Best photo editor for PowerPC Mac Mini?

MmmPancakes said:

Hi guys,

My mom has the original PowerPC Mac Mini. She's currently looking for a photo editor similar to Photoshop Elements that will run on her machine. This is a little outside my wheelhouse?

Any suggestions on solutions?

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GIMP might be fun for her to try. It's free and open source. Note that, even for the same version of GIMP, there are separate downloads for Tiger and Leopard. Also, make sure that she has the most updated version of Tiger or Leopard.

i really like "seashore" runs on both ppc and intel...opensource

http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/About.html

Pixelmator is amazing and ver 1.5 still runs on PowerPC. I use it on my G4 tower at least once a week for the last 2-3 years.

Pixelmator is a solid choice. For years, I ran Photoshop Elements 4 on my G4 iBook as my 'on the road' image editor, and it was a fairly comprehensive suite of editing tools. You can find it pretty easily on eBay. If your Mom is accustomed to rockin' out on Photoshop CS5, then Elements 4 might seem a little puny. However, if she's looking for a decent, easy to use editor, Elements 4 isn't bad. Plus, it's not always a bad idea to run software that is contemporary with the machine you're using.

You might also want to look at Acorn 1.5.5, which is designed for Macs running 10.4 and later. You can find it at flyingmeat.com/acorn/ Which version of OS X does the Mini have?

As an aside, Preview, which has shipped with every Mac since forever, has a decent set of editing tools. Might be worth seeing which version of OS X your Mom is running (Preview is slightly different based on OS release).

MmmPancakes said:

Great advice from all. I'm making a list for her.

Quick question: How does one go about getting Pixelmator 1.5? Does she just buy a license for the current version, and gain access to previous versions?

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Thats the part I'm not sure about but one legal loophole a couple people I know still on PowerPC that also love Pixelmator found is just buy a licence from them and then use any older copy which I provided. They confirmed with them and there is no legal issue at all because even though it was my copy of the app they had their own unique license.

My 2x licenses have been the same since I bought it around ver 1.2. I now keep one licensed version on my Intel MacBook which is updated to 1.6.5 and the other on my G4 running version 1.5.1 which was the final version to be universal.

Is there a trial version of Pixelmator 1.5.1 because really want to give it a try after reading about it?

ThunderSnake said:

GIMP might be fun for her to try. It's free and open source. Note that, even for the same version of GIMP, there are separate downloads for Tiger and Leopard. Also, make sure that she has the most updated version of Tiger or Leopard.

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I remember using Gimp a long time ago for my G3 iBooks. It's a great free app that gives you layers and stuff like Photoshop. Just be sure to have X-Code installed otherwise it won't work if I'm not mistaken.