Seashore is a native OS X application which does image editing on a Mac. Free and Open Source, it’s much smaller and lighter than Photoshop and easier to use than The Gimp, and being an installed application is much more responsive than an online image editor such as Picnic. So Seashore fits in nicely for anything a bit more than than basic iPhoto tweaking, and a bit less than full blown Photoshop pro tools.

Seashore loads very quickly indeed on my underpowered Mac mini, and immediately presents a simple and recognisable tools palette.

So you can get up and running doing simple stuff with images really quickly, but when it comes to more advanced operations, and inevitably the need arises sooner rather than later, then the shortcomings of Seashore in its present state become apparent.

Update: May 2009

I’ve spent a bit more time getting to grips with the concepts behind the seashore image editor for mac and recorded a series of five screencast tutorials on the subject. They start off fairly basic and should serve as a good introduction to the fundamental ideas and techniques, maybe applicable to any picture editing software, not just seashore for mac. The only thing is I haven’t decided exactly where to publish them yet, maybe here or perhaps better on the ICT tutor blog

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Seashore Image Editor for Mac – Better than The Gimp