OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Public Beta With Photos App Now Available

[bryanzak]

iPhote has no lag to. How old is your Mac??? Photos is not functional. It's a mess compared to iPhoto

I have a brand new 27" iMac, loaded, and iPhoto is a dog dealing with 35,000 photos. For example opening up my son's "Face" (about 8,000 photos) can take 90 seconds or longer. (Yes I have a fusion drive)

I can enumerate multiple areas where iPhoto's performance is terrible. And it doesn't sync photos across all my devices. That's the final nail in the 13 year old coffin.

What makes you say Photos is a mess? After spending a couple of days with Photos and two different libraries (a small one with 750ish photos and a copy of our main 35,000 photo library) I couldn't be more pleased. Yes there are some issues (by and large all minor), but I won't have any problem moving to Photos when it's released.

Unlike many of the folks complaining though, I'm opening bug reports with Apple for each and every thing -- no matter how minor. I'm curious, since you seem dismissive of Photos are you providing that kind of feedback to Apple as well or just ranting in forums?

 

[salkin]

Let me tell u guys Photos horror story.

I've been waiting for this kind of cloud based photo service for damn long. To have everything in one app, every device, edit them and still able to revert original photo etc

I have over 40 000 photos which took about 120GB on my Finder folders. Importing been so damn slow. I'm still not done and I started last thursday. First app is processing them and I guess creating thumbnails and other stuff. After importing 65GB of photos in 2 days, I started to realize that Photos app actually takes alot of space! 65GB has become 100GB... How thumbnails can take 35GB???

Uploading to iCloud is painful. I have realized there's some kind of hourly upload limit and if I reach it, app gives me 1 hour penalty and it's effecting to every device! If I'm on penalty also my iPhone and iPad stops downloading/uploading photos for one hour.

Few days ago I was doing some edits to my photos on my way to work. When I got to the wi-fi connection for some reason iPhone was stuck on uploading my edits to iCloud Photo Library. After 24 hours been stuck I decided to unable iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone to restart sync. It was a BIG mistake since iPhone couldn't delete photos from my iPhone even when I choose that option. I had all of the 25 000 thumbnails on my phone and nothing synced anymore, I couldn't even delete them. Only change was to delete some folders under PhotoData folder through iExplorer.

After fixing that mess and re-syncing I realized those photos I edited earlier on iPhone been corrupted. I couldn't open it neither on iOS or Mac. I tried to revert original version on editing mode but it just said something like "can't download original photo from the server. Please try later again". Hopefully they will work later again.

Also I have realized Photos app is so laggy on iPad and iPhone with huge photo library. Almost stops working while it's downloading/uploading. I'm on iPhone 6 and iPad Air.

Things that bothers me on Photos in Mac....

- "All Photos" folder not organized by date. Now it's huge mess!
- Smart albums not showing on iOS devices
- I think there should be Faces -tab, not folder under Albums-tab
- Not able to edit/add geo location
- Not able to adjust date & time of several photos
- Not able to drag photos to Photoshop. I remember it was possible on iPhoto
- I want to filter all photos that are not in Album yet. For me browsing photos though "Moments" is too much. I want to organize everything in Folders by year, and events in Albums. Now if I take new photos on my iPhone, there's no way to see which is not in album yet.
- Moving photos from album to another is impossible. Now I first need to go to current album "Delete from this album" and then go to Moments, find same photos and add them to new album.. Easy?

and on iOS still missing

- No Faces section or search by Face name.
- Can't add tags, adjust date/time

Hope all you guys had better experience with Photos. I now wished I waited til actual release

 

[Belmont31R]

Heh people with much smaller amounts of photos were complaining before about the upload time to complete the transfer to iCloud.

Then if you start messing with disabling it in the middle of all that I can imagine you ran into problems.

And this is a beta still, and has been for a while. If you have a really big photo library its going to take a long time to upload everything and you need to have some patience.

----------

I have a brand new 27" iMac, loaded, and iPhoto is a dog dealing with 35,000 photos. For example opening up my son's "Face" (about 8,000 photos) can take 90 seconds or longer. (Yes I have a fusion drive)

I can enumerate multiple areas where iPhoto's performance is terrible. And it doesn't sync photos across all my devices. That's the final nail in the 13 year old coffin.

What makes you say Photos is a mess? After spending a couple of days with Photos and two different libraries (a small one with 750ish photos and a copy of our main 35,000 photo library) I couldn't be more pleased. Yes there are some issues (by and large all minor), but I won't have any problem moving to Photos when it's released.

Unlike many of the folks complaining though, I'm opening bug reports with Apple for each and every thing -- no matter how minor. I'm curious, since you seem dismissive of Photos are you providing that kind of feedback to Apple as well or just ranting in forums?

I am on lesser machine but with a smaller library and Photos app is much smoother and faster all around than iPhoto.


And people...like it or not Apple is getting rid of the old apps with the Forstal touch. Deal with the new UI style or not but thats the direction they are going.


All in all I am VERY happy with getting rid of iPhoto and transferring to Photos. This will be much better for the vast majority of users.

As I said earlier in the thread if you are a professional then this app, and iCloud Photo Library isn't for you. I doubt Apple ever made very much money off Aperture and this new system is much more appealing to newer prospective customers. How many people are going to go spend $79.99 in the MAS for Aperture? They've already moved from iWork being paid apps to free and its probably not worth it in the long run to keep up with the expensive paid apps that have a pretty small user base.

 

[zerolight]

Same here. I think I'd be horrified if I got all the pictures my kids took

My Kids are 6 and 9. They don't take pictures. When older they will most likely opt out of our family album. I know I would. Ignore them for now. The issue is that my wife and I can't share a master library.

Are you seriously agreeing that a husband and wife should not have a single master library for all photos? My wife loves having access to all our photos going back years without having to go to my login. Vacations, Photos of kids, etc. if I share those via the cloud "family share" or create a new cloud share, not only am I doubling up on content on all my devices, the original library and the share, but I've lost the benefit of shared edits. Any changes are made to the photo in the shared album, not the photo in the master library. And any photos added to an album in the master library - a smart album for instance, don't appear in the cloud share as that is really just a snap shot. So the share needs to be deleted and reshared.

All the benefits of photo library in iCloud are only available to a single user. Fine, some of you don't want it, but it should be an option. I should be able to give my wife view and edit rights to OUR entire photo library in the same way I can a single shared album in ios. It should be an option you can turn on or off. The limitation makes sense on the phone on iOS. Sharing one off photos from camera roll. It makes less sense with the master library.

If you take all the photos in your family and control everything and your wife just wants to see the results and just the best ones, fine. My wife share the role of photographer and as a result we both want to see and managed the results in a single library.

I'm not so great at sorting out the crap from 6000 photos. My wife is. Instead of sharing the library, Aperture style, Photos requires me to share my login or lock my wife out of the master library.

 

[Belmont31R]

My Kids are 6 and 9. They don't take pictures. When older they will most likely opt out of our family album. I know I would. Ignore them for now. The issue is that my wife and I can't share a master library.

Are you seriously agreeing that a husband and wife should not have a single master library for all photos? My wife loves having access to all our photos going back years without having to go to my login. Vacations, Photos of kids, etc. if I share those via the cloud "family share" or create a new cloud share, not only am I doubling up on content on all my devices, the original library and the share, but I've lost the benefit of shared edits. Any changes are made to the photo in the shared album, not the photo in the master library. And any photos added to an album in the master library - a smart album for instance, don't appear in the cloud share as that is really just a snap shot. So the share needs to be deleted and reshared.

All the benefits of photo library in iCloud are only available to a single user. Fine, some of you don't want it, but it should be an option. I should be able to give my wife view and edit rights to OUR entire photo library in the same way I can a single shared album in ios. It should be an option you can turn on or off. The limitation makes sense on the phone on iOS. Sharing one off photos from camera roll. It makes less sense with the master library.

If you take all the photos in your family and control everything and your wife just wants to see the results and just the best ones, fine. My wife share the role of photographer and as a result we both want to see and managed the results in a single library.

I'm not so great at sorting out the crap from 6000 photos. My wife is. Instead of sharing the library, Aperture style, Photos requires me to share my login or lock my wife out of the master library.

I have kids, too, with 8 year old twins, who have their own phones, but I still don't see any desire to have every picture that gets on my iPhone or Mac automatically synced across to my wife's phone, and I don't want her photos automatically synced across to my phone.

Shared Photostream's do not take a lot of space on the phone. They are like the "optimized" setting on iCloud Photo Library. Full res images don't get downloaded.

A master library insinuates having lesser libraries but at the same time you're saying you want all of the pictures you have under your iCloud account synced across to your family. Our shared Family Photostream album is our master library with over 1600 images. If all of the pictures in my wife's iCloud Photo Library and mine were combined my 64GB iPhone would not have enough storage. She takes a lot of pictures, and having a selective (manual) shared library is the only way to go; that shared library doesn't download full res to the device unless I access each picture.

The limitation is edits don't sync across after the 'share' but you just have to do edits before sharing them. While I'd agree that its an arbitrary limitation that should be fixed I don't think its a show stopper, and we'll probably see improvements to shared streams in the future. Photos app is already better to me than iPhoto, and its still a beta 1.0 which is fine. Much like iWork I think the new Photos system will take a while to get refined, and some people will probably feel like features have been removed, but the 'new' way will be better for the majority of users.

 

[bryanzak]

Let me tell u guys Photos horror story.

I've been waiting for this kind of cloud based photo service for damn long. To have everything in one app, every device, edit them and still able to revert original photo etc

I have over 40 000 photos which took about 120GB on my Finder folders. Importing been so damn slow. I'm still not done and I started last thursday. First app is processing them and I guess creating thumbnails and other stuff. After importing 65GB of photos in 2 days, I started to realize that Photos app actually takes alot of space! 65GB has become 100GB... How thumbnails can take 35GB???

Uploading to iCloud is painful. I have realized there's some kind of hourly upload limit and if I reach it, app gives me 1 hour penalty and it's effecting to every device! If I'm on penalty also my iPhone and iPad stops downloading/uploading photos for one hour.

Few days ago I was doing some edits to my photos on my way to work. When I got to the wi-fi connection for some reason iPhone was stuck on uploading my edits to iCloud Photo Library. After 24 hours been stuck I decided to unable iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone to restart sync. It was a BIG mistake since iPhone couldn't delete photos from my iPhone even when I choose that option. I had all of the 25 000 thumbnails on my phone and nothing synced anymore, I couldn't even delete them. Only change was to delete some folders under PhotoData folder through iExplorer.

After fixing that mess and re-syncing I realized those photos I edited earlier on iPhone been corrupted. I couldn't open it neither on iOS or Mac. I tried to revert original version on editing mode but it just said something like "can't download original photo from the server. Please try later again". Hopefully they will work later again.

Also I have realized Photos app is so laggy on iPad and iPhone with huge photo library. Almost stops working while it's downloading/uploading. I'm on iPhone 6 and iPad Air.

Things that bothers me on Photos in Mac....

- "All Photos" folder not organized by date. Now it's huge mess!
- Smart albums not showing on iOS devices
- I think there should be Faces -tab, not folder under Albums-tab
- Not able to edit/add geo location
- Not able to adjust date & time of several photos
- Not able to drag photos to Photoshop. I remember it was possible on iPhoto
- I want to filter all photos that are not in Album yet. For me browsing photos though "Moments" is too much. I want to organize everything in Folders by year, and events in Albums. Now if I take new photos on my iPhone, there's no way to see which is not in album yet.
- Moving photos from album to another is impossible. Now I first need to go to current album "Delete from this album" and then go to Moments, find same photos and add them to new album.. Easy?

and on iOS still missing

- No Faces section or search by Face name.
- Can't add tags, adjust date/time

Hope all you guys had better experience with Photos. I now wished I waited til actual release

All Photos is sorted by date added. It's your "camera roll"
Why even mention iOS shortcomings? Not relevant here. Parity is obviously coming to iOS
No Faces tab is a minor quibble turn on sidebar maybe?
Not being able to edit add gps info is an issue. I've reported it to Apple. Have you?
You can change time date on multiple photos
You can have a smart album for not in any album
Move to another album by selecting pics selecting new album from file menu and then selecting the desired album

 

[joeallam1]

Unexpected error

I've updated to this new Photos app. selected a new iCloud plan and started to prepare my iPhotos library. However the process takes ages (about an hour), gets to 30% and then I get a pop up message saying an unexpected error has occurred and then it quits. I have been through this process 4 times now. My iPhotos library is on an external hard drive as it is over 120gb and too big for my Macbook Pro.

I was able to complete the process with a second, smaller iPhoto library I had locally on my machine.

Any thoughts? Has anyone else experienced this?

Cheers

 

[bryanzak]

My Kids are 6 and 9. They don't take pictures. When older they will most likely opt out of our family album. I know I would. Ignore them for now. The issue is that my wife and I can't share a master library.

Are you seriously agreeing that a husband and wife should not have a single master library for all photos? My wife loves having access to all our photos going back years without having to go to my login. Vacations, Photos of kids, etc. if I share those via the cloud "family share" or create a new cloud share, not only am I doubling up on content on all my devices, the original library and the share, but I've lost the benefit of shared edits. Any changes are made to the photo in the shared album, not the photo in the master library. And any photos added to an album in the master library - a smart album for instance, don't appear in the cloud share as that is really just a snap shot. So the share needs to be deleted and reshared.

All the benefits of photo library in iCloud are only available to a single user. Fine, some of you don't want it, but it should be an option. I should be able to give my wife view and edit rights to OUR entire photo library in the same way I can a single shared album in ios. It should be an option you can turn on or off. The limitation makes sense on the phone on iOS. Sharing one off photos from camera roll. It makes less sense with the master library.

If you take all the photos in your family and control everything and your wife just wants to see the results and just the best ones, fine. My wife share the role of photographer and as a result we both want to see and managed the results in a single library.

I'm not so great at sorting out the crap from 6000 photos. My wife is. Instead of sharing the library, Aperture style, Photos requires me to share my login or lock my wife out of the master library.

What you describe doesn't work today with iPhoto so I don't see how Photos is a step back in that respect. The closest you can get is putting the iPhoto Library in a shared location and manually syncing your phones via iTunes. But that still only means one user's Apple ID is used for iClould - shared photo streams, etc. It's clunky at best.

My wife has always had the "master" photo library. Any photos I take on my iPhone that I want in the master library I transfer over to her account and they're imported into iPhoto today (and Photos tomorrow).

I agree that this is not multi-user friendly, but that's no different than it is today. If you need this kind of shared photo library support then it doesn't sound like Apple's solutions are for you. Is that an error on Apple's part? Probably. Does that make Photos 1.0 a bad app? Not in the least. As I said before, for 97% of folks out there, Photos is vast improvement (both in quality of life with respect to multiple devices and in actual functioning of the app) over iPhoto.

Will Photos grow to include Aperture like workflows? Maybe, I'd even say probably.
Will Photos grow to be multi-user account friendly? Unclear, I'm not sure Apple sees it as a priority.

 

[kernowRE]

I've updated to this new Photos app. selected a new iCloud plan and started to prepare my iPhotos library. However the process takes ages (about an hour), gets to 30% and then I get a pop up message saying an unexpected error has occurred and then it quits. I have been through this process 4 times now. My iPhotos library is on an external hard drive as it is over 120gb and too big for my Macbook Pro.

I was able to complete the process with a second, smaller iPhoto library I had locally on my machine.

Any thoughts? Has anyone else experienced this?

Cheers

I had a similar experience, I repaired my library with iPhoto before trying to open it again with Photos, it took a while (80GB library) but the picture count matched after the import and it is now chugging away uploading.

Hold alt-cmd while clicking on iPhoto (different for aperture) to open the repair options

 

[jdphoto]

Does anyone know where to get a copy of the 10.10.3 Beta install file? I've run the update, but also would like to download the update file separately.

 

[rhett7660]

Since this is beta software I hope you guys and gals are trying this out on backed up pictures. Remember this is beta software. I would not be using my master files to test the features out of the new photo app.

 

[joeallam1]

I had a similar experience, I repaired my library with iPhoto before trying to open it again with Photos, it took a while (80GB library) but the picture count matched after the import and it is now chugging away uploading.

Hold alt-cmd while clicking on iPhoto (different for aperture) to open the repair options

brilliant thanks, just running the repair now - fingers crossed!

 

[sualpine]

Since this is beta software I hope you guys and gals are trying this out on backed up pictures. Remember this is beta software. I would not be using my master files to test the features out of the new photo app.

Alpha is the new beta, beta is the new production.

 

[rhett7660]

Alpha is the new beta, beta is the new production.

Doh!

 

[bryanzak]

Since this is beta software I hope you guys and gals are trying this out on backed up pictures. Remember this is beta software. I would not be using my master files to test the features out of the new photo app.

Not only am I testing with a copy of our photo library I'd doing so with a "test" Apple ID I created just for this Photos experience. And then I'm using that test Apple ID on an old iPad to test all the syncing, etc.

 

[rhett7660]

Not only am I testing with a copy of our photo library I'd doing so with a "test" Apple ID I created just for this Photos experience. And then I'm using that test Apple ID on an old iPad to test all the syncing, etc.

Reading some of the comments, I am hoping they are not using real one of a kind, I can't replace these pictures, pictures. I would hate for them to lose information that is not replaceable by using beta software and thinking this is good enough, I can trust it with my only copy of file "X"!

 

[TheDrunkLamb]

1 Day, 7 Hours

It's taking forever to download, says it will take 1 Day, 7 Hours to download! I've done a speed test on my internet and it doesn't appear to have slowed down. Are there lots of people downloading this do we think?

 

[AllergyDoc]

This public beta seems to have killed the phone call aspect to Continuity for me. It worked great in the 2nd developer beta, now seems broken.

 

[hindmost]

Let me tell u guys Photos horror story.......(horror story)....Hope all you guys had better experience with Photos. I now wished I waited til actual release

I have a 'horror story' also. I had eye surgery recently and cannot see much in my near vision. So....I accidentally 'clicked' I wanted an 'aperture' photo file when I should have clicked I was using iPhoto. Result? Not a single photo when I open the new Photos app..

sigh....I'm at a loss how to correct this.

Any thoughts from anybody?

 

[justperry]

try deleting wifi in network settings and then +(add) it back in.
and also go to wifi/advance and delete all networks you are not using..

I am enjoying the read of photo app reviews... I hoping for the best. has anyone tried it with a 650gb library?

That's the first thing I try, I helped a lot of people on this forum here and when they have WIFI issues it's the first thing I tell them to try.
Won't help here.

Thanks for the reply though.

----------

And on other networks?
Have you tried it?

Can't, it's my home (Mac Mini) computer.

Cheers

 

[g33k0ut]

I agree that this is not multi-user friendly, but that's no different than it is today. If you need this kind of shared photo library support then it doesn't sound like Apple's solutions are for you. Is that an error on Apple's part? Probably. Does that make Photos 1.0 a bad app? Not in the least. As I said before, for 97% of folks out there, Photos is vast improvement (both in quality of life with respect to multiple devices and in actual functioning of the app) over iPhoto.

Will Photos grow to include Aperture like workflows? Maybe, I'd even say probably.
Will Photos grow to be multi-user account friendly? Unclear, I'm not sure Apple sees it as a priority.

I didn't spend a huge amount of time reading the details about Photos and iCloud until now, but I had rather assumed that one of the obvious benefits of having a photo library centrally stored on the Cloud was access to all those photos across not just my devices, but also those belonging to family members.

The Family Sharing functions introduced in iOS 8 work well for the most part, but Family Sharing of Photo Albums is a little weak for my tastes. I don't want to have to choose what to share - I already know I want to share everything.

My use case would be to have my wife and I (one iPhone and one Mac each) have access to everything from any device, with content automatically sync'd as photos and video are added or removed from any of those devices.

Apple already do this for all our music courtesy of iTunes Match/iTunes in The Cloud. Replicating that with our Photos is the final piece to establishing iCloud as the central hub of our digital life.

Maybe they'll decide to introduce this later. Until they do, I just saved myself the cost of a storage upgrade for my iCloud account because syncing photos across only my iPhone+Mac isn't a compelling proposition (personal opinion, appreciate views will differ).

 

[zerolight]

I have kids, too, with 8 year old twins, who have their own phones, but I still don't see any desire to have every picture that gets on my iPhone or Mac automatically synced across to my wife's phone, and I don't want her photos automatically synced across to my phone.

Shared Photostream's do not take a lot of space on the phone. They are like the "optimized" setting on iCloud Photo Library. Full res images don't get downloaded.

A master library insinuates having lesser libraries but at the same time you're saying you want all of the pictures you have under your iCloud account synced across to your family. Our shared Family Photostream album is our master library with over 1600 images. If all of the pictures in my wife's iCloud Photo Library and mine were combined my 64GB iPhone would not have enough storage. She takes a lot of pictures, and having a selective (manual) shared library is the only way to go; that shared library doesn't download full res to the device unless I access each picture.

The limitation is edits don't sync across after the 'share' but you just have to do edits before sharing them. While I'd agree that its an arbitrary limitation that should be fixed I don't think its a show stopper, and we'll probably see improvements to shared streams in the future. Photos app is already better to me than iPhoto, and its still a beta 1.0 which is fine. Much like iWork I think the new Photos system will take a while to get refined, and some people will probably feel like features have been removed, but the 'new' way will be better for the majority of users.

I could live with it for now if the sharing was better. But it is totally barebones.

The way the wife and I work right now is:

- Any photos from her phone, my phone, random cute pics the kids have taken with their iPad, and pukka pics from the Nikon all end up in one library. I call it the master library, but there are no others. They all just get dumped into Aperture after Xmas, vacation, whatever.

- Aperture is on a shared drive. We can both open it in our own login on the Mac, so long as it isn't already open. iTunes picks it up as a sync-able option, so we can sync to our own iPads & iPhones. We sync the past year or two (I have several smart albums).

So now we have all the latest photos. At our leisure we can check them out, decide what we want to keep, what we want to delete, etc. And when time permits we go back and remove the chaff from Aperture. Smart albums auto update, iTunes syncs in charge (sometimes), and everything just works.

Photo Library in the cloud could have taken that a step further. Not just review the photos, but throw away the crap, straighten the odd photo, whatever when time at the desk is difficult to come by. Alas, that's a one user solution.

At least there's a sharing option right? The sensible approach would allow me to right click on a smart album, publish it to iCloud, and invited family to access it in their "photostream". Change that album and the iCloud version would update. Of course it doesn't work like that either.

Instead it copies the contents of the album to a new iCloud album. If my smart album changes, I need to go look at it, figure out what is new, and manually move that across to the shared album. I can't even tell it to share all in the album, but skip duplicates - instead it will happily add duplicate after duplicate. In short, it makes it a bit of a chore. Skip duplicates - that would make it workable.

The closest to sensible cloud functionality is Lightroom Mobile, though even that can't share smart albums. But at least it will update whatever regular collection you publish in the cloud as you edit the local album. We could both also login to my account and maintain it. But, I don't really love Lightroom, not enough to pay for the service, and the storage capacity - I'm already close to the limit there. Apple offers 4 times the capacity for half the price of the basic photographer plan.

----------

Reading some of the comments, I am hoping they are not using real one of a kind, I can't replace these pictures, pictures. I would hate for them to lose information that is not replaceable by using beta software and thinking this is good enough, I can trust it with my only copy of file "X"!

The sensible approach is to take a copy of your entire photo library. Play with the copy in Photos.

 

[jmorrison0722]

Questions...

Sorry if these were asked and answered already.
1. Faces. Is full faces functionality in the new app? I'm reading it maintains faces data from iPhoto / aperture, but does it let you define new faces, identify photos, etc.?
2. iCloud library question... say I pay Apple for the space, upload my entire library, but keep it set to keep originals on my mac. How does the new app handle deletes in the future. If I delete from my mac...does it also delete from the cloud? Can I delete from my iPhone or iPad and have them delete from everywhere? I'd like to be able to cull out bad photos from any device, but just curious if that's supported.
3. Can someone clue me in on how the iCloud photo library integrates with family sharing? Will I be able to import from multiple devices, each using their own Apple ID's?
4. Curious how adjustments from aperture carry over. What happens to adjustments made in aperture for which there is no comparable feature in photos?

 

[zerolight]

I didn't spend a huge amount of time reading the details about Photos and iCloud until now, but I had rather assumed that one of the obvious benefits of having a photo library centrally stored on the Cloud was access to all those photos across not just my devices, but also those belonging to family members.

The Family Sharing functions introduced in iOS 8 work well for the most part, but Family Sharing of Photo Albums is a little weak for my tastes. I don't want to have to choose what to share - I already know I want to share everything.

My use case would be to have my wife and I (one iPhone and one Mac each) have access to everything from any device, with content automatically sync'd as photos and video are added or removed from any of those devices.

Apple already do this for all our music courtesy of iTunes Match/iTunes in The Cloud. Replicating that with our Photos is the final piece to establishing iCloud as the central hub of our digital life.

Maybe they'll decide to introduce this later. Until they do, I just saved myself the cost of a storage upgrade for my iCloud account because syncing photos across only my iPhone+Mac isn't a compelling proposition (personal opinion, appreciate views will differ).

It seems the simple solution to this would be to separate the Photos login from the rest of iCloud the way they do with Apps and Music. My wife and I can login to iTunes and AppStore with my AppleId, whilst getting the cloud saving, bookmarking, calendar syncing goodness of iCloud specific to ourselves. If they did the same thing with Photos, we could log into my Photos library too, together, still keeping the rest separate. A simple fix. But of course, they can't sell two lots of Cloud storage for Photos that way!

 

[bryanzak]

I didn't spend a huge amount of time reading the details about Photos and iCloud until now, but I had rather assumed that one of the obvious benefits of having a photo library centrally stored on the Cloud was access to all those photos across not just my devices, but also those belonging to family members.

That doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

Though I admit that I don't quite understand all this angst about the lack of sharing between Apple IDs. My wife and both have .mac.com AppleIDs, my kids have me.com - we've all had our own Apple IDs with our own iTunes Match, apps, everything from Day 1.

I don't understand the desire to have all this stuff shared between people (I really don't want to get the iBooks my wife gets, I certainly don't want the music my daughter buys, etc. etc.)

What you folks describe sounds nice in theory, but I think in practice I'd hate it.

That said, I still think you expect too much from Photos 1.0. I'd much rather Apple focus on perfect and seamless syncing across devices for one AppleID in this first release. Get that part right. Then figure out Family Sharing in the next release or something.

----------

Sorry if these were asked and answered already.
1. Faces. Is full faces functionality in the new app? I'm reading it maintains faces data from iPhoto / aperture, but does it let you define new faces, identify photos, etc.?

Yes to all three questions.

2. iCloud library question... say I pay Apple for the space, upload my entire library, but keep it set to keep originals on my mac. How does the new app handle deletes in the future. If I delete from my mac...does it also delete from the cloud? Can I delete from my iPhone or iPad and have them delete from everywhere? I'd like to be able to cull out bad photos from any device, but just curious if that's supported.

Yes, deleting from your Mac deletes from everywhere.

3. Can someone clue me in on how the iCloud photo library integrates with family sharing? Will I be able to import from multiple devices, each using their own Apple ID's?

I don't use Family Sharing so I can't comment on that, but from what I've seen there's no support for what you're asking for beyond simple shared photo streams (now called shared albums)

4. Curious how adjustments from aperture carry over. What happens to adjustments made in aperture for which there is no comparable feature in photos?

Never used Aperture, but my understanding is that the adjustments are carried over but if you make any further changes they'll be lost as they can't be represented (currently?) in the UI. But I'm not sure about that.