Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor

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.