I rarely do any photo editing. But when I need to, Snapseed is usually my app of choice.

I have a Galaxy S23 Ultra. Samsung's built in tools can do a lot thesedays. Especially if you download Galaxy S Enhance, which uses AI to enhance, erase items, remove reflections etc..

But I also really like Photo Studio Pro, which I purchased many years ago and am still using.

I have others, but these two are the ones I am keep going back to. Obviously if you don't have a Samsung the first one doesn't help you.

I also recently bought IMGMI from the Skylar team. It's very quirky (no undo?!), so I'm not going to universally recommend it, but it is a very powerful AI tool and quite fun to play with, especially if you want to play with sky and clouds. To illustrate what I mean here are 3 photos of mine which I played with in IMGMI that took 2 mins to make:

http://piclinx.4junk.xsmail.com/imgmi-surryhills.jpg

http://piclinx.4junk.xsmail.com/imgmi-innerwest.jpg

http://piclinx.4junk.xsmail.com/imgmi-balgowlah.jpg

I use a few different apps, depending on what I'm aiming for.

For any photo that I want a nice elegant result with, I'll use Lightroom. I have an Adobe subscription through my employer, so it's an easy go-to for me. The fact that it syncs all images and edits with desktop through the Adobe cloud is a really nice way to do some edits on my S23U while I'm out and about, and then finish them later on desktop. My final steps are usually to open the photo in Photoshop for the sort of cloning and generative stuff that Lightroom can't yet match on either desktop or mobile.

If I'm making any silly images for my kids or socials, I'll use InShot, which I have an annual subscription for. It's got a lot of great tools and sticker sets, so it's fun to work with. It's great for video editing too, if perhaps not quite as powerful as Capcut.

Lastly, I use Canva for things that need a little more control over text, as it does a better job in that arena than InShot (although far from perfect).

⌁ getmikestevens.com

Hmm what's an Andoid? Also, heads up that you can edit post titles in Lemmy!

What app should I be using if I only ever need to highlight, circle, or put text on an image?

Don't do much editing (on mobile) but when I do it's photoshop express. Usually does all I need though I'd not be supprised if there is better. Using on1 for the laptop (I think there's a mobile version that I've not even tried.

Snapseed and Lightroom.

Simple Gallery

I love the Google Photos editor... But I can't use it: it kills metadata for some reason. It resets the date and location, which absolutely ruins the library.

I personally use Google photos as well

I use Snapseed and save good pre-config as QR-Code.