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I would like to have a similar program as MS Paint for OS X such that I can fast and easily add trivial text to my pictures.

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Also see this question: superuser.com/questions/11111/… – Nate Jul 27 '09 at 1:19
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I find it bizarre Apple don't include such a simple application with the OS, or add drawing tools to Preview (with the "Add [oval/box/note]" annotation tools) – dbr Jul 27 '09 at 3:48
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@dbr: Preview does allow for using the annotation tools on images. For 10.5 only through the annotation toolbar, and since 10.6 full support. – Arjan Sep 23 '09 at 22:47
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10 Answers

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Paintbrush for OSX could be what you're looking for. It's an almost identical clone with some tweaks based on the original MS Paint.

Its open-source too, if you're into that sort of thing.

http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/

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up vote 12 down vote

One can even use Preview. Even though in 10.5 the items in menu Tools » Annotate are grayed-out unless you're viewing a PDF (and hence the keyboard shortcuts won't work either), the same annotation options from the toolbar are always active. So, add them to the toolbar and off you go. In 10.6, all is available for images as well, also including a much better Select tool.

For more annotation styles, look at the Annotations pane in the Inspector (Command-I). After saving the image, the annotations might be fixed in place even if you did not close Preview yet, so take care.

Annotations in Preview

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up vote 4 down vote

Skitch

It's a nice sketching/screenshot/annotation tool.

It has nice features like the ability to select specific strokes and move/delete them (like a vector based drawing tool), and has a very intuitive resizing/cropping UI

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And when using that account to easily host images: once Skitch is out of beta, you may need to pay to keep those images online. – Arjan Jul 27 '09 at 18:09
Just to update this: you can point Skitch at any remote SFTP server and it will push the files there instead of going to myskitch. They may eventually charge a flat fee for the app itself, which I would gladly pay, but you're not bound to their upload service. – peelman Jul 6 '10 at 15:53
Since version 1.0.4, March 2011, an account is no longer required. – Arjan Jun 5 '11 at 9:44
@Arjan ah, excellent - thanks for letting me know! Updated my answer – dbr Jun 8 '11 at 14:09
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up vote 1 down vote

If you'd like to programatically overlay text on your pictures in an infinite* variety of ways plus be able to do an infinite* variety of other things, check out ImageMagick. Available for OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD. It's not a paint program, though, but in addition to command-line functionality it can be controlled from a number of languages including C, C++, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.

* Literally

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That's spiffy for programmers, but it seems a bit like answering "what's a good car to buy?" with "here's how to build your own!" – Nathan Long Sep 23 '09 at 21:46
"...such that I can fast and easily add trivial text to my pictures" - ImageMagick makes that easy - especially if you need to do something like watermark a large group of photographs. – Dennis Williamson Sep 23 '09 at 22:25
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up vote 1 down vote

GraphicConverter has quite a few painting capabilities and is free.

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It was bundled with Mac OS X for a while, but it's not free. – Paul Tomblin Sep 23 '09 at 21:35
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up vote 1 down vote

I like scribbles lot. http://www.atebits.com/scribbles/

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Brilliant: "With Scribbles, you don't have to pre-define the size of your canvas." – Arjan Sep 27 '09 at 21:09
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up vote 1 down vote

http://seashore.sourceforge.net/

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...Paint-like? ;-) (Actually, the Win 98 Paint I know might have improved a bit meanwhile as well.) – Arjan Sep 28 '09 at 11:18
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up vote 0 down vote

I use paintbrush and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

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This should be a comment on superuser.com/questions/13354/… – Jonik Sep 26 '09 at 9:45
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up vote 0 down vote

Check out PaintDS

www.rdsisemore.com/paintds

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up vote 0 down vote

I used SuperPaint 3.5 using Mac OS9, and found it excellent for drawing annotated diagrams. It is no longer supported with the advent of Mac OSX, but I found that AppleWorks(v.6) also fulfills my needs. Since I need Chinese characters in addition to English, I find that it requires conversion to PDF format (easily done under the print command) to enable printing. Otherwise what you see on the screen is not what you see in print.

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