editing app to make you look skinny, apps like Facetune2 and YouCam Perfect include liquify tools and slimming filters. Use them at low intensity — under 30% — to keep the result looking natural.
For desktop-quality work on mobile, Adobe Photoshop Express handles curves, levels, and local adjustments with precision. It syncs to Creative Cloud, so edits you start on your phone carry over to your laptop without re-importing.
How to Manage Storage When Using Multiple Apps
Installing several top photo editing apps at once eats through your phone’s internal storage fast. On Android, a common fix is moving apps to an SD card. But many users hit a wall. The best app to move apps to sd card depends on your Android version — older phones running Android 6 or 7 had a feature called Adoptable Storage, while newer ones restrict it.
If you’re asking why can’t i move apps to sd card, the answer is usually that the developer locked the app to internal storage. Google restricted background app-to-SD migration starting in Android 8 to improve stability. The best app to move apps to sd card on older devices is still the built-in Apps menu under Settings, where you can tap “Change” under Storage Used.
On newer phones, your best workaround is offloading images to the SD card directly rather than moving the apps themselves. Set your camera app to save to the SD card and use a file manager to shift edited exports there as well. That frees up internal space without needing to move the editing apps.