The 5 Best Android Apps For Quick Photo Editing

With all the popular, high-end smartphone cameras out there, it’s no longer surprising that mobile photography is increasingly the primary way people take photos. And since those photos are already on your phone, it makes sense to edit them right on your device for convenience. The problem, though, is that mainstream photo editing apps like Photoshop Express and Snapseed aren’t exactly the easiest apps to use. They can feel like overkill, especially when you just want to edit your photos quickly, or maybe brighten them up a bit, crop them, or turn them black and white.

The good news is that if you’re on Android, you have plenty of alternative photo editing apps at your disposal. Some of them are designed with simplicity in mind, making them the best option for those who only need quick editing and don’t want to spend time and effort learning more professional-grade photo editor apps. We’ve rounded up five of these basic apps, all of which are chosen for their simple interfaces and solid star ratings on the Play Store.

You probably use Google Photos mainly for viewing your media and backing it up to the cloud, but it also doubles as one of the simplest Android photo editors. To help you quickly edit photos on Android, Google Photos has an Auto feature that adjusts your photo (e.g., brightness, contrast) to make it look better with just one tap. You can pick from three Auto options available: Enhance, Dynamic, and AI Enhance. AI Enhance, in particular, is Google Photos’ conversational editing tool. With this feature, you can just type a prompt detailing the specific changes you want to make and let AI do its thing. All three Auto options produce different outputs, so you can choose which edit suggestion you like best.

If you prefer a more hands-on approach to editing, Google Photos offers several other tools, split into just five categories for simplicity. The Actions category includes action tools such as Sharpen, Crop, and Unblur. It also includes a Magic Eraser you can use to remove unwanted objects from the photo. The Markup category is for when you need to draw or add text on the image. The Filters category has preset filters with adjustable intensity. The Lighting category lets you edit settings such as brightness, tone, and shadows. Finally, the Color category is designed for editing the photo’s color, including the warmth, tint, and saturation. Google Photos only saves images as copies, so you can keep the original photo alongside the edited one in case you change your mind down the line.

Among InFrame‘s biggest draws is its instant editing tools. One is Style, a collection of frames automatically applied to your chosen photo. Depending on the frame and your photo’s size, it may be cropped or zoomed in. Another InFrame tool for quickly editing photos on your Android is Filter. Just as its name suggests, it’s a set of filters that can be easily adjusted to your preferred intensity. On the other hand, the Effects tool adds stylized effects to the photo. You have a Stretch effect, which stretches a selected portion of the image to look longer; Spotlight, which shines a spotlight on one portion and darkens the rest of the image; and Focus, which blurs the image except for the subject you want to focus on. 

Unfortunately, InFrame doesn’t support manual adjustments to photo aspect ratios. But it still includes tools for rotating, flipping, and cropping the photo. The built-in crop tool is particularly handy because it offers preset aspect ratios for certain social media apps. For instance, you’ll see a 1:1 crop for Instagram, 16:9 for YouTube, and 3:2 for Pinterest. This makes it easier to select the right aspect ratio based on where you’ll share the photo.

While InFrame is simple and intuitive, the downside is that it shows ads. They usually pop up at the top of the screen, so they’re quite distracting. However, you can subscribe to InFrame Pro to remove those annoying ads. 

Compared with the other recommendations on this list, Lensa is a bit more feature-packed. But it keeps its interface minimal and intuitive, so you won’t really get lost while editing your photos on Android. What also sets Lensa apart is its AI-powered, one-tap Smart Adjust feature. This applies automatic adjustments to your photo in three ways: Natural, Medial, or Shine. For other instant edits, you can try Lensa’s Filters section too. It includes over 60 filters, but to make things less overwhelming, you can have Lensa pick a filter for you with the Auto filter button. If you have an inspo picture in your gallery, the app can use that to match the effect to your photo too.

If none of these quick editing tools speak out to you, you can always go the manual route. Lensa’s Adjusts section provides sliders to adjust aspects such as exposure, contrast, and vibrance. And unlike other photo editors, it even lets you adjust the aspect ratios of the subject, backdrop, and sky individually. Its crop tool is similar to other apps, but it includes extra features for adjusting the photo’s angle, flipping it, and rotating it. With Lensa, you can remove unnecessary objects from your picture. The Object Removal tool comes in two versions, though: basic and advanced. The basic tool is free and requires you to draw over the object manually. The advanced tool just lets you draw an X over the object, and the AI will automatically remove it, though this requires Magic tokens that you have to purchase.

Most people’s go-to Adobe mobile apps for photography and editing are Lightroom and Photoshop Express. But if those two Android apps seem too complicated, there’s another app from Adobe that actually works as a simple photo editor: Adobe Express. It was originally designed to create marketing materials, but it also offers a quick way to edit your photos.

Like Google Photos, Adobe Express has a one-click adjustment feature. This Auto Enhance tool changes your picture’s aspects with a single touch. If you’re not a fan of the automatic adjustments, though, the app offers built-in Photoshop filters for quick photo edits. These filters range from vibrant and retro to black-and-white. Apply one and adjust the intensity to achieve your preferred effect.

As with most photo editing apps, Adobe Express lets you tweak various aspects of a photo, such as saturation, highlights, and contrast. It includes a tool for cropping, rotating, and flipping the photo horizontally or vertically. Conveniently, you’ll even find a background remover on Adobe Express. This automatically makes the background transparent or replaces it with a solid color. If the automatic background remover doesn’t work as expected, there’s also a manual Erase tool, so you can choose which parts of the picture to keep and remove.

Adobe Express is free to download and use, and you won’t need to sign in to an Adobe account, unlike Lightroom or Photoshop Express. The app offers a premium subscription, but if you’re only using it to edit photos on your Android, those features are completely free.

If you’re looking for a minimalist photo editor for your Android, check out Instasize. Its home screen is so clean that the only things here are the settings, menu, and add photo icons. The editing interface is just as clutter-free, making it quick and easy to edit photos on your Android.

The first tool you’ll see on the Instasize editor is the Filters. There are over 130 options to choose from, all of which let you change the intensity as needed. To better streamline your workflow, you can pick your favorite filters and customize the Filters tool to show only those select few. This way, you won’t have to scroll through all the options when editing your photos quickly. For manual adjustments, Instasize offers access to image settings such as tint, warmth, and even vignette. And as usual, you can flip, rotate, and crop the photo in Instasize too. The crop tool features preset aspect ratios for instant cropping, but you’re also free to crop the picture however you need.

Besides these basic photo editing tools, Instasize includes several other advanced tools. For one, you can resize the image and remove its background in-app. The image resizer lets you adjust the image’s dimensions, quality, and format to reduce its size. The background remover, on the other hand, erases the image background. Instasize also has an Object Removal tool, which is handy for photos with unwanted objects.

Unfortunately, Instasize isn’t completely free. The free version provides full access to the adjustment, resizing, and cropping tools. But for other features, like filters, you only get limited options until you subscribe to Instasize Premium.

For an app to make it to the list, it must support quick photo editing first and foremost. That means it should be as simple and straightforward as possible, with no overly complex toolbar that has more than 15 tools at a time. Users should be able to launch the app and quickly find the tool they need without delving into menus. Anyone new to the app should have no trouble using it right away as well.

Apart from functionality, the photo editing app has to be highly rated on the Play Store. We went with apps rated at least 4.4 stars and have more than 10 million downloads, meaning they’re indeed widely used.