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Photos App Beta Discussion

bmac89

bmac89

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 3, 2014
1,388
468
Hi,

There are lots of threads about the new Photos App Beta, but I thought it would be good to have a central thread for general discussion about the App and a place to share experiences good and bad. Obviously this is not a replacement for providing Feedback through the Feedback Assistant.

I haven't had a really good chance to try out the App yet, but my first impressions is that it is a positive improvement from iPhoto but obviously not a replacement for Aperture. It feels much lighter and faster. I am disappointed that Aperture is being discontinued but I am evaluating this app simply as an iPhoto replacement rather than Aperture replacement. Hopefully a Photos Pro will be released one day and Apple will bring some focus back to enthusiast and professional users.

I find the white background quite bright and distracting on the eye, however the dark/black background in fullscreen image view is nice. I would like to see dark background across the whole app. The previous version of iPhoto used grey/black background across the whole app and was a not so harsh on the eyes.

I also hope they will provide a slideshow option without music. Currently every slideshow theme including classic theme has music and no option to turn it off.

Hopefully other will share thoughts and experiences.

Cheers!
 
It stalled while uploading my photos. The number supposedly stored in the cloud wasn't reflected on any of my devices. Each device had a slightly different set of photos. Deleting photos didn't seem to propagate across devices. The uploading progress bar kept getting stuck and greyed out.

I gave up after a day and a half and decided to start over fresh. Deactivated iCloud Photo Library, deleted the library in my Mac, and imported it from Aperture again. But as soon as I reactivated iCloud it began downloading duplicates - all the photos that had successfully uploaded before - even though I had deleted them and turned off iCloud. Apparently they will stay in iCloud for 30 days before disappearing and there's no way around this. There also doesn't appear to be any way to deactivate the deletion countdown. So I can't try again because anything I upload will just get deleted in 30 days - or so the warning tells me.

Overall a bit of a mess. A very beta product and nowhere near ready to ship IMO. Reminds me a lot of iTunes match with all the random sync errors and absolutely no way to see or manage what's going on.
 
Syncing is terrible

I've had it installed for 36 hours. The folders on my iPad and iPhone are now totally screwed up. I have duplicate pics in some. Most are empty folders. GPS data has been lost. This has been based on an extremely limited (bout 900 pics) that I have on laptop. I have over 45,000 on desktop.

The local photo library on my laptop grew by about 15% in size. I had been hoping that since so much is cloud based this would actually shrink rather than grow.

I like the basic app for editing pics. It's simple, easy to use it. But there are times I am going to want greater control over the pics and will either use Apperture or Photoshop.

Based on what I am seeing,I will probably use it to locally sort and do basic editing. But I will continue to use SmugMug and DropBox for sharing pics with others and between devices. Hopefully I can still share the photo roll even if nothing else is shared.
 
Tried it for a couple of days, uploaded 17000 images and videos to iCloud and tested it.

This is not for me, I like the iPhoto app more as a desktop app, in Photos i miss the option to open and edit an image in a 3rd party editor.

I have no need to have all my images and vids on iCloud and after +24h after the upload I could not access the images on iCloud.com since it still was "processing"

Deleted the Photo library and now it's gone. I'll stick to iPhoto.
 
unobtainium said:
It stalled while uploading my photos. The number supposedly stored in the cloud wasn't reflected on any of my devices. Each device had a slightly different set of photos. Deleting photos didn't seem to propagate across devices. The uploading progress bar kept getting stuck and greyed out.

I gave up after a day and a half and decided to start over fresh. Deactivated iCloud Photo Library, deleted the library in my Mac, and imported it from Aperture again. But as soon as I reactivated iCloud it began downloading duplicates - all the photos that had successfully uploaded before - even though I had deleted them and turned off iCloud. Apparently they will stay in iCloud for 30 days before disappearing and there's no way around this. There also doesn't appear to be any way to deactivate the deletion countdown. So I can't try again because anything I upload will just get deleted in 30 days - or so the warning tells me.

Overall a bit of a mess. A very beta product and nowhere near ready to ship IMO. Reminds me a lot of iTunes match with all the random sync errors and absolutely no way to see or manage what's going on.
Click to expand...

I'm not on my Mac right now to know for sure, but when you have Photos open go to File and look for something that says "Show recently deleted" or something like that. When you click it, it will bring up all recently deleted files at which point you can click "Delete all" to delete those pictures for good. They are set to delete automatically at 30 days, but you can force delete them before the 30 days if you'd like.
 
Why is Photo Agent going wild????

I posted this post a minute before this thread was posted so I have moved my question over here in hopes of finding an answer.

I've had the 10.10.3 Beta for a couple of days now. No problems until this morning. With my internet source being satellite due to my location, I have to watch how much data I use to stay within my monthly limit. Therefore my Activity Monitor is on at all times and open on my 2nd monitor so I can catch any surprises.

This morning from the time I started my computer a large amount of data was being sent. I didn't pay much attention to it but thought it was strange because it was very rare.

Three hours later I check my internet provider site showing how much data I have used this morning and am amazed at the amount. After some fast looking I see that "Photo Agent" is the culprit. I shut that down from the Activity Monitor until I can figure out what is going on or someone here that has more expertise can tell me what's going one.

A few days ago I had Photo load all of my photos from iPhoto, around 25GBs. I chose NOT to use iCloud for storage and have all my photos stored on my iMac.

While I wait for replies I will continue to look on this forum, Apple support and anything else I can find on search ... for an answer.

What can you tell me about Photo Agent sending out tons of packets?

Thanks
 
I tried the force delete about 4 hours ago. Everything (well the couple dozen pics that did sync and all the folders) are still there.

I know this is a beta, but it has totally screwed up the folders of pics (lots of dups, deleted pics that were already there) that I have on all my devices. Fortunately I only installed on my laptop with a limited number of pics and I still have a Master copy on my desktop.

It appears that if you elect NOT to sync to iCloud, you have limited ability to "share" photos from the Photo application. It allows me to share, but does not display the shares in the Photo app but it does on the iPhone and iPad.

Since I have about 75 gig of pics, I really do NOT intend to share my photo library with iCloud on that machine. Also, I am concerned about the size of the photo library. On my laptop with about 3 GB of pics, the Photo library was almost 7 GB. Not sure what would happen with 75 GB of pics.

With limited sharing, you lose the few benefits the Photo app really offer. I have begun my search for a replacement or see how long I can hold on to iPhoto.
 
iubhounds said:
Why is Photo Agent going wild????

I posted this post a minute before this thread was posted so I have moved my question over here in hopes of finding an answer.

I've had the 10.10.3 Beta for a couple of days now. No problems until this morning. With my internet source being satellite due to my location, I have to watch how much data I use to stay within my monthly limit. Therefore my Activity Monitor is on at all times and open on my 2nd monitor so I can catch any surprises.

This morning from the time I started my computer a large amount of data was being sent. I didn't pay much attention to it but thought it was strange because it was very rare.

Three hours later I check my internet provider site showing how much data I have used this morning and am amazed at the amount. After some fast looking I see that "Photo Agent" is the culprit. I shut that down from the Activity Monitor until I can figure out what is going on or someone here that has more expertise can tell me what's going one.

A few days ago I had Photo load all of my photos from iPhoto, around 25GBs. I chose NOT to use iCloud for storage and have all my photos stored on my iMac.

While I wait for replies I will continue to look on this forum, Apple support and anything else I can find on search ... for an answer.

What can you tell me about Photo Agent sending out tons of packets?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Photos is very buggy beta software. It probably started to upload thumbnails of your photos to the cloud "in preparation" for syncing, without your permission. Definitely let Apple know.
 
unobtainium said:
Photos is very buggy beta software. It probably started to upload thumbnails of your photos to the cloud "in preparation" for syncing, without your permission. Definitely let Apple know.
Click to expand...

Thanks

I thought that might be a possibility, the cloud doing something without my permission.
 
unobtainium said:
Photos is very buggy beta software. It probably started to upload thumbnails of your photos to the cloud "in preparation" for syncing, without your permission. Definitely let Apple know.
Click to expand...

That is the other problem. The Photo Diagnostics report they require for me to send in a problem will not work and does not work even after multiple times of shutting down and reloading as it suggests.

That keeps me "dead in the water" on this issue.
 
I couldn't find much use for it, since I have better applications already.

My hope was that it would be integrated with other applications as iPhoto and Aperture were, but I'll have to wait for the release for that to start as the other applications have to catch up.

But even still, it's quite limiting. The inability to add geolocation info is odd. I can deal with the all or nothing sync with iPhoto Library, but that means I'll need separate libraries. I probably won't use that either; I prefer manual control and in any case I want DIFFERENT images on each device.

It also isn't very retina aware. With Aperture I can do 1:1 and move from screen to screen and it knows that to display it 1:1 on each one; Photos doesn't. And dual display options aren't happening.
 
I've been playing around with it. I like the idea of having the pictures all synced between my iMac, iPad, iPhone, and Macbook. especially just having them all stored in iCloud without having to store everything locally. The only feature I don't like so far is that some of the Albums such as faces do not sync. I hope this is a feature they add soon.
 
So far so good for me. ~100GB of photos uploaded in the past 24 hours. I now have it activated on all of my devices and everything appears to be synced (or in the process of syncing). I love the fast scrolling and the editing controls are exactly what I need and nothing more.

The real test will be every day use and making sure it all syncs...but this appears to be a step in the right direction.
 
I finally turned off cloud sharing on the Photo App. Its been more than 2 days and less then 30 photos synced. I still had almost a dozen empty folders in the iCloud photo and the devices. I tried deleting and reenabling the iCloud sharing but after 2 hours it still hadn't changed.

I've turned off everything with Photo App and will try again on the next Beta (maybe). Like with iubhounds, the photo diagnostic would never work for me. It was unable to talk to the helper app.


Even though the diagnostic tool didn't work, I submitted about a dozen tickets to Apple including one on the diagnostic tool.
 
I was having problems getting Photos to sync on my iPad. It just stalled like some others are describing. So I did a reset all content a settings and restored from an iCloud backup. Then it synced Photos fine (about 11,000 photos and 500 videos). Before doing the full reset, I tried signing out and in iCloud and iTunes but that did not work.

Photos synced fine to my iPhone and works great on both an iMac and Macbook.

Other than this one sync issue on the iPad, everything else is working fine (so far).
 
Editing photo locations

Has anyone figured out how to edit the location that the photos were taken in the metadata? I have a bunch of old photos on my hard drive that were taken with and old point and shoot years ago, and I've just been inspired to add all the relevant metadata. I can add tags and faces and can edit the date the photos were taken in the metadata window, but can't figure out how to add a location. Not sure if I'm missing something obvious or if this is just a beta-software omission.

Thanks!!
 
Last edited:
Using the app, I feel that it is a step up from iPhoto. The interface matches Yosemite, and it is a lot cleaner and easier to organize.

I have a small photo library (around 2,000 photos), and I noticed quick loading times in the app as I scrolled. I'm not much of an editor, but I will play with some of my images in the coming week.

But now for the bad... The initial syncing into iCloud Photo Library is horrible. It took practically all night, and I had to keep restarting the sync on the Mac and my 6 plus. Also, it takes a while to see any changes with regards to adding or getting rid of albums.

Also, opening the app is very slow after a reboot or waking from sleep after a full log out from the system. This is most likely because of the beta status, but one that I hope to see improve as these betas go on.

Overall, I like what I am seeing so far. There are a lot of improvements to be made, but I like it.

Also, a question to some of you running photos, are any of you seeing a hidden photos album in the albums tab? I hid some photos to test this, but I have to go into the all photos album to see anything.
 
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anyone have any idea if there is a beta itune that work with "Photos"?

Cause after I sync my photos from iPhone to "Photos" then I go to itune, now itune can't find the apps and I could no longer sync photo back to my iphone anymore.

Look like I will restore from my time machine and give this beta a miss.
 
I don't do any major photo editing like some of you guys are doing. For me though I'm not a fan of it so far, I know it's only the beta so I am not too upset and hope it improves. I don't like the color scheme and I don't like how the photos display. I liked it more the iPhoto way where it just shows a full month and all the pics from that month and doesn't sort it by date, that is really annoying to look at.
 
keigo said:
anyone have any idea if there is a beta itune that work with "Photos"?
Click to expand...

I noticed this behavior. At this point Photos doesn't seem to be integrated with the other Apple apps, e.g. it doesn't show up in iMovies media sources.
 
I couldn't even find a way to import to a new folder which I could name (or for that matter to import to an existing folder). Everything from my camera was just dumped to a folder called "last import". Either I'm doing something wrong or the import feature stinks.
 
robjulo said:
I couldn't even find a way to import to a new folder which I could name (or for that matter to import to an existing folder). Everything from my camera was just dumped to a folder called "last import". Either I'm doing something wrong or the import feature stinks.
Click to expand...

There are no more events to import into. Photos is one giant library. However, you can create folders and albums. This "tags" the photos properly and you can keep it just as organized.
 
Folders and Albums

Is anyone else having issues with their folders or albums not showing up? I imported my iPhoto library which had all my events. I dragged and dropped those out of the iPhoto Library folder in the new Photos app and they became albums in Photos. However, while all the pictures show up on my iPhone and on iCloud.com none of the albums do?

Also, is anyone else having issues with photos taken from a device not uploading to the library? I took a couple of photos yesterday and have been on wifi the entire time. The photos show up on iCloud.com but not in the Photos app on my mac.

So far this is most definitely a very beta rollout and I'm glad I have my iPhoto library backed up on my Time Capsule.
 
Faces?

Does anyone know how to rescan for faces? Or any tricks for faster tagging?
I already tagged a few thousand photos in my Photos library and now it is still asking me to confirm and tag faces one by one. Such a slow process.
I have about 12,000 photos and tagging these again one by one will take forever. I do not see any improvement with faces compared to iPhoto. :(

Also how do I delete photos already imported off of my iPhone or iPad from inside the Photos app?
 
itabmedia said:
Does anyone know how to rescan for faces? Or any tricks for faster tagging?
I already tagged a few thousand photos in my Photos library and now it is still asking me to confirm and tag faces one by one. Such a slow process.
I have about 12,000 photos and tagging these again one by one will take forever. I do not see any improvement with faces compared to iPhoto. :(

Also how do I delete photos already imported off of my iPhone or iPad from inside the Photos app?
Click to expand...

I have written off faces solely for this reason .... its crazy to have to do this all again.....
 
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