Best photo editor for remote teams

The photo editing space is dominated by roughly 40-60 serious contenders, from Adobe's Creative Cloud to lighter alternatives like Canva, Pixlr, and Photopea. But almost all of them treat remote collaboration as a secondary feature bolted on after the fact. The actual pain point isn't editing capability—it's context switching. Remote teams waste 15-20 minutes per task jumping between Slack, email, comment threads, and approval tools just to move a single asset forward. Most tools fail because they optimize for individual power users, not for the async approval cycles and version control that remote teams actually need. The gap exists at the intersection of three things: (1) real-time but also async commenting workflows, (2) built-in approval chains that don't require external tools, and (3) integration with project management systems teams already use (Notion, Linear, Asana). A shipper entering this space shouldn't try to out-Adobe Adobe. Instead, focus on reducing context switches—embed approval flows directly into the editor, surface the right metadata (who needs to approve, deadlines, version history), and make handoffs between designers and non-designers frictionless. The winning move is being the anti-Figma for photo editing: less about drawing tools, more about shipping workflows.