Instagram's Edits video app arrives on Mac as a desktop editor.
Meta has released a desktop version of Edits, its free video editing app, for Mac. The company says 50 million people have used the app, which trade press has framed as Instagram's answer to CapCut, in just over a year.
The announcement came on 5 November in a post on the Edits blog by Brett Westervelt, who leads the app. The Mac editor adds a multi-track timeline, keyframes, audio waveforms for cutting on the beat, colour wheels, curves and log conversion. Users can import their own LUTs and font files, set custom keyboard shortcuts and connect AI agents to the editor through MCP. Instagram's licensed and royalty-free audio libraries come across from the phone app, along with saved audio and text styles and unlimited automatic captions in several languages.
Publishing changes too. Creators can post straight from the desktop to Instagram with tagging, location and trial reels built in, rather than editing on a computer, moving the file to a phone and posting from there. Edits also now supports horizontal as well as vertical formats, with watermark-free 4K export for use on any platform.
Some things are still missing. Meta's post mentions only macOS, with no word on a Windows version, and editing one project across phone and desktop is still being built. Meta says it will update the desktop app weekly. Engadget reports that Mark Zuckerberg told Meta's last earnings call that Edits has more than 50 million active users; the blog itself says 50 million people.
Our read: for agencies and in-house content teams in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf that produce Reels, this makes Edits a credible free option for desktop workflows that often sit in CapCut or Premiere today. Direct posting with trial reels built in is the feature most worth testing, since it removes the phone hand-off. Teams on Windows have no option for now.
Why it matters
A free desktop editor that posts straight to Instagram gives Reels teams an alternative to CapCut and paid editors, with Instagram's audio library and trial reels built in.
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