15 ms·

Photos Preview

181 points by antr 12y ago

tashoecraft 12y ago
Photos does look great, but Apple decided to completely ignore iPhoto while making this. iPhoto has so many bugs and problems and there is nothing I can do but sit and wait for them to release Photos.
- foomoo 12y ago
  I like the looks, too! Looks to me as if iPhoto will eventually be replaced by Photos (though I believe I remember the announcement was that it would not?) as it wraps most of its functionality and has a nicer look. Maybe makes sense to have Photos (lifestyle) and Aperture (professional) as two apps with a clear focus for each one. I'm just missing some statement on how the performance is, especially since we all have like several hundred GBs or even TBs worth of pictures nowadays. It's only a preview with screenshots though...
  - corv 12y ago
    Unfortunately Aperture is also being discontinued...
    - acdha 12y ago
      To be fair, after years of being neglected it's probably better that they admit nobody is working on Aperture.
  - booticon 12y ago
    Photos will be replacing iPhoto and Aperture: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/27/aperture-development-stops/ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/27/aperture-development-sto... I believe Adobe has already released a plugin to import your Aperture library into Lightroom.
  - eridius 12y ago
    According to The Verge[1]: > iPhoto was often criticized for choking on large image libraries, but Apple says it built Photos to handle large and growing photo libraries, since people are taking so many more photos than they used to before. From our experience, it seems that Apple's efforts have paid off: the new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, [...] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7979925/apple-photos-app-new-iphoto-hands-on-video http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7979925/apple-photos-app-ne...
- cake 12y ago
  iPhoto is so slow, I hope they fixed that ! Even on my SSD i7 mbp with 16GB of RAM I'm surprised. My photo collection isn't that huge as most of the stuff is stored outside but it really lacks the snapiness it should have.
  - dba7dba 12y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, how big is your iPhoto Library? With large file sizes these days, it takes no time to generate a huge iPhoto Library. Also, when you add a photo into iPhoto Library, it automatically generates more copies of the file with smaller sizes, thus increasing the size of iPhoto Library very fast. I strongly recommend using "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20) to divide iPhoto library into smaller libraries. Also, I read somewhere that not all SSDs in Apple laptops are the same. Some are from samsung and some are from Toshiba. And supposedly Toshiba ones are much slower than Samsung ones and someone claimed it was barely faster than a mechanical HD. But anyhow, the point is you should at least use "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). Or even better, I recommend using the howto I posted in this same thread.
uptown 12y ago
Now available in the public and developer OSX Beta.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Thanks, I was a bit confused over what had changed since it still said "coming this spring."
joshmlewis 12y ago
I like that you can optimize for storage on mobile devices keeping a smaller file size on the phone with the ability to access the higher res if needed.
jws 12y ago
All photos automatically stored in the cloud at full resolution. At last! Here's hoping I never again spend a week recovering a friend or family member's lifetime of photos from their failed hard drive. By the way, check your backups.
bluthru 12y ago
I wonder what percentage of users will have to buy more iCloud storage for this. Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly, especially if someone has multiple Apple devices.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly" That's one way to look at it. But they need to make money somehow and I'd prefer this to advertising or selling my data or trying to convince me to make my life publicly accessible online.
  - guelo 12y ago
    Or including it as part of the iPhone's obscene 50%+ profit margins. That's what Google does with unlimited free auto-backup to Google Plus, and they don't even make money on most of the Android phones sold! Apple doesn't need this money, just like they don't need the ugly user experience when an iPhone's account gets disconnected from its credit card. But Apple's culture of nickel and diming for everything has to do with training users to pull out their credit cards. The more often a user hits Pay the easier it is to do it the next time it comes up. As long as the user keeps pulling out the credit card the experience is smooth and makes the user feel like they are part of an elite higher class. In other words, it's deliberate consumer brainwashing.
    - tdkl 12y ago
      > unlimited free auto-backup For pictures below 2048x2048. Also I'd rather pay for storage then expose my data to web app automated algorithms and lack of local editing software with two way sync.
      - guelo 12y ago
        Android does include local editing with 2 way sync.
    - 12y ago
distantsounds 12y ago
As a photographer, 5GB isn't enough for storing high-res photos. It's nice to keep them off your iDevice, but relying on iCloud to keep them is silly. Amazon, on the other hand, allows for unlimited cloud photo storage solely by being a Prime customer. All my 24MP RAW photos get stored there safely, along with having my own local storage for backup.
- acomjean 12y ago
  iClouds lack of file structure makes it seem not ideal for storage. I also shoot raw.. Wait, unlimited cloud photo storage at amazon prime. That seems like a good deal.
  - irq 12y ago
    You can have whatever file structure you want on iCloud Drive. https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/ https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/
- bobbles 12y ago
  So youll pay amazon for the storage but not Apple? Being a prime customer doesn't mean its 'free'
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Huh? That's pretty much exactly what it means.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - supercoder 12y ago
      If you receive a service in exchange for payment , then no it's not free.
      - 12y ago
tomcam 12y ago
I would just be happy with a file-based interface that would let me know physically where my photos are, where they're backed up to on iCloud, and could easily be moved to another storage device.
nvartolomei 12y ago
I just hope it will be faster compared to iPhoto which is lagging on latest rMBP 15 i7 with 2gb discrete video card.
grandalf 12y ago
I recently made the decision to use Dropbox Carousel for this kind of thing. Anyone have thoughts on whether I should stick with that or switch to photos?
- untilHellbanned 12y ago
  As much as I love Dropbox and think Carousel looks nice, I'm finding it difficult to justify in comparison to Google Drive+Docs combo and/or the whole Apple ecosystem. Dropbox has tough sledding against the level of integration that Google & Apple offer. Carousel isn't going to cut it. I know they bought Mailbox and I think some startups offering nice documentation creation tools, but I'm wondering if they CAN do enough? People say don't worry about the bumbling incumbents, but when it comes to files I'm not so sure. Anyone know how Dropbox is going to win?
- ctrlrsf 12y ago
  I went with OneDrive for all pics. On Mac I import all pics into a folder per year/yyyy-mm-dd. This makes it available in my Android phone too. On phone use OD to upload phone pics to Camera Roll folder, which I rotate into separate Dir every year. The OD web interface is good enough and I like the simple folder hierarchy. I also move and delete a lot of files around. The OD syncs this quickly to web and phone. Lastly I like the recycle bin on web interface because I can see good size thumbnail of deleted file and also metadata to make sure it wasn't something I deleted by mistake. This is a huge plus for me over DB and GD. Only downside of OD for me is no Linux client, so limit picture management to OSX.
tomswartz07 12y ago
I've been saying this for the past few OSX releases, and this seems to just reinforce the idea: I believe that Apple is going to unify iOS and OSX. Their UI designs are slowly converging, and in some cases, they're combining apps across both platforms. I think we'll very soon see a single 'Apple OS' that will work on all devices; a dream that a lot of other OS's have been seeking for a long time.
- daenney 12y ago
  I'm not entirely convinced they're going to go for the Windows 10 approach but it would be interesting to see how far they're going to take this.
- kaolinite 12y ago
  If that were true, why would they be about to launch a new OS - WatchOS? Wouldn't the Apple Watch run iOS too?
- jimmcslim 12y ago
  There's a nugget of truth here; 'some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.' from http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/02/new-apple-photos-app-contains-uxkit-framework/ http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/02/new-apple-photos-app-conta...
kingnight 12y ago
I think the big win for Photos.app / iCloud Photo Library is the fact that 3rd party app 'extensions' are able to provide exponential editing capabilities directly to the users main library. I anticipate Photos.app on Mac gaining 'Extensions' a la iOS Extensions in the next WWDC revision/OS X release.
- eridius 12y ago
  OS X already has support for Extensions. Check System Preferences. The relevant category here is "Actions". The system already provides a "Markup" action that provides Preview.app's markup capabilities to other apps that embed images. On my system right now, Pixelmator also exposes one action called "Repair Tool". You can try this out by creating a new TextEdit document and dragging an image in there. In the upper-right corner of the image there's a dropdown button that shows you the available actions you can take. I certainly hope Photos.app supports Extensions. It would be a pretty obvious oversight not to do this.
  - kingnight 12y ago
    Ah right, I forgot about the 'actions'. As of right now (10.0.3 beta), Photos.app does not have any available access points to "Actions", etc. Hopefully soon!
    - eridius 12y ago
      Please file a radar! I hope it's on their roadmap, but if not, better to ask for it now than wait until after the app is released. http://bugreport.apple.com http://bugreport.apple.com
- Corrado 12y ago
  I would like a "storage" extension that let me choose my own "iCloud' implementation. That way I could point Photos at Dropbox, Amazon S3, or my own SAN, and still use the capabilities of the product. My main concern with photos on my computer right now is how much space they take up and how to securely store them off-site somewhere. I know that iCloud could do this but I would probably need the 1TB plan with is $20/month - that's very expensive. Maybe there is a way to only store new photos in iCloud and offload the old ones to Glacier or something. :/
kohanz 12y ago
I'm wondering how alone (or not) I am in being uncomfortable with cloud storage for my (mostly family) photos. It would be the most convenient solution in terms of storage and redundancy, but the idea of them possibly being compromised and also somewhat out of my control doesn't sit well with me. It feels slightly hypocritical, since I do share the odd photo on Facebook, but the idea of having every photo and video "out there" is a bit daunting. Currently I have a RAID 1 NAS at home (also backed up to external drive occasionally), which I use to offload photos from our various devices. I can access these pictures when at home from any device, but of course not outside of the WIFI. So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup. Am I living in the stone age?
- cwbrandsma 12y ago
  House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway. Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.
  - kohanz 12y ago
    Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.
    - apetresc 12y ago
      I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
      - kohanz 12y ago
calebm 12y ago
I have been struggling to manage my family's photos and videos, and it has really been a nightmare. I'm currently using flickr, but it leaves much to be desired. This looks like exactly what I've been looking for.
- imjk 12y ago
  What problems in particular were you having that makes this is a great solution?
- balls187 12y ago
  I have always been a fan of Smugmug. It's super easy (imo) to use, and there are a number of great export plugins for LightRoom.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    I love smugmug, but the import/export is getting very tiring. Seriously, MacDaddy?
    - balls187 12y ago
      I just export from Lightroom, which is part of my workflow. For everything else, I just use facebook.
- wbond 12y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but iCloud accounts can't be shared very easily/well between devices. I spent a bunch of time researching, but ended up shelling out for Dropbox Pro and Carousel on our multiple phones. Then I use selective sync to not fill our laptops with the full-res photos.
- dba7dba 12y ago
  Another fan of smugmug here. You can't beat unlimited storage for $40/year. Granted upload is limited by upload speed but by letting it upload overnight, that hasn't been a problem for me. Smugmug has app on iOS/Android that work well also. Here's how I manage family photos/videos as a Mac user: 1. Use "Image Capture" to import photos/videos from camera/iphone/android into Mac. Do NOT use iPhoto to import although OS X recommends it. It's the root of all kinds of problems afaik. "Image Capture" is free tool included with OS X. Just open "Image Capture" and insert your memory card or plug in usb cable. 2. Once imported, use ExifRenamer (or other alternatives) to rename files to date/time taken. This ensures each photo/video has unique serial. With the new names, you can easily tell when/what/where/why just by looking at filename. 3. You can group files into year-mm-dd or any other method you like. You can do it manually easily or use "Big Mean Folder Machine 2". 4. Once you have grouped files into year-mm-dd, now you can import them into iPhoto. I do this purely for easier browsing/etc. 5. Within iPhoto, you have photos grouped into year-mm-dd. #Now you should NOT keep ALL your photos/videos in ONE iPhoto database/folder. You should create 1 iPhoto database/folder for just 1 year using tools like "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). That way iPhoto data doesn't get too big. #I back up both the renamed files (divided into yyyy-mm-dd) AND the iPhoto libraries to external HDs. Backing up the renamed files as simple files is critical imo. #Whenever iPhoto is updated by Apple and I open an iPhoto library from older version, that iPhoto Library needs to be updated by the newer iPhoto. Not a big deal though. #Backup to Smugmug Now after above are done, I start uploading photos to smugmug. I may do maybe a month at a time or something like it. With smugmug, I can recover photos even if I lose both my Mac and external HDs. It will be painful but possible. Obviously Amazon S3 is another option. I would just zip up the files and encrypt them if using Amazon S3.
Chevalier 12y ago
Sigh. Does Apple offer auto-awesome like G+ (and soon, OneDrive)? Do they highlight the best photos or stitch burst shots together into a GIF? Do they email you memories like Everpix used to? Critically for me, do they offer deduplication? I currently have nearly 1TB of photos thanks to reliance on iPhoto and a decade of attempted back-ups to local storage. In reality, there's maybe 200GB of actual photos. Thankfully, cloud storage has stemmed the proliferation of redundant photos. For a company supposedly focused on user experience, Apple's complete failure with photos has been baffling. First the catastrophe of iPhoto, then arbitrary photo streams, and now $20/month/1TB (!) for iCloud storage. What the hell. Apple usually justifies their premium and exclusivity by offering better products. Hands up, everyone who thinks Apple offers even remotely comparable web services versus literally anyone else. This just another greedy lock-in of tech-illiterate customers by offering worse services at higher prices. Which seems pretty emblematic of the Tim Cook era -- when Apple fully pivoted to extracting premium money from their customers rather than offering premium products.
apunic 12y ago
Lock-in. A huge photo collection is the best lock-in for an OS. So to have a top-notch app here is a smart move from Apple. I have like 70GB of photos in iPhoto and somehow this stops me from fully migrating to another OS. Just the thought of moving this 70GB to another file system, OS and photo program let me stick to OSX forever. And photos especially the family ones are maybe the most important 'personal' data of a user. Besides, iPhoto is not bad but the many format changes in the past were a bit tiring. In general I prefer Dropbox as a cloud file storage--they have the best clients of all OSes and security features like no other (remote wipe), now I just need a cross platform photo database which is separated from my cloud storage provider.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Lock-in, as in a lock I can't unlock? As in I can't get my photos out if I want? It's only lock-in if you want to leave and you can't. I'll be as locked into this as I'm locked into my favorite scotch. I can switch, but why? I really don't get the lock-in argument. I like Apple's stuff, all of it. It works really well for me. I'm the happiest I've ever been with my computer environment. If Apple starts to suck I'll find something else, as will many other people and some enterprising fellow will see that and create something great. Better yet maybe Dropbox will up their game to compete with Apple on photo storage. Rising tide etc etc.
  - Someone 12y ago
    With iPhoto, you can easily move your photos elsewhere, but moving the metadata with it (what photo is in what album, recognized faces, etc) is another thing. I call that a form of lock-in.
    - prawn 12y ago
      It creates/enables inertia rather than locks you in, I think that's what they're saying.
      - ryanmarsh 12y ago
untilHellbanned 12y ago
Serious question: Is there a better way than the Abercrombie/J.Crew model approach?
- lanewinfield 12y ago
  As someone who used to work for Apple—they source all the photos they use in their promotional materials from photos actual employees have taken.
  - jreed91 12y ago
    Interesting. I've always found apple's promotional images to be a bit more casual and not so overly photoshopped.
  - untilHellbanned 12y ago
    I guess my question was whether it might be better to use more authentic imagery (whatever that means) and not just images of pristine young white people doing white people things. I'm genuinely curious about the branding here and not trying to be sensational.
    - prawn 12y ago
      Quality photos are aspirational. No one will want to see someone's poorly composed and boring photos in promotional material. And 'white people'? The hero couple in Utah look black and latino to me. If anything, Apple's marketing is generally as interracial as typical office stock photography.
karapu2 12y ago
It's interesting that they appear to have removed the Places functionality. I find it the fastest way to locate many photos - vacations, nights out, etc. I guess most folks did not use that as much, and so it was removed.
tunesmith 12y ago
They mention it for videos also - I hope their recommendations on how to handle videos become clearer. I used to pull my videos into iPhoto, but it felt disorganized to have them littered among my photos, and it felt clunky to pull them into iMovie. Later I changed to importing them directly into iMovie, but then iMovie had one of the worst bugs I've ever experienced on Desktop software, where over a period of months the source video of some important footage (me performing at a club) just completely disappeared, leaving only the thumbnails and audio. By the time I discovered it (reviewing year's highlights), it was gone from my time machine history as well (due to Time Machine deciding to corrupt itself and start over every eight months or so). So now I import video into Final Cut hooked up to a desktop Drobo which backs up to CrashPlan.
brianwillis 12y ago
I'm really pleased to see Apple getting away from the "events" concept that iPhoto introduced. It was a good idea in theory - all your photos would be automatically grouped into albums based on the date they were taken - but in practice requiring that every photo in your library belong to exactly one event meant that you had a bunch of awkward single-photo events. Photostream ended up making this worse with special photostream-only events that completely broke the model of how photos should be organised.
- amirmc 12y ago
  I've actually been quite pleased with the events concept. I found albums annoying and manually tedious but that pics automatically get grouped has made it easy for me to go back through old photos and find the ones I'm looking for. You're right about the annoying single-photo events but then I just dump them all together into the 'photostream' event for that month.
- Wingman4l7 12y ago
  Wouldn't this also have been super annoying for events that went past midnight and spilled over into the next day?
  - fletom 12y ago
    IIRC events were created based on some heuristic of the photos' geolocaiton data and time taken. So if you do a 3 day trip outside of your city that becomes one event on import. It was also super easy to merge two events into one. I thought it worked pretty well in general.
balls187 12y ago
I would prefer if they had layflat photobooks.
jwr 12y ago
After Apple suddenly (and still no longer "officially") killed Aperture, I no longer trust them with long-term data storage. So no "Photos" for me. I am still thinking about how to deal with the collection that I have in Aperture. And before you respond with "just keep the files" or "export the files and import into Lightroom", it's no longer 1999 and it's not just about the files. There is metadata, tags, collections, stacks, and other kinds of organizational structure that are not easily reflected in a directory hierarchy. I've been bitten once, I won't be fooled again — this time I intend to develop my own solution for keeping this data in the long term.
- gr2020 12y ago
  Lightroom has a new importer to pull in Aperture data, including tags and all of that...so it's not really a "export the files and import into Lightroom" situation - it appears it should preserve your metadata. http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-import-plugin-now-available.html http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-imp...
  - sib 12y ago
    Unfortunately, the Aperture and Lightroom data models and workflow are different enough that Lightroom really can't import everything that you've done in Aperture. Quote from Lightroom page: "migrate their images and key metadata"... It also doesn't support the non-destructive workflow edits that you've applied to your (potentially) tens of thousands of images. If you import them, all the edits become baked in.
- cbhl 12y ago
  I'm sad that I feel the only way to get a handle on my photos is to put them in Facebook or Flickr. For example, there was the OpenPhoto kickstarter, but even though the code is open source, their hosted service (since renamed to Trovebox) is shutting down next month. There's also Origami, where the team and product were split in an acquihire/aquire under eFamily.com.
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  Photos will undoubtedly import Aperture metadata. It's disingenuous to assume otherwise.
jader201 12y ago
This sounds good, but if it's still going to lock all of my files behind a proprietary and obscure file structure -- and metadata library -- that totally get borked whenever I try to have some other app access them, then it's no better off than iPhoto. If they managed to keep whatever file structure I have them in intact, and still keep the metadata/library abstracted from the file structure, then I might have more hope for it.
- daveidol 12y ago
  Agreed. I ditched iPhoto and switched to Unbound (http://unboundformac.com/ http://unboundformac.com/) a while back for this reason.
- marssaxman 12y ago
  Check out http://www.mylio.com/ http://www.mylio.com/ - it's all about preserving your file structure.
  - clarkm 12y ago
    Well, their website doesn't load, so they're not off to a good start.
brockers 12y ago
Another Apple ad on Hacker News? I wish we have a filter for "things that only apply to Apple users."
- Fuzzwah 12y ago
  Come on, this is Hacker News. If you want to filter it... hack it.... And it isn't even like you've got to invent a wheel or anything, many people have felt the same way as you and put together some way of filtering the site and then released the source: https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+filter https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+filter
teekert 12y ago
It all looks nice but I think many people are asking: How does this compare to Aperture? Does it deal with Raw? The word Raw is not mentioned on the page but they do talk about multiple formats... Come on Apple! The entire Aperture crowd is in the dark and looking for these details!
- sib 12y ago
  I don't have details yet, but, based on this quick review, I would say that it's much, much closer to iPhoto than to Aperture, unfortunately. I'm sure that it handles Raw, but not all the rest of what makes Aperture useful and unique.
kryptiskt 12y ago
Hmmm... another thing from Apple that goes without the 'i', I sense a shift in branding. Probably gonna be a while before they drop it on the phones, though.
- jakejake 12y ago
  Seems to be the way they have been moving for a while on the productivity apps. Now only iMovie and iTunes are left. It would be pretty ballsy (even for Apple) to drop the i and call the iPhone simply "Phone"!
veidr 12y ago
NOTE: There is nothing actually new available here at all, other than some new marketing copy. The app is still "Coming this spring" and the extremely basic and clunky beta cloud service is the same as what has been available since last year.
- mcmillion 12y ago
  The beta is out for developers and it's pretty nice.
  - veidr 12y ago
    You mean the Mac app? Where? I just logged into the developer site but I don't see it anywhere. EDIT: Ah I see, you need the beta of the next version of the whole OS.
thomasfoster96 12y ago
Is this replacing iPhoto? I can't imagine iPhoto and Photos would make sense existing alongside each other.
- mxxx 12y ago
  It's essentially a hybrid of Aperture and iPhoto. Similar to what they did with Final Cut Pro and iMovie. Basically they remove all the really powerful features and replace them with an interface a 4 year old could use. It'll probably be a win for iPhoto users who are looking to step up their photo game a bit, but it's a bit of a kick in the teeth for Aperture users who probably now need to look at Lightroom.
dba7dba 12y ago
After some reading about Photos, I'm beginning to see one big reason they are pushing this is for the ability to charge monthly fee for storing photos online... Why can't they incorporate 'Iphoto Library Manager' and give user the ability to divide iphoto libraries into smaller chunks and let users easily store them on external Hds?

181 points by antr 12y ago

Photos does look great, but Apple decided to completely ignore iPhoto while making this. iPhoto has so many bugs and problems and there is nothing I can do but sit and wait for them to release Photos.

foomoo 12y ago
I like the looks, too! Looks to me as if iPhoto will eventually be replaced by Photos (though I believe I remember the announcement was that it would not?) as it wraps most of its functionality and has a nicer look. Maybe makes sense to have Photos (lifestyle) and Aperture (professional) as two apps with a clear focus for each one. I'm just missing some statement on how the performance is, especially since we all have like several hundred GBs or even TBs worth of pictures nowadays. It's only a preview with screenshots though...
- corv 12y ago
  Unfortunately Aperture is also being discontinued...
  - acdha 12y ago
    To be fair, after years of being neglected it's probably better that they admit nobody is working on Aperture.
- booticon 12y ago
  Photos will be replacing iPhoto and Aperture: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/27/aperture-development-stops/ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/27/aperture-development-sto... I believe Adobe has already released a plugin to import your Aperture library into Lightroom.
- eridius 12y ago
  According to The Verge[1]: > iPhoto was often criticized for choking on large image libraries, but Apple says it built Photos to handle large and growing photo libraries, since people are taking so many more photos than they used to before. From our experience, it seems that Apple's efforts have paid off: the new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, [...] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7979925/apple-photos-app-new-iphoto-hands-on-video http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7979925/apple-photos-app-ne...
cake 12y ago
iPhoto is so slow, I hope they fixed that ! Even on my SSD i7 mbp with 16GB of RAM I'm surprised. My photo collection isn't that huge as most of the stuff is stored outside but it really lacks the snapiness it should have.
- dba7dba 12y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, how big is your iPhoto Library? With large file sizes these days, it takes no time to generate a huge iPhoto Library. Also, when you add a photo into iPhoto Library, it automatically generates more copies of the file with smaller sizes, thus increasing the size of iPhoto Library very fast. I strongly recommend using "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20) to divide iPhoto library into smaller libraries. Also, I read somewhere that not all SSDs in Apple laptops are the same. Some are from samsung and some are from Toshiba. And supposedly Toshiba ones are much slower than Samsung ones and someone claimed it was barely faster than a mechanical HD. But anyhow, the point is you should at least use "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). Or even better, I recommend using the howto I posted in this same thread.

uptown 12y ago

Now available in the public and developer OSX Beta.

smackfu 12y ago
Thanks, I was a bit confused over what had changed since it still said "coming this spring."

joshmlewis 12y ago

I like that you can optimize for storage on mobile devices keeping a smaller file size on the phone with the ability to access the higher res if needed.

jws 12y ago

All photos automatically stored in the cloud at full resolution. At last! Here's hoping I never again spend a week recovering a friend or family member's lifetime of photos from their failed hard drive. By the way, check your backups.

bluthru 12y ago

I wonder what percentage of users will have to buy more iCloud storage for this. Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly, especially if someone has multiple Apple devices.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly" That's one way to look at it. But they need to make money somehow and I'd prefer this to advertising or selling my data or trying to convince me to make my life publicly accessible online.
- guelo 12y ago
  Or including it as part of the iPhone's obscene 50%+ profit margins. That's what Google does with unlimited free auto-backup to Google Plus, and they don't even make money on most of the Android phones sold! Apple doesn't need this money, just like they don't need the ugly user experience when an iPhone's account gets disconnected from its credit card. But Apple's culture of nickel and diming for everything has to do with training users to pull out their credit cards. The more often a user hits Pay the easier it is to do it the next time it comes up. As long as the user keeps pulling out the credit card the experience is smooth and makes the user feel like they are part of an elite higher class. In other words, it's deliberate consumer brainwashing.
  - tdkl 12y ago
    > unlimited free auto-backup For pictures below 2048x2048. Also I'd rather pay for storage then expose my data to web app automated algorithms and lack of local editing software with two way sync.
    - guelo 12y ago
      Android does include local editing with 2 way sync.
  - 12y ago

distantsounds 12y ago

As a photographer, 5GB isn't enough for storing high-res photos. It's nice to keep them off your iDevice, but relying on iCloud to keep them is silly. Amazon, on the other hand, allows for unlimited cloud photo storage solely by being a Prime customer. All my 24MP RAW photos get stored there safely, along with having my own local storage for backup.

acomjean 12y ago
iClouds lack of file structure makes it seem not ideal for storage. I also shoot raw.. Wait, unlimited cloud photo storage at amazon prime. That seems like a good deal.
- irq 12y ago
  You can have whatever file structure you want on iCloud Drive. https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/ https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/
bobbles 12y ago
So youll pay amazon for the storage but not Apple? Being a prime customer doesn't mean its 'free'
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Huh? That's pretty much exactly what it means.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - supercoder 12y ago
    If you receive a service in exchange for payment , then no it's not free.
    - 12y ago

tomcam 12y ago

I would just be happy with a file-based interface that would let me know physically where my photos are, where they're backed up to on iCloud, and could easily be moved to another storage device.

nvartolomei 12y ago

I just hope it will be faster compared to iPhoto which is lagging on latest rMBP 15 i7 with 2gb discrete video card.

grandalf 12y ago

I recently made the decision to use Dropbox Carousel for this kind of thing. Anyone have thoughts on whether I should stick with that or switch to photos?

untilHellbanned 12y ago
As much as I love Dropbox and think Carousel looks nice, I'm finding it difficult to justify in comparison to Google Drive+Docs combo and/or the whole Apple ecosystem. Dropbox has tough sledding against the level of integration that Google & Apple offer. Carousel isn't going to cut it. I know they bought Mailbox and I think some startups offering nice documentation creation tools, but I'm wondering if they CAN do enough? People say don't worry about the bumbling incumbents, but when it comes to files I'm not so sure. Anyone know how Dropbox is going to win?
ctrlrsf 12y ago
I went with OneDrive for all pics. On Mac I import all pics into a folder per year/yyyy-mm-dd. This makes it available in my Android phone too. On phone use OD to upload phone pics to Camera Roll folder, which I rotate into separate Dir every year. The OD web interface is good enough and I like the simple folder hierarchy. I also move and delete a lot of files around. The OD syncs this quickly to web and phone. Lastly I like the recycle bin on web interface because I can see good size thumbnail of deleted file and also metadata to make sure it wasn't something I deleted by mistake. This is a huge plus for me over DB and GD. Only downside of OD for me is no Linux client, so limit picture management to OSX.

tomswartz07 12y ago

I've been saying this for the past few OSX releases, and this seems to just reinforce the idea: I believe that Apple is going to unify iOS and OSX. Their UI designs are slowly converging, and in some cases, they're combining apps across both platforms. I think we'll very soon see a single 'Apple OS' that will work on all devices; a dream that a lot of other OS's have been seeking for a long time.

daenney 12y ago
I'm not entirely convinced they're going to go for the Windows 10 approach but it would be interesting to see how far they're going to take this.
kaolinite 12y ago
If that were true, why would they be about to launch a new OS - WatchOS? Wouldn't the Apple Watch run iOS too?
jimmcslim 12y ago
There's a nugget of truth here; 'some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.' from http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/02/new-apple-photos-app-contains-uxkit-framework/ http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/02/new-apple-photos-app-conta...

kingnight 12y ago

I think the big win for Photos.app / iCloud Photo Library is the fact that 3rd party app 'extensions' are able to provide exponential editing capabilities directly to the users main library. I anticipate Photos.app on Mac gaining 'Extensions' a la iOS Extensions in the next WWDC revision/OS X release.

eridius 12y ago
OS X already has support for Extensions. Check System Preferences. The relevant category here is "Actions". The system already provides a "Markup" action that provides Preview.app's markup capabilities to other apps that embed images. On my system right now, Pixelmator also exposes one action called "Repair Tool". You can try this out by creating a new TextEdit document and dragging an image in there. In the upper-right corner of the image there's a dropdown button that shows you the available actions you can take. I certainly hope Photos.app supports Extensions. It would be a pretty obvious oversight not to do this.
- kingnight 12y ago
  Ah right, I forgot about the 'actions'. As of right now (10.0.3 beta), Photos.app does not have any available access points to "Actions", etc. Hopefully soon!
  - eridius 12y ago
    Please file a radar! I hope it's on their roadmap, but if not, better to ask for it now than wait until after the app is released. http://bugreport.apple.com http://bugreport.apple.com
Corrado 12y ago
I would like a "storage" extension that let me choose my own "iCloud' implementation. That way I could point Photos at Dropbox, Amazon S3, or my own SAN, and still use the capabilities of the product. My main concern with photos on my computer right now is how much space they take up and how to securely store them off-site somewhere. I know that iCloud could do this but I would probably need the 1TB plan with is $20/month - that's very expensive. Maybe there is a way to only store new photos in iCloud and offload the old ones to Glacier or something. :/

kohanz 12y ago

I'm wondering how alone (or not) I am in being uncomfortable with cloud storage for my (mostly family) photos. It would be the most convenient solution in terms of storage and redundancy, but the idea of them possibly being compromised and also somewhat out of my control doesn't sit well with me. It feels slightly hypocritical, since I do share the odd photo on Facebook, but the idea of having every photo and video "out there" is a bit daunting. Currently I have a RAID 1 NAS at home (also backed up to external drive occasionally), which I use to offload photos from our various devices. I can access these pictures when at home from any device, but of course not outside of the WIFI. So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup. Am I living in the stone age?

cwbrandsma 12y ago
House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway. Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.
- kohanz 12y ago
  Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.
  - apetresc 12y ago
    I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
    - kohanz 12y ago

calebm 12y ago

I have been struggling to manage my family's photos and videos, and it has really been a nightmare. I'm currently using flickr, but it leaves much to be desired. This looks like exactly what I've been looking for.

imjk 12y ago
What problems in particular were you having that makes this is a great solution?
balls187 12y ago
I have always been a fan of Smugmug. It's super easy (imo) to use, and there are a number of great export plugins for LightRoom.
- r00fus 12y ago
  I love smugmug, but the import/export is getting very tiring. Seriously, MacDaddy?
  - balls187 12y ago
    I just export from Lightroom, which is part of my workflow. For everything else, I just use facebook.
wbond 12y ago
I was thinking the same thing, but iCloud accounts can't be shared very easily/well between devices. I spent a bunch of time researching, but ended up shelling out for Dropbox Pro and Carousel on our multiple phones. Then I use selective sync to not fill our laptops with the full-res photos.
dba7dba 12y ago
Another fan of smugmug here. You can't beat unlimited storage for $40/year. Granted upload is limited by upload speed but by letting it upload overnight, that hasn't been a problem for me. Smugmug has app on iOS/Android that work well also. Here's how I manage family photos/videos as a Mac user: 1. Use "Image Capture" to import photos/videos from camera/iphone/android into Mac. Do NOT use iPhoto to import although OS X recommends it. It's the root of all kinds of problems afaik. "Image Capture" is free tool included with OS X. Just open "Image Capture" and insert your memory card or plug in usb cable. 2. Once imported, use ExifRenamer (or other alternatives) to rename files to date/time taken. This ensures each photo/video has unique serial. With the new names, you can easily tell when/what/where/why just by looking at filename. 3. You can group files into year-mm-dd or any other method you like. You can do it manually easily or use "Big Mean Folder Machine 2". 4. Once you have grouped files into year-mm-dd, now you can import them into iPhoto. I do this purely for easier browsing/etc. 5. Within iPhoto, you have photos grouped into year-mm-dd. #Now you should NOT keep ALL your photos/videos in ONE iPhoto database/folder. You should create 1 iPhoto database/folder for just 1 year using tools like "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). That way iPhoto data doesn't get too big. #I back up both the renamed files (divided into yyyy-mm-dd) AND the iPhoto libraries to external HDs. Backing up the renamed files as simple files is critical imo. #Whenever iPhoto is updated by Apple and I open an iPhoto library from older version, that iPhoto Library needs to be updated by the newer iPhoto. Not a big deal though. #Backup to Smugmug Now after above are done, I start uploading photos to smugmug. I may do maybe a month at a time or something like it. With smugmug, I can recover photos even if I lose both my Mac and external HDs. It will be painful but possible. Obviously Amazon S3 is another option. I would just zip up the files and encrypt them if using Amazon S3.

Chevalier 12y ago

Sigh. Does Apple offer auto-awesome like G+ (and soon, OneDrive)? Do they highlight the best photos or stitch burst shots together into a GIF? Do they email you memories like Everpix used to? Critically for me, do they offer deduplication? I currently have nearly 1TB of photos thanks to reliance on iPhoto and a decade of attempted back-ups to local storage. In reality, there's maybe 200GB of actual photos. Thankfully, cloud storage has stemmed the proliferation of redundant photos. For a company supposedly focused on user experience, Apple's complete failure with photos has been baffling. First the catastrophe of iPhoto, then arbitrary photo streams, and now $20/month/1TB (!) for iCloud storage. What the hell. Apple usually justifies their premium and exclusivity by offering better products. Hands up, everyone who thinks Apple offers even remotely comparable web services versus literally anyone else. This just another greedy lock-in of tech-illiterate customers by offering worse services at higher prices. Which seems pretty emblematic of the Tim Cook era -- when Apple fully pivoted to extracting premium money from their customers rather than offering premium products.

apunic 12y ago

Lock-in. A huge photo collection is the best lock-in for an OS. So to have a top-notch app here is a smart move from Apple. I have like 70GB of photos in iPhoto and somehow this stops me from fully migrating to another OS. Just the thought of moving this 70GB to another file system, OS and photo program let me stick to OSX forever. And photos especially the family ones are maybe the most important 'personal' data of a user. Besides, iPhoto is not bad but the many format changes in the past were a bit tiring. In general I prefer Dropbox as a cloud file storage--they have the best clients of all OSes and security features like no other (remote wipe), now I just need a cross platform photo database which is separated from my cloud storage provider.

ryanmarsh 12y ago
Lock-in, as in a lock I can't unlock? As in I can't get my photos out if I want? It's only lock-in if you want to leave and you can't. I'll be as locked into this as I'm locked into my favorite scotch. I can switch, but why? I really don't get the lock-in argument. I like Apple's stuff, all of it. It works really well for me. I'm the happiest I've ever been with my computer environment. If Apple starts to suck I'll find something else, as will many other people and some enterprising fellow will see that and create something great. Better yet maybe Dropbox will up their game to compete with Apple on photo storage. Rising tide etc etc.
- Someone 12y ago
  With iPhoto, you can easily move your photos elsewhere, but moving the metadata with it (what photo is in what album, recognized faces, etc) is another thing. I call that a form of lock-in.
  - prawn 12y ago
    It creates/enables inertia rather than locks you in, I think that's what they're saying.
    - ryanmarsh 12y ago

untilHellbanned 12y ago

Serious question: Is there a better way than the Abercrombie/J.Crew model approach?

lanewinfield 12y ago
As someone who used to work for Apple—they source all the photos they use in their promotional materials from photos actual employees have taken.
- jreed91 12y ago
  Interesting. I've always found apple's promotional images to be a bit more casual and not so overly photoshopped.
- untilHellbanned 12y ago
  I guess my question was whether it might be better to use more authentic imagery (whatever that means) and not just images of pristine young white people doing white people things. I'm genuinely curious about the branding here and not trying to be sensational.
  - prawn 12y ago
    Quality photos are aspirational. No one will want to see someone's poorly composed and boring photos in promotional material. And 'white people'? The hero couple in Utah look black and latino to me. If anything, Apple's marketing is generally as interracial as typical office stock photography.

karapu2 12y ago

It's interesting that they appear to have removed the Places functionality. I find it the fastest way to locate many photos - vacations, nights out, etc. I guess most folks did not use that as much, and so it was removed.

tunesmith 12y ago

They mention it for videos also - I hope their recommendations on how to handle videos become clearer. I used to pull my videos into iPhoto, but it felt disorganized to have them littered among my photos, and it felt clunky to pull them into iMovie. Later I changed to importing them directly into iMovie, but then iMovie had one of the worst bugs I've ever experienced on Desktop software, where over a period of months the source video of some important footage (me performing at a club) just completely disappeared, leaving only the thumbnails and audio. By the time I discovered it (reviewing year's highlights), it was gone from my time machine history as well (due to Time Machine deciding to corrupt itself and start over every eight months or so). So now I import video into Final Cut hooked up to a desktop Drobo which backs up to CrashPlan.

brianwillis 12y ago

I'm really pleased to see Apple getting away from the "events" concept that iPhoto introduced. It was a good idea in theory - all your photos would be automatically grouped into albums based on the date they were taken - but in practice requiring that every photo in your library belong to exactly one event meant that you had a bunch of awkward single-photo events. Photostream ended up making this worse with special photostream-only events that completely broke the model of how photos should be organised.

amirmc 12y ago
I've actually been quite pleased with the events concept. I found albums annoying and manually tedious but that pics automatically get grouped has made it easy for me to go back through old photos and find the ones I'm looking for. You're right about the annoying single-photo events but then I just dump them all together into the 'photostream' event for that month.
Wingman4l7 12y ago
Wouldn't this also have been super annoying for events that went past midnight and spilled over into the next day?
- fletom 12y ago
  IIRC events were created based on some heuristic of the photos' geolocaiton data and time taken. So if you do a 3 day trip outside of your city that becomes one event on import. It was also super easy to merge two events into one. I thought it worked pretty well in general.

balls187 12y ago

I would prefer if they had layflat photobooks.

jwr 12y ago

After Apple suddenly (and still no longer "officially") killed Aperture, I no longer trust them with long-term data storage. So no "Photos" for me. I am still thinking about how to deal with the collection that I have in Aperture. And before you respond with "just keep the files" or "export the files and import into Lightroom", it's no longer 1999 and it's not just about the files. There is metadata, tags, collections, stacks, and other kinds of organizational structure that are not easily reflected in a directory hierarchy. I've been bitten once, I won't be fooled again — this time I intend to develop my own solution for keeping this data in the long term.

gr2020 12y ago
Lightroom has a new importer to pull in Aperture data, including tags and all of that...so it's not really a "export the files and import into Lightroom" situation - it appears it should preserve your metadata. http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-import-plugin-now-available.html http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-imp...
- sib 12y ago
  Unfortunately, the Aperture and Lightroom data models and workflow are different enough that Lightroom really can't import everything that you've done in Aperture. Quote from Lightroom page: "migrate their images and key metadata"... It also doesn't support the non-destructive workflow edits that you've applied to your (potentially) tens of thousands of images. If you import them, all the edits become baked in.
cbhl 12y ago
I'm sad that I feel the only way to get a handle on my photos is to put them in Facebook or Flickr. For example, there was the OpenPhoto kickstarter, but even though the code is open source, their hosted service (since renamed to Trovebox) is shutting down next month. There's also Origami, where the team and product were split in an acquihire/aquire under eFamily.com.
LeoPanthera 12y ago
Photos will undoubtedly import Aperture metadata. It's disingenuous to assume otherwise.

jader201 12y ago

This sounds good, but if it's still going to lock all of my files behind a proprietary and obscure file structure -- and metadata library -- that totally get borked whenever I try to have some other app access them, then it's no better off than iPhoto. If they managed to keep whatever file structure I have them in intact, and still keep the metadata/library abstracted from the file structure, then I might have more hope for it.

daveidol 12y ago
Agreed. I ditched iPhoto and switched to Unbound (http://unboundformac.com/ http://unboundformac.com/) a while back for this reason.
marssaxman 12y ago
Check out http://www.mylio.com/ http://www.mylio.com/ - it's all about preserving your file structure.
- clarkm 12y ago
  Well, their website doesn't load, so they're not off to a good start.

brockers 12y ago

Another Apple ad on Hacker News? I wish we have a filter for "things that only apply to Apple users."

Fuzzwah 12y ago
Come on, this is Hacker News. If you want to filter it... hack it.... And it isn't even like you've got to invent a wheel or anything, many people have felt the same way as you and put together some way of filtering the site and then released the source: https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+filter https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+filter

teekert 12y ago

It all looks nice but I think many people are asking: How does this compare to Aperture? Does it deal with Raw? The word Raw is not mentioned on the page but they do talk about multiple formats... Come on Apple! The entire Aperture crowd is in the dark and looking for these details!

sib 12y ago
I don't have details yet, but, based on this quick review, I would say that it's much, much closer to iPhoto than to Aperture, unfortunately. I'm sure that it handles Raw, but not all the rest of what makes Aperture useful and unique.

kryptiskt 12y ago

Hmmm... another thing from Apple that goes without the 'i', I sense a shift in branding. Probably gonna be a while before they drop it on the phones, though.

jakejake 12y ago
Seems to be the way they have been moving for a while on the productivity apps. Now only iMovie and iTunes are left. It would be pretty ballsy (even for Apple) to drop the i and call the iPhone simply "Phone"!

veidr 12y ago

NOTE: There is nothing actually new available here at all, other than some new marketing copy. The app is still "Coming this spring" and the extremely basic and clunky beta cloud service is the same as what has been available since last year.

mcmillion 12y ago
The beta is out for developers and it's pretty nice.
- veidr 12y ago
  You mean the Mac app? Where? I just logged into the developer site but I don't see it anywhere. EDIT: Ah I see, you need the beta of the next version of the whole OS.

thomasfoster96 12y ago

Is this replacing iPhoto? I can't imagine iPhoto and Photos would make sense existing alongside each other.

mxxx 12y ago
It's essentially a hybrid of Aperture and iPhoto. Similar to what they did with Final Cut Pro and iMovie. Basically they remove all the really powerful features and replace them with an interface a 4 year old could use. It'll probably be a win for iPhoto users who are looking to step up their photo game a bit, but it's a bit of a kick in the teeth for Aperture users who probably now need to look at Lightroom.

dba7dba 12y ago

After some reading about Photos, I'm beginning to see one big reason they are pushing this is for the ability to charge monthly fee for storing photos online... Why can't they incorporate 'Iphoto Library Manager' and give user the ability to divide iphoto libraries into smaller chunks and let users easily store them on external Hds?