8 Free Photo Editing Apps for Outdoorsy Kids

With so many free photo editing apps, which ones do you trust to takeprecious storage in your phone? To pick the best free photo editing apps, I turned to a natural expert–my teenage daughter. Like most teens, she Instagrams her daily finds with all her friends and visuals are her favorite way to communicate with others. She always shows me cool new features or fancy free font apps that she discovered with her friends.

She’s also very outdoorsy, a true nature ambassador and bird lover. Whenever we go on hikes or days out, she loves to take pictures of landscapes, flowers or bugs with her Sony Z3 Compact Xperia and edits all photos before posting them on social media. Trust me, teens try all the options, tools and whatnots before deciding whether to keep or delete an app.

To show you what each app can do on FrogMom, she used the same base picture and added effects later. This is the base picture without any effects–mountains in the Swiss Alps.

Now, watch what you can do with these free apps.

#1 Snapseed

Photo editing effects: nature HDR-scape + #9 frame

Available for Android or iOs, Snapseed is one of the best free photo editing apps and I use regularly to create dramatic effects on photos when the weather is iffy or when I need textures on nature landscapes. It’s my personal favorite and it provides a wide range of self-explanatory tools to rework photographs. No need to be a techy to understand how it works. It’s just a matter of sliding your finger up and down and horizontally to select and choose how strong effects should be. It’s a great app for mobiles.

#2 PicsArt Photo Studio

Photo editing effects: Effect (Dodger) + Clipart (Meadow dreams #28 from top left)

My daughter’s personal favorite, PicsArt really offers a wide range of effects, drawing tools and clip art to almost Photoshop without Photoshop. My daughter’s favorite effects include FX (Light cross, Retro, Vibrant, HDR-1 and 2 and Vignette), Blur (Motion blur, Smart blur) and Pop Art (change color gradient or replace colors within photo) but you might want to tinker with all the nifty tools. With PicsArt, you can say goodbye to Instagram’s editing tools.

#3 Pixlr

Photo editing effects: Effect (Hagrid) + Frames (Scrap)

With a sleek interface, Pixlr offers fun options to add borders, overlays, stickers and effects. You can add focus to your photos, emphasize what you want, blur or crosshatch with a single click. My daughter recommends trying Hagrid, Anne and Bob in Effects, Autofix and Autocontrast in Tools and Scrap, Smoke, Cornered and Nolaroid in Frames. Happy Pixlr!

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#4 Aviary

Photo editing effects: Effect (Durango) + Stitched (Knot)

Aviary is the ultimate lightweight meme app with options to add top and bottom text, as well as options to jazz up your shots with filters and overlays. If you like to share your photos on social networks with a message, Aviary does it in a snap.

#5 PIP Camera

Photo editing effects: Frame = Photo (#12)

Available for Android and iOs, Pip Camera styles itself as a selfie cam with photo collage options, which in fact it does very well. Take any photo and use Pip Camera’s classic effects or magazine cover collages to create “picture in picture” effects with special frames. As Pip Camera makes square format photos only, it’s perfect for Instagram. It’s really fun to set a focused foreground image inside an on-screen frame (such as a milk bottle) and an out-of-focus background image.

#6 Quick (Free)/Over (Paying)

Photo editing effect: Text (Pinto No. 03)

Quick lets you add text to your photos but unlike other photo editing apps, you can add text in fancy fonts that you can change. Picsart does it too if you dig deep but Quick does it in a pinch. To get rid of the Quick logo, you can upgrade to Over (the paying version of the app) or simply live with the logo.

#7 Photo Lab Picture Editor FX

Photo editing effect: Effect (Dreamy retro)

Available for Android and iOs, Photo Lab is similar to Pip Camera in many ways and is a really fun free photo generator with realistic photomontages, stylish photo filters or holiday e-card templates. Just image. You can transform pics into paintings or animals with a simple click!

#8 Color Effects

Photo editing effect: grey everything out and use the medium brush to restaure color to a selected area.

Available for Android and iOs, Color Effects is a gimmicky and funky app that allows you to highlight selected parts of a photo by keeping those areas in full color while converting the rest of the photo to black and white. Agreeed, it’s of limited use but it’s extremely fun for close-up pics of wildflowers in meadows or people in nature. The only down note with this free app is that you have to watch regular ads to get access to the app.