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First Impressions of Photos for OS X: 'Vast Improvement' Over iPhoto

talmy said:
It will ask you if you want to open with Aperture or Photos. Edits do not transfer between them after the original import (because it's a separate library).
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Wait - do if I start using the new app will it duplicate my 100gig library? Will I have 200gigs of pics on my HD?
 
MikePLP said:
Way to jump to conclusions without even using it. Good job.
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It said split library was being removed. That's not jumping to a conclusion, it's READING. Try it. Esp with my comment. It was conditional. Let's hope the condition isn't present. We don't know yet.

And my point is perfectly valid. If I can't split a 400gb library, Photos had better be MAGICAL. That sentiment is based on how crappy iPhoto is at it.
 
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Some early incorrect information that were deal breakers for Photos.app as a pro editing tool are now being cleared up.

- Photos.app supports multiple libraries so you can separate your personal photos from your work photos. You can choose to have one library sync with iCloud while others remain local. This is very important. You may not want your hundreds of GB of work photos uploading to iCloud while you might want to enjoy that feature for your personal photos taken on your iPhone.

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- You can store your library anywhere you want, including an external drive. You can set one of your libraries to become the master system library.

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- Referenced photos are supported so you can keep a lean library on your scratch disk while keeping the master images on an external drive. This also allows you to organize your photos in a folder hierarchy in the Finder.

- There are Smart Folders. This in tandem with keywords can be a powerful organizing tool. For example, rather than create projects, you can simply keyword a project's client, type (ie wedding or studio), venue, etc. Then you can group all your photos from one client or all your wedding shots into one easily browsable album that you can then search in just like in Aperture.

- There's a side bar and you can create folders of albums, essentially replicating Aperture Projects.

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Apple is going to have to pry 'Aperture' from my cold, dead hands! The day 'Aperture' is no longer compatible with an OS X upgrade is the day I permanently stop upgrading my Mac's OS. Eventually, that will mean I can't buy a new Mac (due to the OS that is included and required).

Mark
 
ThunderSkunk said:
Lightroom & CaptureOne kick Apertures butt, so Apple abandons the Pro market completely, ignores even the Prosumer market, and creates an app for teenagers posting selfies on Facebook.

And then charges a subscription fee to use it...

okidoki then.
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Agreed.

It's completely weird as we were initially told the new application would have us Aperture users covered. Now they are going after the lowest common denominator instead, seems to be Apple's main focus. Even the latest logic pro update focused on ridiculous toy elements like virtual drummers to jam with (something more suited to garage band). I think I might just upgrade my version of CaptureOne and move over to that permanently. Dip my heels into ProTools as well. Ironically this makes a move back to windows so much easier and more accessible.
 
ipedro said:
- Referenced photos are supported so you can keep a lean library on your scratch disk while keeping the master images on an external drive. This also allows you to organize your photos in a folder hierarchy in the Finder.
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This is big, has it definitely been confirmed that photos.app does NOT support video? Because the video are up in the cloud and organized separately in it's album
 
vixster1901 said:
This is big, has it definitely been confirmed that photos.app does NOT support video? Because the video are up in the cloud and organized separately in it's album
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Photos.app definitely supports video. I've seen it used to view and adjust Slo-Mo videos. Whether you can import video from an SLR, I don't know. Frankly, I wouldn't want to anyway. I import all my SLR video into Final Cut Pro X though I see the value of having my iPhone's videos in my Photos library.
 
zorinlynx said:
Maybe this is the case. However, from the outset this software seems highly dependent on iCloud for full functionality.

The basic truth is that I do not trust iCloud with my photos. Music? Sure. Phone contacts, syncing app preferences? Why not. But my photos?

This is the most precious data I have. Nothing else even comes close. My music collection is replaceable. Photos are not.

Without this trust, this software becomes nearly useless. I can use it for "messing around" but not to seriously store my photos. The approach seems to be putting the "master copy" on iCloud. NO WAY! The master copy needs to be on the computer. Every other copy should be a backup of it.

That's the fundamental problem for me, and I'm sure many others. We're not willing to risk our photos; they are too precious. If I had to lose ALL my personal data except ONE kind, I'd pick photos to be that exception.
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Yes I feel the same way though I would trust Apple over all the others. Photos/pictures are too precious and it kinda seems like a liability.
 
I imagine the feature will be added back in a future release, but losing star ratings is kind of a big deal for me. How else do people separate their great photos from the "just good" ones?
 
Honestly, I'm just happy I have a speedier photo library manager than the behemoth that was iPhoto.

I use Lightroom to edit photos anyway. :p
 
Sharewaredemon said:
Apple was a far better software company in 2007 and 2008 than they are today.

They offer so much more today than then, but they do it so poorly the majority of things need avoiding if you want to have any kind of decent UX.

It's seriously depressing how bad they are now.

I don't understand why they can't hire more people to make their software not being a crappy ghost of their past excellence.

If you want to hold Apple up to their standard, I'd say that most of everything they are working on today, or offering today should have been feature complete in Mountain Lion and whatever iOS was out at that time.

Adobe products have the most rigid and useless interfaces when compared to Apple's pro software and I'm so sad to see people having to go from Aperture to Lightroom.

Myself I have no plan on updating beyond 10.8 as long as I can, and I hope to continue using Aperture as long as possible.

The difference between applications that adhere to Apple's UI guidelines and those that eschew them is astonishing.

I lament that user experience seems to be getting worse and worse, and that the saying "apple can't" seems to be something I'm faced with more and more today, compared to the past when it seldom arose.

tl;dr

Apple could make good software (that works) but appears to be too cheap to hire staff to accomplish this.
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I couldn't agree me. Personally I hated already the new Final Cut, which was lacking in so many ways and moved on to Premier. Eventually I know the day will come when I will use Lightroom, although workflow wise I really like Aperture better.

Apple is financially so huge, Billions of profit and yet they can't have a software department which develops Software not only for the Soccer Mommies. Everything is dumbed down, lacking, restricted, etc.

And gosh, how awful is the Photo App on the iPad, with its ugly interface of enormous unused white spaces. I can't wait to have the pre-Alpha-software look on my Macs as well.
 
Cloudsurfer said:
I'm glad events ... are gone. They were a pain to use
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I never ‘got’ iPhoto because of this. Events make sense for people that do take most of their pictures for specific events, but I was never one of them. I think 60% of my pictures can’t be meaningfully arranged into events, they are just random pictures. How to deal wit them? I could arrange them by month (like imported Photo Stream pictures are by default), but that just doesn’t make sense to me and fragments the whole events view. I could merge events into something more meaningful, but then all pictures are placed at the time of the oldest picture available, reducing the utility. The thing is, you can’t hide pictures from the events view either. As a result, both the Events and Photos views are cumbersome and require constant arranging. I just couldn’t be bothered with them anymore.

Then you also have albums of course, which I use instead. But the problem with albums is that you can’t delete photos within them, only remove them. Albums are like iTunes playlists, they don’t affect your music library. But albums also take up space in your sidebar, reducing their utility.

Finally, there’s Photo Stream. This has made things even more complicated, because it not only messes with your Events view, but also ‘duplicates’ your pictures. You think deleting something from Photo Stream is enough, but it doesn’t affect your library. You need to go to Events/Photos to go find and delete imported pictures, there is no other way (then you also need to empty your trash of course).

iPhoto is just conceptually broken and has been for years. At this point I’m using the pictures folder and iPhoto in tandem where it makes sense, but the Finder just sucks for viewing pictures. On top of that, iPhoto also breaks with many conventions and common controls in OS X, it has an UI that is severely lacking in one area and needlessly complicated in another.

I have great hopes in this new Photos application and I can’t wait to try it. From what I’ve seen so far, they’re reconceptualising and streamlining a lot of things, which is good.
 
Is it possible to just download pictures from Photostream but don't upload new imported photos? In iPhoto was an option to not upload imported photos from a camera but you are still able to see the Photostream. These options seem to have gone so far, aren't they?!
So it is use Photostream with upload and download or not at all?!
 
Wait, no Events? How do you organize your photos? I currently have 45,000+ photos organized by events. What happens when I move them to Photos?
 
The new UI paradigm like iTunes is really horrible. I guess we're stuck with it for at least a decade. Ugh.... What is the obsession with making everything white? It's much to hard on the eyes.

You know how in his demo of Photos it switches to dark grey in edit mode? Yeah, how about that. In the OS. Everywhere. Now.
 
A cool thing I found! Photos asks for the dedicated graphics when your macbook pro is plugged in and uses the integrated when on battery. I've always wanted something like that!
 
Can anyone tell me what kind of adjustments are behind the "patch" Icon in the new Photos.app?

In general it looks to me, that Photos can replace Aperture for my kind of photo editing. The only thing I would need are some repair stamps or something like that.
 
'Antiquated' iPhoto

The comments about iPhoto being clunky and un-Apple-esque are funny when you're old enough to remember that about 15 years ago iPhoto was one of the unique selling points of OS X.

I'm on Aperture/Photoshop and will move to either Lightroom or Photos if one day it allows easy integration with an external editor.
 
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