Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
First Impressions of Photos for OS X: 'Vast Improvement' Over iPhoto
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If this app lives up to the hype, and works correctly (everything just, you know, will "work"), then this will be AMAZING. It looks great, way better than iPhoto. Currently, iPhoto is just a piece of crap and a dog to use. C'mon Apple, let's get this thing tested (thoroughly, so that there are no major bugs that may result in photo loss) and released ASAP!
My only issue with this is that despite Apple's massive cash reserves, it still isn't competitive with what Dropbox offers in way of storage. With so much getting invested into the iCloud stuff, anyone see a chance they'll get more price competitive?
I've got a 300GB iPhoto library.
I've got a 300GB iPhoto library.
For those of you saying you've lost your iPhoto Events (as I thought I had) have you checked for an Album called 'iPhoto Events' at the top level? Each of my events were a separate sub-album within.
Also, as good as the new Photos app is, it is immeasurably easier to navigate with the sidebar turned on (View > Show Sidebar.) At least in my opinion.
Also, as good as the new Photos app is, it is immeasurably easier to navigate with the sidebar turned on (View > Show Sidebar.) At least in my opinion.
It's funny you say that, because when they announced their new price points for iCloud storage, they beat Dropbox by a significant margin. 100 GB of Dropbox storage was $99/year, whereas 200 GB of iCloud Drive storage was going to be $3.99/month, less than $48/year.
I'd like to see the prices come down again, especially in the larger sizes, but I only need about 100 GB, so the 200 GB at $3.99/month is working just fine for me at the end of the day.
But in terms of cloud storage, what I'd really like to see more than anything is an increase in the song limit in iTunes Match! 25k is killing me!
Fast and tightly integrated with the phone? Great.
Lacking some Aperture features? I don't think anyone is surprised. These will hopefully be added over time.
I have a few questions: Can I store photos locally?
Is this like Documents in the Cloud: When you lose connection you can still view and edit photos, and then the changes sync when you reconnect?
Once I've filled up my 5GB of iCloud storage syncing, editing, organising my newest photos, can the rest be stored on my Mac only where I have a lot of space?
----------
I think so. As someone said, Photo Stream let you have 1,000 photos in a ton of different shared streams. This plus iCloud Document storage. Now, Apple won't have to let you store thousands of photos in the cloud, so hopefully we will see the free storage increase. We saw price reductions last summer, and hopefully will see more.
Lacking some Aperture features? I don't think anyone is surprised. These will hopefully be added over time.
I have a few questions: Can I store photos locally?
Is this like Documents in the Cloud: When you lose connection you can still view and edit photos, and then the changes sync when you reconnect?
Once I've filled up my 5GB of iCloud storage syncing, editing, organising my newest photos, can the rest be stored on my Mac only where I have a lot of space?
----------
I think so. As someone said, Photo Stream let you have 1,000 photos in a ton of different shared streams. This plus iCloud Document storage. Now, Apple won't have to let you store thousands of photos in the cloud, so hopefully we will see the free storage increase. We saw price reductions last summer, and hopefully will see more.
Last edited:
What if we don't want all our photos in the cloud?
I've been happy with Photo Stream moving my iPhone pics into iPhoto, but I've got 50,000 pics in my iPhoto library (~320Gb) and I have no interest in migrating that to the cloud.
Will the one-way cloud syncing continue to work as it does in iPhoto?
Actually, I *have* been looking for a cloud-based archive for all these photos, but given Apple's history in cloud services (in terms of reliability and longevity) I am hesitant to put a lot of trust with them on this.
I've been happy with Photo Stream moving my iPhone pics into iPhoto, but I've got 50,000 pics in my iPhoto library (~320Gb) and I have no interest in migrating that to the cloud.
Will the one-way cloud syncing continue to work as it does in iPhoto?
Actually, I *have* been looking for a cloud-based archive for all these photos, but given Apple's history in cloud services (in terms of reliability and longevity) I am hesitant to put a lot of trust with them on this.
Question for anyone testing iCloud Photo Library: what happens to videos? Are they uploaded as well? Earlier comments have established that the new Photos app can't do anything with them, but does turning on iCloud Photo Library leave them stranded on your devices?
Coming from Aperture and knowing they'll swiftly abandon support for Aperture libraries in iTunes (synch to iOS) and the program (future major OS X version) I'll remember this experience for a long time.
Hope you save good cash on binning Aperture, Apple.
Also, once more a good reminder that their secretive behavior, never telling what they show you is all fun and games for the beautiful surprises, the fun keynotes, the beefy upgrades you hadn't expected.
Don't forget stuff like this.
To think somebody bought Aperture a year ago and learned a few months later that they'll bin it and then see what Apple plans to replace it with.
Wow.
Anyone using it for longer doesn't feel bitten financially, they are invested in this software otherwise.
Whoever you ask, early or late Aperture users, they'll all remember this very well.
Apple created a lot of frustration and I cannot imagine that Aperture didn't at least generate SOME profit or break even to not piss off every user of this quite unique software.
Glassed Silver:mac
Hope you save good cash on binning Aperture, Apple.
Also, once more a good reminder that their secretive behavior, never telling what they show you is all fun and games for the beautiful surprises, the fun keynotes, the beefy upgrades you hadn't expected.
Don't forget stuff like this.
To think somebody bought Aperture a year ago and learned a few months later that they'll bin it and then see what Apple plans to replace it with.
Wow.
Anyone using it for longer doesn't feel bitten financially, they are invested in this software otherwise.
Whoever you ask, early or late Aperture users, they'll all remember this very well.
Apple created a lot of frustration and I cannot imagine that Aperture didn't at least generate SOME profit or break even to not piss off every user of this quite unique software.
Glassed Silver:mac
Agreed on all points, especially will there be an equivalent of Photo Stream sync for wirelessly copying photos from iPhone to the local library on the Mac.
And for cloud based archiving (note not storage of masters! Just a belt and braces, offsite archive of everything) I'm using OneDrive. The OD iOS app periodically backs up my camera roll to OneDrive, and ahave manually copied all of my exported iPhoto library to individual year specific folders within OneDrive as a one off (I love my 40/10 fibre broadband).
Had tried backing everything in iPhoto up to Flickr via the Flickr connecter in IPhoto - hopeless, just hopeless.
Nice beta - I see a suddenly massively increased market share for my currently in development App
Photo looks pretty good. I have jpgs of all my saved images in iPhoto. It has been a great way to take a lot of photos to show to others. I have not used iPhoto for adjustments however. It is just too primitive for that though I appreciated the fact that it could process and adjust Canon RAW files.
I have been using Aperture as a catalog database for all my shots regardless of whether finished or not. Aperture looks like it could have become a real professional contender but when Apple failed to improve it and then lowered the price the writing was on the wall.
Aperture definitely failed to become a reason for a pro to own a Mac. The emphasis now is clearly on the prosumer demographic. Photo looks like it will be a great companion to Mac OS and the people who buy them.
I have been using Aperture as a catalog database for all my shots regardless of whether finished or not. Aperture looks like it could have become a real professional contender but when Apple failed to improve it and then lowered the price the writing was on the wall.
Aperture definitely failed to become a reason for a pro to own a Mac. The emphasis now is clearly on the prosumer demographic. Photo looks like it will be a great companion to Mac OS and the people who buy them.
Apple is completely blowing it.
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.
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.
Question/Suggestion: I used to have all users in my household (2 adults, 2 kids) signed into our main iCloud account on all devices. This allowed all pictures taken by the family to be automatically downloaded to our iMac for backup/preservation by Aperture/iPhoto.
When Family Sharing came out with iOS8, we all logged into our seperate iCloud accounts and now only one user has their photos automatically brought into Aperture on our iMac.
They need to have a way to enable Family Sharing in this new Photos app so all the pictures a family of users take are preserved in one place. Of course, I'm sure Apple would like me to buy extra iCloud photo storage for 4 users instead of 1
Any thoughts?
Suggestion would be iCloud Photo Sharing or putting things into the main shared family photo album. The behaviour you described is exactly how it should work. If each user had their own account on the mac, then each persons' photos would download to the account they are logged in on. Each iCloud account has 5GB free.
I'm curious why OneDrive? I tried it out briefly, but thought Dropbox with Carousel was substantially better, so I've been using that now.
I used to be pretty happy with PhotoStream/Aperture, but they essentially let both die. Shared PhotoStreams are limited in resolution, so it doesn't work for backing up photos from all devices.
Now I have everything sync to Dropbox using Carousel, and then have Hazel (alternatively, Folder Actions) copy new files into my Lightroom's Auto-Import folder. Also, once you get past the interface Lightroom is leaps and bounds better than Aperture ever was, so at least I got some benefit from Apple ditching it. And it's Flickr uploading tool works perfectly and syncs all metadata from Flickr (comments, ratings, tags, etc.) back into the local files. Perfect.
Do not use iCloud Photo Sharing or the default Family Sharing album if you want to preserve the original images. Photos in the shared stream are resized to a maximum long-edge pixel size (which escapes me for the moment, but it's smaller than the images from an iPhone 6) Edit: It's 2304px.
Last edited:
For those who have asked.. Videos do get uploaded from devices.. They are up there in acct. For those who have photo app, have they not downloaded?
Doesn't Apple always do this -- Every year add new features to said app and then Lifecycle's it out and builds a new said barebones app and adds same old but new features to barebones app until it's time to Lifecycle that one out too. Wash, Rinse and Repeat. example: iMovie, Pages, Final Cut Pro, and now Photos. is Apple gaming us?!
The thing that upsets me most about this is that they USED to. Aperture is an amazing software product. Many professional photographers LOVE it and want to keep using it.
There's no reason Apple couldn't have continued developing Aperture for enthusiasts and pros, and still released Photos for the masses. At this point I'd be happy even if Apple only provided bugfixes and continued support for future versions of Mac OS X.
Why has Apple shifted their focus this way? They're a big enough company to provide something for both.
There's no reason Apple couldn't have continued developing Aperture for enthusiasts and pros, and still released Photos for the masses. At this point I'd be happy even if Apple only provided bugfixes and continued support for future versions of Mac OS X.
Why has Apple shifted their focus this way? They're a big enough company to provide something for both.
I was just about to move to Aperture before it was made EOL, so decided to wait and see what the new Photos app would bring. As of yesterday, I've commenced the move over to Lightroom Going to be a big job tidying up, as my library is about 670GB...
Like many others, I've been a long-time user of iPhoto, but I have to disagree that it has been reliable. While I have always liked the organisational features and UI of iPhoto, since iPhoto 09 it has just become too unreliable. I've had multiple instances of the iPhoto library becoming corrupted on import, the application hanging on sharing photos to social media, and in the last 3 months have had to constantly rebuild the database because thumbnails become corrupted.
What was once an application that made photo management simple and pleasant has become a tedious chore just to keep running, and given the frequent corruption issues the way it stores everything inside the .pkg file is the opposite of confidence inspiring. As for iCloud Photos, I don't necessarily want to synchronize edits/deletions across all my devices, and Apple are notoriously poor at allowing the user to customise how they do things. While the default behaviour may be highly convenient 98% of the time, being unable to change said default for the 2% exceptions for me outweighs the benefits.
I was hoping that the new Photos OSX app might regain the ability to use referenced files and inherit from Aprture the ability to link to multiple libraries and off-line storage, but sadly not. I loathe Adobe, and find the Lightroom UI vastly inferior to iPhoto or Aperture (for file management/browsing - editing is another story), but it just doesn't look like Photos is a serious option for someone with a large library.
Going to be a big job tidying up, as my library is about 670GB...Like many others, I've been a long-time user of iPhoto, but I have to disagree that it has been reliable. While I have always liked the organisational features and UI of iPhoto, since iPhoto 09 it has just become too unreliable. I've had multiple instances of the iPhoto library becoming corrupted on import, the application hanging on sharing photos to social media, and in the last 3 months have had to constantly rebuild the database because thumbnails become corrupted.
What was once an application that made photo management simple and pleasant has become a tedious chore just to keep running, and given the frequent corruption issues the way it stores everything inside the .pkg file is the opposite of confidence inspiring. As for iCloud Photos, I don't necessarily want to synchronize edits/deletions across all my devices, and Apple are notoriously poor at allowing the user to customise how they do things. While the default behaviour may be highly convenient 98% of the time, being unable to change said default for the 2% exceptions for me outweighs the benefits.
I was hoping that the new Photos OSX app might regain the ability to use referenced files and inherit from Aprture the ability to link to multiple libraries and off-line storage, but sadly not. I loathe Adobe, and find the Lightroom UI vastly inferior to iPhoto or Aperture (for file management/browsing - editing is another story), but it just doesn't look like Photos is a serious option for someone with a large library.
I hate the fact that iPhoto would try to import videos. It was always in the way.
'Photos' app for photos only.
If you want videos make a video app, maybe call it 'Videos'
Every time I move a photo from All Photos to a specific album, it keeps the original in the All Photos section, is there anyway to avoid this? Once I move a file, I want it gone from the main photo section.
Glad to hear some news about this. Was getting a little worried! Can't wait to try it out myself.