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

[SirYossi]

Aperture Users

I'm an Aperture user. Should I start looking into Lightroom? Or will Photos be better than Aperture?

If you read the article you would not this "If you’re happy with iPhoto and Aperture now, you should feel no hurry to switch over when Photos comes out this spring (as part of the free Yosemite 10.10.3 update), unless you want that iCloud Photo Library feature. Which would be understandable. [...] Someday, yes, there will be some OS X version that can’t run today’s iPhoto and Aperture at all. But that’s years away. In those years, Apple has plenty of time to bring Photos’ feature list up to code, and you can freely keep using iPhoto and/or Aperture and Photos, side-by-side on the same Mac."
It looks like Aperture would be supported at least into OS X.11 and maybe X.12. I Have not used iphoto in over 3 years since switching to Aperture. I love Aperture's freedom to load many libraries with little or no effort. I really do not want to switch to light room but might have to look into other options from capture one or macphun or onOne to see if they come out with a photo database program that would be comparable to aperture or lightroom. Those who made full switch to aperture never went back to iphoto. fact is i deleted iphoto before OS X.10. I do like the option in photos to only share to icloud only photos u want to share. I see photos and icloud the same thing but refined version of photo stream designed for one thing only to share photos. photos and icloud might be for those who are iphoto users and see it as an improvement but it is a giant step backwards to the pro flexibility of Aperture. Funny thing is Aperture was and still might be a very well sold app in the mac app store. I think in the end Aperture either will get a facelife like Final Cut X or integrated fully into photos as a in app purchase. Till them I am using aperture till i can use it no more.

 

[SirYossi]

DAM Software

Such as? Seriously, I could use a few suggestions myself. Most "DAM" software seems to be oriented towards the commercial web/magazine world.

This is to my knowledge not a single DAM software out on the market that is not commercial based i.e. expensive. Extensis Portfolio used to be affordable till they went to the Studio version which now costs $2199.00. I have the last stand alone version and it does not work well in OS X.10.

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I think that will be a waste of money. At some point it won't work because apple will not update it, so the next OS upgrade may break it. I recommend looking at other DAM products that will be supported by companies.

Spending money on a product that apple is killing off may not be the best use of your funds imo

I think apple chopping Aperture next OS is a little premature. I think Aperture will be supported at least another year maybe two. I think there will be at least support to OS X.11 maybe X.12 after that who knows

 

[MellowFuzz]

Your original photos are downloaded and stored on your computer. There is nothing to lose. Explaining this over and over again is getting tiring.

The Photos app merely pushes your photos to iCloud (if you choose) and then allows them to be pushed to your iOS devices. Likewise, your iOS devices push them to iCloud and they are then pushed to the Photos app. Once in the photos app they can be stored on your Mac if you choose. The only way to lose something is to delete photos (either from your iOS device, or from iCloud.com, or from your Mac).

Tell that to my magically self-erasing Notes.

 

[Drag'nGT]

Unless I'm mistaking what you want, you could do this now in iPhoto. Just create an event for each year, say Year2005, Year2006 etc, and put your photos in those events as you take them (eg the stuff you are taking now goes in year2015) and then create albums for any specific things you wish to access directly, lets say "Hawaii vacation 07-08" or "Photos of GF's dog" or whatever, those would cover pictures in multiple years.

I'll give that a try and see how I like it.

 

[cinealta]

The Photos app merely pushes your photos to iCloud (if you choose) and then allows them to be pushed to your iOS devices. Likewise, your iOS devices push them to iCloud and they are then pushed to the Photos app. Once in the photos app they can be stored on your Mac if you choose. The only way to lose something is to delete photos (either from your iOS device, or from iCloud.com, or from your Mac).

So can Photos work the old-fashioned way without any iCloud? Can I download my iPhone pics to my Mac using a lightning-USB cable? If I accidentally delete a pic on my iPhone I don't want it to be instantly deleted on my Mac!

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I think that will be a waste of money. At some point it won't work because apple will not update it, so the next OS upgrade may break it. I recommend looking at other DAM products that will be supported by companies.

Spending money on a product that apple is killing off may not be the best use of your funds imo

$80 for 2 years use is not bad until the next thing comes out. It works out to $7 per month. Basically just a hamburger & fries once a month.

 

[GlenK]

I have been looking forward to Photos until I read one comment above that there are no Events in Photos.

So what happens to your Events? Do they just go away and all the photos are lumped by "time" in one area?

If that's the case how are you handling it if you've used the test version?

Do you need to go through and make Albums out of every Event you want to keep in tack?

 

[talmy]

So can Photos work the old-fashioned way without any iCloud? Can I download my iPhone pics to my Mac using a lightning-USB cable? If I accidentally delete a pic on my iPhone I don't want it to be instantly deleted on my Mac!

It works without iCloud, but at least for now doesn't see a connected iPhone. You can, of course, use the often forgotten Image Capture.app to import the pictures to a folder on you Mac and then import them into Photos.

I have been looking forward to Photos until I read one comment above that there are no Events in Photos.

There is a folder titled "iPhoto Events" that contains the events. The "events" are now "albums".

 

[GlenK]

There is a folder titled "iPhoto Events" that contains the events. The "events" are now "albums".

Very good and thank you for the information. Feel a lot better about it now..

 

[Beavix]

It works without iCloud, but at least for now doesn't see a connected iPhone.

You'll see the iPhone in Photos if you enable the sidebar.

 

[redkamel]

The most aggravating thing about this is, is that this whole "fiasco" was avoidable.

Iphoto was terrible, Aperture was great and easy to use.

All they had to do was take Aperture's UI and editors, add a few consumer/casual level editing options, change the default editing blocks to casual ones, add Cloud syncing and plug ins, and get rid of the really confusing and arbitrary moments/events organizational structure, and now you have a new and improved iPhoto with Apertures strengths.

Pros have all the goodness of Aperture, non-pros have simple editing tools and great organization.

The only way Photos can be great is if it integrates with tons of editors and plugins and has a better organizing structure (which it appears to so far not be able to do)

 

[talmy]

You'll see the iPhone in Photos if you enable the sidebar.

Aha!

I just noticed that a button for "Import" appears along the top as well. Pretty subtle (and IMHO a bad UI design to have the buttons appear and disappear rather than just becoming greyed out).

Once on the import screen there is a checkbox for having Photos automatically open when the iPhone is connected. That's good!

 

[fongkahchun86]

All these articles seem to express how great the new Photos app is. The truth is that for the large majority of people who would want to use it - they will be now forced to pay a monthly fee to sync their photos via iCloud.

Apple only provides 5 GB of free cloud storage. I don't know anyone who has 5GB or less of iPhotos storage.

While I am a fan of most Apple technologies - I am not a fan of having to pay a monthly forever just to sync my photos to my other devices.

Please change the headlines to these glowing reviews to "Photos Will Require Monthly Subscription for 99% of Users for Syncing Photos"

Photo Stream will stream & store the latest 1000 photo. The older photo will be "pushed out" of this 1000 photo collection. The 1000 photo stored under "Photo Stream" will not count into your 5GB free account.

Source: http://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT201317
How many photos are stored in My Photo Stream on my devices and computers?
iCloud pushes all your photos to the Recently Added album or My Photo Stream album on your devices and computers, and manages them efficiently, so you don’t run out of storage space.
Your iOS devices keep a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos in the Photos tab (or My Photo Stream album in iOS 7). From there, you can browse your recent photos or move the ones you like to another album to keep them on your device forever.
Because your Mac and PC have more storage than your iOS devices, you can choose to download all of your My Photo Stream photos automatically.

 

[viorelgn]

Apple IS clearly a world leading company and their style and service are beyond reproach. I am sorry that you were not able to read and understand my clear and perfect English... Apple was the go to company for image makers and had decided that to abandon making photography software for higher end users in favour of the masses. Their attempts to upgrade iPhoto through the years has often been by removing previous functionality, present Aperture users are left with NO Apple software option. It is a great shame that with all their billions in cash reserves they are not able to put some of that to use maintaining a once standard program. Photos for OS X may be praised as an improvement over a basic iPhoto program but it is not a tool for someone seriously working with photographic images. Apple my care about you but they do not care about someone like me who has been an exclusive Apple customer for fifteen years...

 

[bart4u]

Will Not Use

As a professional I use Lightroom 5 daily and the new Apple design is for the regular consumer market. I never used Iphoto and I will never use this new Apple photo program. I would never in a million years trust my photos to a Cloud System and I would never pay for a system like that. A Cloud System could never handle the amount of RAW files I shoot anyhow but I did not like how Apple said good buy to the pro market with Aperture with no yearly updates to their program. I am glad I never wasted my time in learning Aperture but if their program had better reviews than Lightroom 5 I would look at switching over to their program but that never happened. Photographers only have two choices and that would be LIghtroom 5 and Capture One.

 

[CausticPuppy]

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.

Lightroom and CaptureOne are definitely better than Aperture for editing; but Aperture's digital asset management, and library management, was awesome. I'm going to miss that part.

Lightroom is OK in that department, hopefully the next version will continue to improve it.

I'll keep using Lightroom for editing my camera pics, and then export my JPGs to Photos for easy sharing.

 

[KUguardgrl13]

So I just thought of something that concerned me when iCloud Photo Library was originally announced. Is there any way to choose to have the optimized (low res) photos uploaded to iCloud and have the original full res stored on, say, my rMBP? For instance, I have about 15gb of photos right now between my iPhoto Library and photos stored in Finder. I'm not sure how much iCloud storage I want to pay for, so it'd be nice if I could get away with the free 5gb or the $.99 20gb for a while before paying for more storage. Any insight? I know you can always choose which devices will get the full res, but I wasn't sure if iCloud had the option of which resolution to select.

 

[BriMercer]

Hidden Photos

Does anyone know?

The only other pressing question that lingers is with respect to hidden photos. In iPhoto, you could hide blurry or less than perfect photos so that only your best work was on display without having to delete the bad ones from the library. Aperture has a similiar feature that hides photos if you rate them poorly enough.

Is there somethign similiar in the Photos app?

 

[Boomish69]

Don't then. As has been mentioned about a dozen times in this thread, you don't have to use iCloud at all if you don't want to sync the photos between your devices. Then it's just like iPhoto in the way it operates.

it doesn't look like it operates the same way at all. And for your info not everyone reads every part of a thread, I'm just going by the video which to me seems the emphasis is on iCloud integration, as an iPhoto/Photoshop user this is less than impressive.
I don't want iCloud to be a main feature, who has less than 5GB of pics anyway? why would you want to pay apple to store them there, certainly for private family pictures. I have mine encrypted in a local & offsite backup. Yes people might share some collections or if your work was something to do with photo's but with people like Amazon giving away unlimited storage with Prime, I don't see the point. I suppose lets wait and see when it comes out, but to me it seems Apple are chasing Lightroom to be the archetypal place to store your library online. Personally I want my family pictures kept private and on my Mac not on some hub and paying a subscription for the privilege.

 

[AllergyDoc]

Photos crashed every time I use the Adjust function. Every time. I can use the other parts of the app, though.

 

[Oh-es-Ten]

Can anyone answer this -

If you don't use the iCloud sync, how is a sync of Photos done between the iPhone and Mac - can you still include Albums/Events in an iTunes sync, as you can do with iPhoto?

I would love to have all my photos synced via iCloud, but the library is just too large to make it practical.

 

[MiragePL]

In iPhoto and Aperture after deleting photos they were moved to Thrash located in an app and after this you could empty Thrash which was moving files to system Recycle Bin. In Photos (beta) there is no Thrash and deleting photos means only hiding them in app cause they are still visible in library contents. Is there any method for now to permanently delete photos from library or we must wait for another update of beta?

 

[zepman]

In iPhoto and Aperture after deleting photos they were moved to Thrash located in an app and after this you could empty Thrash which was moving files to system Recycle Bin. In Photos (beta) there is no Thrash and deleting photos means only hiding them in app cause they are still visible in library contents. Is there any method for now to permanently delete photos from library or we must wait for another update of beta?

It works the same way as with iOS 8. The photos get permanently deleted after 30 days if you don't do it manually before that time.
You can "show recently deleted photos" from one of the menus. (Might be "View", I don't have access to the app right now) From there you can select and delete photos immediately.

 

[MiragePL]

It works the same way as with iOS 8. The photos get permanently deleted after 30 days if you don't do it manually before that time.
You can "show recently deleted photos" from one of the menus. (Might be "View", I don't have access to the app right now) From there you can select and delete photos immediately.

I think you are talking about files in Cloud and I'm talking about files stored locally. I don't think that I need to wait 30 days for my 20 GBs of RAW to delete automatically

 

[zepman]

I think you are talking about files in Cloud and I'm talking about files stored locally. I don't think that I need to wait 30 days for my 20 GBs of RAW to delete automatically

If I understand it correctly, it works the same way with non-iCloud stored photos.

I do not use iCloud Photo Library.
I will do more testing in the next few days.

 

[MythicFrost]

Thank goodness.

I've always tried using iPhoto, but it's such a pain the way it wants to turn everything into an event.