21 ms·

Apple – OS X – Photos

213 points by liyanage 12y ago

bluthru 12y ago
Finally! I wonder why Apple didn't discuss this at the recent watch event? This is a huge feature that is a big selling point. Maybe Apple wants users to trickle in?
- dewey 12y ago
  Because it's not really related to the watch, they did discuss and unveil it at the last WWDC keynote though. It was also available as a beta version for developers for some time now.
  - bluthru 12y ago
    Nor is HBO Now or the MacBook.
fit2rule 12y ago
I may not be with it, or hip, or up-to-date on the current feelings compelled by the zeitgeist, but I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release. At all. In fact, its a reason for me to forget about the product - because if I know one thing, if an Apple product has cloud support, its going to be everywhere, and unavoidable. They'll be compelling me to use it at every step of the way - heck, probably its all enabled by default. So what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Why is it easier for Apple to move all these features into their data center, and not just fix their operating system at the user level to make it safe, secure - and Apple-easy - to share content directly from the machine itself? I've got an rPi at home, doing the job that Apple wishes I would do with its cloud. My rPi is available and accessible from anywhere on the Internet, with ease. Its got all my media that I want access to on the road .. and it works seamlessly with little fuss. If a $35 device can do that - admittedly with a modicum of tinkering on my (not in-experienced) part - then why can't a $99 'bleeding edge' operating system do it, without requiring that I just give all my content to a third party? Because from where I see it, Apple, you're not competing very well with m $35 media-sharing device that just plain works.
- zitterbewegung 12y ago
  Apple has been giving away their Operating system for years I'm not sure where you get the $99 'bleeding edge' operating system.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    I paid $99 for it back in the day. I guess its actually $25 to purchase a DVD of it here in Europe. EDIT: I'm behind the times, and showing my age - but I've spent $hundreds on OSX over my experience as a Mac user. Its been an investment - small, but nevertheless significant. And this: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ .. just fuels the fire. Because the OS is free, Apple are no longer putting as much effort into expanding its feature-set - instead choosing to make services for the iDevice market. Its clear to me, anyway: Apple are no longer a serious OS vendor. They're very definitely a consumer electronics vendor, though..
    - ryguytilidie 12y ago
      Its good that in your post about how you hate Apple products you made sure to get a ton of things wrong and bias them all in a way that makes Apple look worse than they actually are. It seems like your own irrational hate is the actual problem here.
      - fit2rule 12y ago
        I appreciate your opinion of my psychology, but lets stay on subject: is the Cloud really something we should be promoting, or is there an opportunity here to eat Apples' lunch and develop a better service? Because I think that the Cloud is very, very naive and frankly quite dangerous - I think this, because I've seen and felt the repercussions for what happens when the Cloud server goes down and people can't get work done. It does happen - and will happen. So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...
mratzloff 12y ago
So this replaces iPhoto, correct?
- jagger27 12y ago
  Yep
- jasode 12y ago
  Also replaces some (not all) features of Aperture. If you scroll to the bottom of the Mac store at http://www.apple.com/mac/ http://www.apple.com/mac/ ... you'll see that the link for Aperture[1] http://www.apple.com/aperture/ http://www.apple.com/aperture/ redirects to http://www.apple.com/osx/photos/ http://www.apple.com/osx/photos/
- caryhartline 12y ago
  Photos nearly matches iPhoto feature-for-feature.
smackfu 12y ago
Notice how the Apple screenshots are always full of photos? That only happens if you take a lot of shots everytime you take photos, like when you are on vacation. If not, if you only take occasional random shots, your screen looks like mine, with lonely photos on the left side of the screen, and then acres of white space to the right of them.
- atarian 12y ago
  It's like they're trying to advertise the app!
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    Showing a product in the best possible but still within the bounds of possible light to make people want it. The utter bastards!.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- evilduck 12y ago
  Dammit, Adobe also fills their Bridge app's screenshot with photos! https://creative.adobe.com/products/bridge https://creative.adobe.com/products/bridge Rabble rabble rabble!
  - smackfu 12y ago
    To be clear, I'm not complaining about the marketing. I'm complaining about how it is to actually use, in contrast to the marketing.
    - evilduck 12y ago
      Literally every digital image management application shares this complaint. Why on earth should any software development shop cater the design of a robust management app to the person who has nothing to manage?
dfine 12y ago
The iOS-ification of Mac OS continues apace. A good thing, in my opinion.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  Can you elaborate? What about this new app is more 'iOS'y than 'OSX'y, and why is it a good thing?
  - dfine 12y ago
    The reason why I think it's iOS-ification rather than an OSX-ification is because "Photos" seems less like a standalone app and more like a necessary utility to manage content created by the Apple ecosystem. iPhoto never really felt like that. iPhoto was part of the iLife suite that were standalone apps to manage the different multimedia demands of your life, mostly from non-Apple digital cameras. It was optimized around editing and organizing your photos. "Photos" on iOS was a barebones app required by a device where camera functionality is built in, intended primarily to manage photos created by the iOS device. Over time both of the apps have borrowed features from each other and grown together until it made sense to converge into one app.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I disagree with you, I think its a terrible path to be going down. I do not agree with anyone who thinks that Cloud'ifying everything serves the needs of the end user better. But I guess I'm alone in this - it sure seems Apple is hell bent on removing the filesystem and other traditional paradigms upon which computers have been built for decades, and replacing them with .. other things .. that only they control.
  - CraigRood 12y ago
    >I do not agree with anyone who thinks that Cloud'ifying everything serves the needs of the end user better. It's easy for use to forget what actually happens in the 'real world' when we spend so much time in the 'tech world'. The cloud is extremely powerful in that it bridges the gap between devices, and users. if I have a photo on my phone then why cant I view it on my computer without hooking up and importing. Or if I have photos taken on my DSLR, why then cant I share them remotely from my phone to others whilst I'm out and about.
cpr 12y ago
Dang, I want to love this as a "just works" kind of solution, but as soon as I turn on Cloud Sharing, I get dinged with the need to pay for an iCloud capacity upgrade. (Edit:) 5GB seems like a pretty measly free level.
- caryhartline 12y ago
  It's not like they can just give away unlimited storage.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    But giving away the server software to host yourself would never happen either :-/
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    .. its not like the average user doesn't have their own bandwidth, and their own means of managing storage, back home at their computer. I think Apple are doing the world a disservice by putting more focus on the Cloud nature of things, and less attention on refining their OS to make it easier for people to manage these resources themselves, using the traditional method: with your own computer, your own bandwidth, and under your own control. Seems like a ripe opportunity for a product - build your own Cloud on top of an OSX machine, leave it all at home and administer it - safely - from the beach while you're on vacation.
    - alexashka 12y ago
      I think it's an ease-of-use race to the bottom - the whole cloud storage thing. Inevitably, the cloud is going to be full of photos/videos nobody even remembers exist. It'll be cloud hoarding. It already is that with youtube allowing anyone to upload anything but I have to wonder if that's sustainable. What you're proposing is the next step if cloud hoarding becomes a difficult enough problem - if not, it'll be like Windows being an unbelievable resource-hog but since users keep on buying faster and faster machines, nobody cares. Except here, Apple and the other big companies are taking the hit, not the consumers, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
cjbarber 12y ago
This is great. Even cooler: Print Products! http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/ http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945) A 20 page hardcover photo book costs $29.99. This is awesome.
- cpr 12y ago
  Yes, pretty nice, though a bit pricey. I think iPhoto has had this option for a decade.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    But obviously poorly marketed! I wonder if it'll be available in the UK. Hopefully! I say "hopefully" because attempting to upload photos from my wife's iPad to photobox-like websites is incredibly painful or impossible (or you must use their app due to the iPad having no filesystem access, where ordinary file-access HTML elements just appear as blank spaces in forms, making it IMPOSSIBLE to upload from a website, thereby forcing you to install some rubbish crippled app).
    - diroussel 12y ago
      I've bought photo calendars from iPhoto in the UK before, worked well, looked good.
  - JonathonW 12y ago
    Apple's competitive relative to something like Blurb (which is the on-demand printing provider built into Lightroom)... maybe even a little cheaper for a similar product. They're more expensive than (for example) Walgreens, but, without ordering books from both, I'm not sure if they're similar quality-wise.
treve 12y ago
The only thing this application needs to be to improve on iPhoto, is to not be extremely slow at a few thousand photos.
aselzer 12y ago
I have a huge (250GB+) iPhoto library, and it is what is holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS. Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient. Even worse, parts of my photos were imported as RAW and iPhoto was doing its own magic to convert them to JPEG. iPhoto was not bad a bad program, I actually liked it, but relying on it was a lesson for me to never again store my photos in a closed-source program. Currently I'm still looking for alternatives, Lychee (http://lychee.electerious.com/ http://lychee.electerious.com/) looks nice at first sight, but I don't want a PHP server with MySQL managing my photos. IMO the nicest solution would be a well-defined photo directory format that gets indexed by a fast server implementing an API that you can use to access all photos through client programs. It could keep an SQLite database in the directory to store metadata, but if it is gone, the directories should still make sense.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  >Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient. What a pity there isn't some sort of operating system that can be used to present your media/content NAS to you, from anywhere in the world, with whatever front-end you desire .. seems like any OS vendor worth their salt could produce such a thing. I guess what we need is for things like ipfs.io to take off, and get wrapped up in some ZeroConf'ism with a pretty GUI. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
  - aselzer 12y ago
    I'd just use an SSH tunnel to connect to my server at home. That's fast and secure (but obviously too complicated for most users). "Home server compatible" routers would be nice. Devices could request opening a port, and you verify the action on the router GUI. Then some dynamic DNS server assigns you a nice name.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
cannikin 12y ago
I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream. Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud. The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.
- _ZeD_ 12y ago
  >>> FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work duh, dropbox resolved this problem... how much, ten years ago?
  - zyxley 12y ago
    I think the biggest difference here is that the iCloud Photo Library functionality will back up/sync new photos but won't delete existing photos unless you explicitly tell it to do so, which prevents data loss from corrupted or accidentally deleted local files (which Dropbox will cheerfully sync along to each other machine you have).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - cannikin 12y ago
    Dropbox isn't even close to this experience. Yes the files themselves would be everywhere, but I don't want to have to go into the Dropbox app to view my photos (not to mention the Dropbox app being extremely slow in my experience). With iCloud they're all in your regular Photos app ready to be shared or used in other apps just like the photos you shot with your phone.
jarjoura 12y ago
My problem with iCloud Photos is that I have 100 GB of photos that will now show up on my iPhone and iPad. I used to turn on iPhoto syncing with a 6-month window. So I'm not sure I want my entire collection with me always. :-| Edit: I know it doesn't actually download all 100 GB of image data, only the thumbnails. My point is that I now have a 15 years of photos with me at all times and I'm not sure I want that.
- gress 12y ago
  It won't download 100GB of photos to your devices. Instead it will download only the thumbnails and intelligently download the photos as needed.
  - jarjoura 12y ago
    I know that, but it still is 15 years of photos I now have UI showing me that I have access to at all times and I'm not sure I want that.
    - fredsted 12y ago
      then disable the feature
planetjones 12y ago
1TB of storage space is $240 a year with iCloud. Amazon Cloud Drive is $12 a year for unlimited photos or $60 a year for unlimited everything. I'll stick to Lightroom and Cloud Drive for my photo needs. Until Apple join the league of Google and Amazon with their cloud storage options, then I'm not interested, even if their products are pretty good.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Even from Amazon, haven't we learned not to ever trust the statement "unlimited"? I had an "unlimited" data plan from AT&T. People regularly get their "unlimited" $1/month shared hosting accounts terminated for going over a few megs of storage.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    It's almost like you can't trust cloud providers! I keep the majority of my data at home on a NAS instead of flinging it to the other side of the world and being disappointed that I have trouble getting it back. Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? Will there be a cloud burst, like the dot com bubble burst?
    - acdha 12y ago
      > It's almost like you can't trust cloud providers! That's a rather sweeping statement. It's more accurate to say that you can't trust a service which you don't pay real money for. I would certainly trust a paid, dedicated cloud provider like e.g. SmugMug far more than a “free” service from a large company like Google or Amazon. > Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? That model has its own weaknesses: a single NAS box requires you to play sysadmin and is vulnerable to things like theft, accidents (never assume anything survives kids & pets!), and security problems. If enough people put everything on single systems, they're going to start looking like great targets to the kind of people who make ransom-ware – once the attacker blocks your access to the only copy, you have no choice but to pay up! An interesting project would be figuring out how to solve those problems – e.g. a box which did strongly-encrypted off-site backups with guaranteed minimum retention periods would be interesting both as a hedge against many of those threats and as a way to get the recurring revenue needed to support a serious software project with non-trivial security exposure. You could probably even open-source everything since the vast majority of people are more interested in paying someone to handle ops than saving a latte per month in service charges.
OmarIsmail 12y ago
I would love to be able to use my unlimited storage capacity with Amazon prime as a cloud storage center for this, but alas. It's obvious that the seamless cloud storage will become the default moving forward, I just hope it doesn't take too long for other services to implement the same functionality. I really really don't want to be locked into Apple's ecosystem, but damn are they making it tempting.
- gress 12y ago
  How does this lock you in? Your photos are all still on your Mac filesystem.
  - OmarIsmail 12y ago
    Locked in from the perspective that if I want to extract all the important value from Photos then I need to be using iOS devices, my family needs to be using iOS devices (for easy sharing). As soon as you cross the non-Apple boundary the experience goes from wonderful to garbage.
    - gress 12y ago
      You mean that if you want the features of Apple software, you need to use apple hardware?
Someone 12y ago
"And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud" So, the big question: is that really _can_be, or is it _must_be stored in the cloud?
- _jsn 12y ago
  Can, not must.
  - Someone 12y ago
    Thanks.
ryandetzel 12y ago
Now if only they let my Android upload photos to iCloud I would be a buyer.
numbers 12y ago
I have a frew questions for users who already have Photos: 1. Is it possible to use Photos without paying for iCloud? 2. Does it work like iPhotos where there's a huge library that's created and organized by Photos and I can't just go in that folder using finder to look at something? 3. Is it fast?
- outsidetheparty 12y ago
  Yes, Yes, and Yes
  - zyxley 12y ago
    "Free" has the caveat that it uses iCloud storage, though.
    - outsidetheparty 12y ago
      iCloud is optional.
- aikinai 12y ago
  Everyone complains about the monolithic library "file," but it's actually a directory you can explore if you want; it's just disguised as a file by Finder. Right-click and select "Show Package Contents" to view it in the Finder, and then your photos are all nicely organized in the Masters folder.
martingordon 12y ago
I've been using the betas and have added most of my photos to iCloud Photo Library. My only issue with Photos.app is that there's no way to geotag and add/edit metadata on either platform. I've resorted to writing an iOS app to give me that functionality (using the new-in-iOS 8 Photos framework).
- kingnight 12y ago
  I am crossing my fingers that your work on iOS will be very handy for a Mac Photos extension come WWDC. Is it on the App Store or open source by chance?
- chkuendig 12y ago
  I have the same problem. is your app in the app store? i have a lot of photos i'd like to geotag...
secstate 12y ago
Given how little traction Apple has gained with web apps and storage, you'd think they'd be a little humble and offer a native app that interoperated with Android devices, and different storage backends (store you're photos on Amazon, organize them with Photos). Either that or unlimited storage. I can't remember the last time I considered a distributed storage service from Apple reliable, secure or flexible. Additionally, as an Android user with a Lenovo T440s with Linux and a MacBook Pro, I am increasingly frustrated with how closely integrated all the Apple toys are these days. And I know it's kind of always been this way, but it seems they're growing myopic with regards to other devices people may own. While I'm not in the majority with Linux on one device I KNOW I'm not in the minority with an Android device.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  Humble has never been part of Apple's DNA. They sell a phone that's "unapologetically plastic" after all :D
- mayneack 12y ago
  Have you tried dropbox/carousel for photos? The carousel photo organization has some rough edges (I'd like to be able to organize by folder if I want), but the platform compatibility works great for me (mbp, linux desktop, android phone). Anything that's hidden by the carousel view I can always get into the actual filesystem and look at the photos easily.
- adamlett 12y ago
  Apple's business model is selling devices at a premium. Every choice they make is guided by that. In order to sell at a premium (as opposed to competing on price) their products have to be differentiated. This means no generic back-ends. No Android apps. The unlimited storage I guess they could do, but their customers self-select to be more willing than the average consumer to pay for value, so why should they?
- jsz0 12y ago
  Any device with a modern web browser can access Photos libraries via the iCloud web site. You can also use apps like DropBox/OneDrive/etc to upload you photos to other cloud services. Why should Apple be a middleman in that process? The apps can access the photo library directly.
binarycrusader 12y ago
What terrifies me (as a MacBook Pro owner) is the recent realisation (due to some random corruption of iphoto data, and yes I have a backup device to restore from) that OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem sitting on top of ever-expanding storage devices that many of us are depending on to archive our photos and other data. I don't understand why Apple keeps pushing the capabilities of the system further and their hardware but haven't yet addressed the critical data storage issues that are eating away at the edges.
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem Unfortunately so is every other filesystem. Which is also why Apple heavily emphasizes making backups.
  - dman 12y ago
    Have you looked at ZFS?
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Have YOU looked at ZFS, and how it's unfit for desktop use?
      - laumars 12y ago
        That's unsubstantiated FUD. You only have to glance through this thread to see that there are people (myself included) who run ZFS on their desktop machine (laptop in my case). People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS anyway, so it's not worth the marginal overhead. However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.
lispm 12y ago
A huge downgrade for Aperture users. :-(
- scrumper 12y ago
  Is it? I was looking for some information that compared it to Aperture which I've been using since v1. I'd love to have an Aperture which works seamlessly with iCloud photo library; nearly all my photos are taken on an iPhone these days and it'd be great to have them integrated into the stuff I use for more deliberate photography.
  - sib 12y ago
    Yes, it's a pretty big step down in functionality from Aperture. It's basically 80% iPhoto, 20% Aperture.
    - udp 12y ago
      How does Aperture compare to Lightroom? (I've only ever used the latter.)
      - kingnight 12y ago
        Aperture had way better UI. Lightroom had more powerful editing. I think Photos will have the best of both worlds once Photos.framework comes to Mac.
- kmundnic 12y ago
  What happens to Aperture after the upgrade? Will decide to upgrade in the near future based on what happens to it.
  - rimantas 12y ago
    Aperture will not be updated any more. They announced that quite a long time ago (maybe when first introducing Photos, I don't really remember).
wmeredith 12y ago
Oh thank god. iPhoto is a bag of hurt and has been for years. Now if they'll only kill iTunes.
- stinkytaco 12y ago
  I feel like I'm the only one in the world who doesn't mind iTunes. There are ways I would change it, but it terms of: 1. Making my music browsable and searchable 2. Making my library pretty with a decent album art library (supplemented by manual art for missing albums) 3. Making playlist creation and updating easy 4. Integrating a large amount of media like podcats and audiobooks 5. Most important: syncing with my devices It's fine. It's not great, but foobar doesn't really handle sync very well (iTunes will update playcounts from my device) and it requires additional pieces to handle podcasts or audiobooks in ways I want. I've begun to let my phone handle some pieces of this (some podcasts with PocketCasts and audiobooks are great with Smart Audiobook Player), but iTunes is still a fiddle free one stop shop.
  - snsr 12y ago
    You're not the only one - I still use it daily.
  - brandon272 12y ago
    I like it too. It's not perfect (what is?) but I'm not sure what I would be using if not iTunes.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      Cog? I use it on the Mac because it is small and light, and I organise MP3s by album directories with their own M3U playlists and a global large playlist anyway; I rip my own CDs. (Yes, this is considered archaic by some but at least I still have 16bit lossless physical media and fascinating sleeve notes to refer to, right?)
      - shinratdr 12y ago
lloydde 12y ago
There is a lot of references to "your" in the OP, but I suspect it is not the plural form. The problem my family has is our ever diverging personal photo collections. I've yet to find a solution.
- lh7777 12y ago
  That's right. To some degree it makes sense -- most families probably don't want to share every photo they take. But most probably also won't bother to manually add every photo they do want to share to a shared stream. I'm not sure there's a great solution to this, but it'd be awesome if somebody figured it out. My wife and I have a similar problem with our music libraries. I have all of our music in my library and on iTunes match. I'd like for her to be able to access music in iTunes match too, but there's no way to do that without sharing an iCloud account and thus sharing everything else iTunes related.
jader201 12y ago
Does this still come with the required bloated and brittle metadata libraries and structure that prevents you from setting it up on a shared NAS so that your other non-Mac machines can access it? This has always been my complaint with iPhotos, and I'm betting this is no different. Ideally, it would manage to keep the metadata abstracted from the structure so that you could set it up however and wherever you wanted. But unfortunately for users, their model isn't about building an open and flexible photo storage solution, but rather a solution that depends on the iCloud and the need to purchase more storage capacity.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Amazon Cloud Drive for photos won't even accept it, probably because it knows better. They programmed it into the client to reject iPhoto libraries when you try to drag the thing over, recommending that you export every. single. picture. and uploading that instead. That reminds me, I need to cancel that thing...
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  Fortunately for users, their model is about building something that works transparently and seamlessly across all of their products, a feat which Apple has proven again and again people are willing to pay a little extra for. 99.8% of users think metadata is the act of meeting a child's father.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    across all of their products By "their" you mean "Apple's," right, not "the user's"? Not being facetious, it's true but the phrasing is ambiguous.
- pbreit 12y ago
  Symlinking/aliasing doesn't work?
- bluthru 12y ago
  You can now access your photos through icloud.com. Yes, their free tier should be much larger.
gadders 12y ago
Looks like Apple have invented Picasa. Seriously - what is new here?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jchimney 12y ago
They finally got this right. Photos, for me, was a major upgrade to iPhoto. Allowing me to have full resolution copies on numerous machines, and size optimized copies on mobile, secondary machines with no syncing effort on my part. May not be for everyone; but I love it.
peapicker 12y ago
But I don't want my photos in the cloud.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  They don't have to be in the cloud.
yitchelle 12y ago
Anyone know if this will work in a household that has a mix OSX and Android devices? Eg, will I be able to see the photos on my Samsung S4 that my wife have just uploaded with her iPad mini?
- uptown 12y ago
  If you browse to iCloud.com you should be able to.
jonathankoren 12y ago
What I really need is something that allows both my laptop and my wife's laptop to view and edit the photos. Not even simultaneously. Just from two different machines and two different accounts. Right now we store the photos on a NAS Picasa to view and edit them. (Picasa hates network drives, but symlink magic fixes that.) I don't really like Picasa (It insists on G+ too much, and the UI doesn't integrate well with MacOSX, specifically Finder.), but it works better than iPhoto for large collections. Unless I'm mistaken, this looks like the standard Apple approach where its tied to a single iCloud account. Is family photo sharing/editing really that difficult? We can't be the only ones that want that right? Also 1 TB isn't enough space. We have 14 years of photos we'd have to upload. That's a lot, and these price points are just too expensive.
- kamilafsar 12y ago
  I never used it myself, but there is actually a "Family Sharing" feature for iCloud. > When Family Sharing is turned on, a shared album is set up automatically in the Photos app on all family members’ devices. https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Be aware that you can't family share in-app purchases (even persistant upgrade type purchases).
  - jonathankoren 12y ago
    Isn't that read only?
frik 12y ago
Hopefully some of its new features make it to iOS8 "Photos" app. The various views (like "Year") and editing tools would fit perfectly for iPad and to some extend also iPhone.
eibrahim 12y ago
I use Lightroom on my MacBook pro and my library is saved inside Dropbox. I can easily share folders with a Dropbox link and my photos are synced everywhere. The Dropbox upgrade gives me a terabyte of storage and can be used for more than just photos.
- speik 12y ago
  That's not a bad system. Can I ask how long it took you to upload it all to Dropbox?
  - eibrahim 12y ago
    Not sure. I have a very fast connection and my MacBook is always on. I wasn't paying attention but I think everything was uploaded in a couple of days or so.
  - fernly 12y ago
    Would it not take as long to upload to iCloud?
akoster 12y ago
The one feature I'm really going to miss is the ability to set the location of photos manually, as I was able to do in iPhoto. This would make using the "Places" feature work really well as I could browse photos by geographic location and insure the photos taken on an iPhone (with GPS data embedded) and photos taken with my older digital camera (without this embedded GPS data) would show up at the specified location. Does anyone know any ways to manually set a photo or album's location in the new Photos app? (Or do I need to revert to using something like Exiftool http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ to set GPS data manually prior to importing pictures into Photos?)
- mattnewton 12y ago
  I think this is what you wanted? https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/#/phta4e5a733f https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/#/phta4e5a733f Edit: actually it doesn't mention editing map data in the list of editable things. That's good feedback for http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
username223 12y ago
I don't care that much about the "cloud" stuff -- I already pay for unlimited online backups -- but it looks like Photos will finally do lens correction. Yay! Now I can finally shoot raw without messing with Lightroom.
- username223 12y ago
  "EDIT": Nevermind. I installed it, and it still apparently doesn't do lens correction. Dear Apple: some people like to do more than take phone selfies.
flipmonk 12y ago
Finally! This beta has proven beyond reasonable doubt of their reasoning behind shuttering aperture. In love! Phenomenal product, this.
mahyarm 12y ago
iCloud doesn't scale in this case. Take about 1 1:00 video per week for a few years and you've already gone over the 1TB iCloud service limit. Anyone who's kept their personal photo history for 7+ years probably already goes over this limit. It's pretty sad, because it's probably the fastest photo management app out there.
iambatman 12y ago
I've got 200GB+ of photos,maybe 10 times that in video, all because I have kids and I'll probably never look at most of them again , yet I NEED to save them somewhere!
- greyskull 12y ago
  https://www.backblaze.com/ https://www.backblaze.com/ ? Archive the older stuff. Simple suggestion.
- broken_symlink 12y ago
  i've been thinking about using amazon glacier for that. maybe just do a back up once a year or so.
dankohn1 12y ago
How can I have two photo streams both feed into the same Photos account? My wife and I take tons of pictures of our kids. How should we configure things so that we can see all the pictures we've both taken?
- zachberger 12y ago
  Have you looked at family sharing? https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/
  - dankohn1 12y ago
    There doesn't seem to be a way to have all photos taken added to the family album. I still have to manually add each photo.
jjmata 12y ago
Has anybody gotten confirmation of EyeFi cards being able to upload to iCloud so we can use Photos as the universal photo browser?
Osiris 12y ago
This feels a lot like vendor-lock-in to me. It "just works" as long as everything you own runs OS X or iOS.
callesgg 12y ago
i am terified of apple and photo library's. cause I used iphoto and suddenly one day the meta data like sorting and descriptions and tags went corrupt. then it happened again and I stopped using it.
jmgtan 12y ago
Really excited to try this out, had bad experience with iPhoto's performance the past few months. I recently switched to using the Photos functionality of Synology. It's not as pretty as Apple's software but it's very fast.
honeybooboo123 12y ago
And the US police state will be happily data-mining everyone's photos for facial recognition data and your social graph.
hsshah 12y ago
I currently use Carousel by Dropbox and have 200GB worth of pics and family videos. Ofcourse I use selective sync to not have them on my MBP I like Apple photos auto smart sync and a native Mac app. If I want to move/copy my pics from Dropbox to iCloud drive, any alternatives to having download them to local machine and upload again to Apple server? Any cloud based sync product that supports iCloud?
sozerberk 12y ago
Even though this functionality is very handy, I think I will never trust iCloud ever again due to many loss of data and time to solve syncing problems. If this photo syncing is anything like keychain syncing, I will have very bad time and while password recovery only takes time, photo recovery won't be possible.
andygambles 12y ago
Would really like to see Album Sharing rather tha shared photostreams. Help reduce duplicate photos on the device. Also as a Family Sharer I'd prefer the icloud space to be shared across all. Rather than buy 200GB for 5 people I can get away with 200GB for everyone.
cc22 12y ago
Does this still work with 'get my iPhone photos in a normal folder' (e.g. for Lightroom) hacks like photostream2folder?
mcbetz 12y ago
Photos are probably the most valuable digital files quite everyone has. And as with all things that are precious, there comes (or at least should come) caution. There is nothing that I fear more than loosing my photos, my visual biography. That is why I am super conservative when it comes to software that wants to handle my photos. What are the requirements for software that I allow to manage my photos: - Very good chance of still being in the market in 5-10 years. This basically rules out all Google (Picasa), Apple (iPhoto, Aperture, Photos) products. - Possibility to backup my photos on various destinations (not only one commercial cloud) - A library format that is readable from external applications (SQL, metadata files) - Good tools to search, compare and sort my library - At least support two major platforms natively Unfortunately, the only software that meets most of these requirements is Adobe's Lightroom. And this is very sad: - It has too many features that I do not need - I am not a professional photographer - It does not care about native UIs and its usability I still find weak - It asks for a premium price for professional photographers (both the one-time fee and the creative cloud version) How about alternatives? - Aperture was a very good alternative, despite being only available for Mac - I was disappointed by all open source alternatives; most of which are not easily available for Mac and Windows (Lightzone, Darkroom, Digikam, Shotwell) - Digikam comes closest, but as it's KDE based, installation and native support on Windows and Mac is still weak - Capture One Pro 8 works on Mac and Windows but is even more expensive than Lightroom and hence not worth it - I do not know about any other photo management tool that is stable, multi platform and meets most of the conservative demands
- danieldk 12y ago
  This. Having gone through some discontinued products already (keychain sync, Aperture, iDisk), I have learned to rely on Apple for the hardware and operating system and on others for software and synchronization. I switched to LightRoom when Aperture became stagnant. It has many advantages for the long term, e.g. being able to export collections as separate catalogs (ideal for backuping RAWs and adjustments for stuff that is done, e.g. holidays), storing metadata in XMP sidecar files, continuous and quick updates for RAW support for new cameras. I agree on the pricing as well. I do use some raw editing features, but it is relatively modest. For that, it is relatively expensive, and has gone through four iterations (paid upgrades) already since I first started looking into it.
tempodox 12y ago
This is one product that's definitely not for me. The UI is dumbed down beyond the pain threshold, removing access to the settings that interest me, organising photos after criteria that are irrelevant for me. And iCloud storage? Worst idea ever since mobile carriers make you pay through the nose for every byte of download and thrice as much for upload. I can't for the life of me figure out who this product is for. Apple destroyed what has worked before, leaving us with broken crap that's too expensive to use, if you even wanted to use it. There was a time when I used to look forward to what Apple might come up with next. By now, I only expect more destruction of previously existing functionality in exchange for higher prices. Apple has become a poisoned fruit.
- tempodox 12y ago
  Seriously, if I need an external service for everything from text editing upward, why the heck would I even bother with this non-OS? Oh, right, I'm locked into it if I want to make native iOS apps and the like. That's really the only reason that remains.

213 points by liyanage 12y ago

Finally! I wonder why Apple didn't discuss this at the recent watch event? This is a huge feature that is a big selling point. Maybe Apple wants users to trickle in?

dewey 12y ago
Because it's not really related to the watch, they did discuss and unveil it at the last WWDC keynote though. It was also available as a beta version for developers for some time now.
- bluthru 12y ago
  Nor is HBO Now or the MacBook.

fit2rule 12y ago

I may not be with it, or hip, or up-to-date on the current feelings compelled by the zeitgeist, but I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release. At all. In fact, its a reason for me to forget about the product - because if I know one thing, if an Apple product has cloud support, its going to be everywhere, and unavoidable. They'll be compelling me to use it at every step of the way - heck, probably its all enabled by default. So what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Why is it easier for Apple to move all these features into their data center, and not just fix their operating system at the user level to make it safe, secure - and Apple-easy - to share content directly from the machine itself? I've got an rPi at home, doing the job that Apple wishes I would do with its cloud. My rPi is available and accessible from anywhere on the Internet, with ease. Its got all my media that I want access to on the road .. and it works seamlessly with little fuss. If a $35 device can do that - admittedly with a modicum of tinkering on my (not in-experienced) part - then why can't a $99 'bleeding edge' operating system do it, without requiring that I just give all my content to a third party? Because from where I see it, Apple, you're not competing very well with m $35 media-sharing device that just plain works.

zitterbewegung 12y ago
Apple has been giving away their Operating system for years I'm not sure where you get the $99 'bleeding edge' operating system.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I paid $99 for it back in the day. I guess its actually $25 to purchase a DVD of it here in Europe. EDIT: I'm behind the times, and showing my age - but I've spent $hundreds on OSX over my experience as a Mac user. Its been an investment - small, but nevertheless significant. And this: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ .. just fuels the fire. Because the OS is free, Apple are no longer putting as much effort into expanding its feature-set - instead choosing to make services for the iDevice market. Its clear to me, anyway: Apple are no longer a serious OS vendor. They're very definitely a consumer electronics vendor, though..
  - ryguytilidie 12y ago
    Its good that in your post about how you hate Apple products you made sure to get a ton of things wrong and bias them all in a way that makes Apple look worse than they actually are. It seems like your own irrational hate is the actual problem here.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      I appreciate your opinion of my psychology, but lets stay on subject: is the Cloud really something we should be promoting, or is there an opportunity here to eat Apples' lunch and develop a better service? Because I think that the Cloud is very, very naive and frankly quite dangerous - I think this, because I've seen and felt the repercussions for what happens when the Cloud server goes down and people can't get work done. It does happen - and will happen. So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...

mratzloff 12y ago

So this replaces iPhoto, correct?

jagger27 12y ago
Yep
jasode 12y ago
Also replaces some (not all) features of Aperture. If you scroll to the bottom of the Mac store at http://www.apple.com/mac/ http://www.apple.com/mac/ ... you'll see that the link for Aperture[1] http://www.apple.com/aperture/ http://www.apple.com/aperture/ redirects to http://www.apple.com/osx/photos/ http://www.apple.com/osx/photos/
caryhartline 12y ago
Photos nearly matches iPhoto feature-for-feature.

smackfu 12y ago

Notice how the Apple screenshots are always full of photos? That only happens if you take a lot of shots everytime you take photos, like when you are on vacation. If not, if you only take occasional random shots, your screen looks like mine, with lonely photos on the left side of the screen, and then acres of white space to the right of them.

atarian 12y ago
It's like they're trying to advertise the app!
- noir_lord 12y ago
  Showing a product in the best possible but still within the bounds of possible light to make people want it. The utter bastards!.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
evilduck 12y ago
Dammit, Adobe also fills their Bridge app's screenshot with photos! https://creative.adobe.com/products/bridge https://creative.adobe.com/products/bridge Rabble rabble rabble!
- smackfu 12y ago
  To be clear, I'm not complaining about the marketing. I'm complaining about how it is to actually use, in contrast to the marketing.
  - evilduck 12y ago
    Literally every digital image management application shares this complaint. Why on earth should any software development shop cater the design of a robust management app to the person who has nothing to manage?

dfine 12y ago

The iOS-ification of Mac OS continues apace. A good thing, in my opinion.

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
Can you elaborate? What about this new app is more 'iOS'y than 'OSX'y, and why is it a good thing?
- dfine 12y ago
  The reason why I think it's iOS-ification rather than an OSX-ification is because "Photos" seems less like a standalone app and more like a necessary utility to manage content created by the Apple ecosystem. iPhoto never really felt like that. iPhoto was part of the iLife suite that were standalone apps to manage the different multimedia demands of your life, mostly from non-Apple digital cameras. It was optimized around editing and organizing your photos. "Photos" on iOS was a barebones app required by a device where camera functionality is built in, intended primarily to manage photos created by the iOS device. Over time both of the apps have borrowed features from each other and grown together until it made sense to converge into one app.
fit2rule 12y ago
I disagree with you, I think its a terrible path to be going down. I do not agree with anyone who thinks that Cloud'ifying everything serves the needs of the end user better. But I guess I'm alone in this - it sure seems Apple is hell bent on removing the filesystem and other traditional paradigms upon which computers have been built for decades, and replacing them with .. other things .. that only they control.
- CraigRood 12y ago
  >I do not agree with anyone who thinks that Cloud'ifying everything serves the needs of the end user better. It's easy for use to forget what actually happens in the 'real world' when we spend so much time in the 'tech world'. The cloud is extremely powerful in that it bridges the gap between devices, and users. if I have a photo on my phone then why cant I view it on my computer without hooking up and importing. Or if I have photos taken on my DSLR, why then cant I share them remotely from my phone to others whilst I'm out and about.

cpr 12y ago

Dang, I want to love this as a "just works" kind of solution, but as soon as I turn on Cloud Sharing, I get dinged with the need to pay for an iCloud capacity upgrade. (Edit:) 5GB seems like a pretty measly free level.

caryhartline 12y ago
It's not like they can just give away unlimited storage.
- 0x0 12y ago
  But giving away the server software to host yourself would never happen either :-/
- fit2rule 12y ago
  .. its not like the average user doesn't have their own bandwidth, and their own means of managing storage, back home at their computer. I think Apple are doing the world a disservice by putting more focus on the Cloud nature of things, and less attention on refining their OS to make it easier for people to manage these resources themselves, using the traditional method: with your own computer, your own bandwidth, and under your own control. Seems like a ripe opportunity for a product - build your own Cloud on top of an OSX machine, leave it all at home and administer it - safely - from the beach while you're on vacation.
  - alexashka 12y ago
    I think it's an ease-of-use race to the bottom - the whole cloud storage thing. Inevitably, the cloud is going to be full of photos/videos nobody even remembers exist. It'll be cloud hoarding. It already is that with youtube allowing anyone to upload anything but I have to wonder if that's sustainable. What you're proposing is the next step if cloud hoarding becomes a difficult enough problem - if not, it'll be like Windows being an unbelievable resource-hog but since users keep on buying faster and faster machines, nobody cares. Except here, Apple and the other big companies are taking the hit, not the consumers, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

cjbarber 12y ago

This is great. Even cooler: Print Products! http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/ http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945) A 20 page hardcover photo book costs $29.99. This is awesome.

cpr 12y ago
Yes, pretty nice, though a bit pricey. I think iPhoto has had this option for a decade.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  But obviously poorly marketed! I wonder if it'll be available in the UK. Hopefully! I say "hopefully" because attempting to upload photos from my wife's iPad to photobox-like websites is incredibly painful or impossible (or you must use their app due to the iPad having no filesystem access, where ordinary file-access HTML elements just appear as blank spaces in forms, making it IMPOSSIBLE to upload from a website, thereby forcing you to install some rubbish crippled app).
  - diroussel 12y ago
    I've bought photo calendars from iPhoto in the UK before, worked well, looked good.
- JonathonW 12y ago
  Apple's competitive relative to something like Blurb (which is the on-demand printing provider built into Lightroom)... maybe even a little cheaper for a similar product. They're more expensive than (for example) Walgreens, but, without ordering books from both, I'm not sure if they're similar quality-wise.

treve 12y ago

The only thing this application needs to be to improve on iPhoto, is to not be extremely slow at a few thousand photos.

aselzer 12y ago

I have a huge (250GB+) iPhoto library, and it is what is holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS. Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient. Even worse, parts of my photos were imported as RAW and iPhoto was doing its own magic to convert them to JPEG. iPhoto was not bad a bad program, I actually liked it, but relying on it was a lesson for me to never again store my photos in a closed-source program. Currently I'm still looking for alternatives, Lychee (http://lychee.electerious.com/ http://lychee.electerious.com/) looks nice at first sight, but I don't want a PHP server with MySQL managing my photos. IMO the nicest solution would be a well-defined photo directory format that gets indexed by a fast server implementing an API that you can use to access all photos through client programs. It could keep an SQLite database in the directory to store metadata, but if it is gone, the directories should still make sense.

fit2rule 12y ago
>Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient. What a pity there isn't some sort of operating system that can be used to present your media/content NAS to you, from anywhere in the world, with whatever front-end you desire .. seems like any OS vendor worth their salt could produce such a thing. I guess what we need is for things like ipfs.io to take off, and get wrapped up in some ZeroConf'ism with a pretty GUI. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
- aselzer 12y ago
  I'd just use an SSH tunnel to connect to my server at home. That's fast and secure (but obviously too complicated for most users). "Home server compatible" routers would be nice. Devices could request opening a port, and you verify the action on the router GUI. Then some dynamic DNS server assigns you a nice name.
  - fit2rule 12y ago

cannikin 12y ago

I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream. Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud. The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.

_ZeD_ 12y ago
>>> FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work duh, dropbox resolved this problem... how much, ten years ago?
- zyxley 12y ago
  I think the biggest difference here is that the iCloud Photo Library functionality will back up/sync new photos but won't delete existing photos unless you explicitly tell it to do so, which prevents data loss from corrupted or accidentally deleted local files (which Dropbox will cheerfully sync along to each other machine you have).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cannikin 12y ago
  Dropbox isn't even close to this experience. Yes the files themselves would be everywhere, but I don't want to have to go into the Dropbox app to view my photos (not to mention the Dropbox app being extremely slow in my experience). With iCloud they're all in your regular Photos app ready to be shared or used in other apps just like the photos you shot with your phone.

jarjoura 12y ago

My problem with iCloud Photos is that I have 100 GB of photos that will now show up on my iPhone and iPad. I used to turn on iPhoto syncing with a 6-month window. So I'm not sure I want my entire collection with me always. :-| Edit: I know it doesn't actually download all 100 GB of image data, only the thumbnails. My point is that I now have a 15 years of photos with me at all times and I'm not sure I want that.

gress 12y ago
It won't download 100GB of photos to your devices. Instead it will download only the thumbnails and intelligently download the photos as needed.
- jarjoura 12y ago
  I know that, but it still is 15 years of photos I now have UI showing me that I have access to at all times and I'm not sure I want that.
  - fredsted 12y ago
    then disable the feature

planetjones 12y ago

1TB of storage space is $240 a year with iCloud. Amazon Cloud Drive is $12 a year for unlimited photos or $60 a year for unlimited everything. I'll stick to Lightroom and Cloud Drive for my photo needs. Until Apple join the league of Google and Amazon with their cloud storage options, then I'm not interested, even if their products are pretty good.

ceejayoz 12y ago
Even from Amazon, haven't we learned not to ever trust the statement "unlimited"? I had an "unlimited" data plan from AT&T. People regularly get their "unlimited" $1/month shared hosting accounts terminated for going over a few megs of storage.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  It's almost like you can't trust cloud providers! I keep the majority of my data at home on a NAS instead of flinging it to the other side of the world and being disappointed that I have trouble getting it back. Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? Will there be a cloud burst, like the dot com bubble burst?
  - acdha 12y ago
    > It's almost like you can't trust cloud providers! That's a rather sweeping statement. It's more accurate to say that you can't trust a service which you don't pay real money for. I would certainly trust a paid, dedicated cloud provider like e.g. SmugMug far more than a “free” service from a large company like Google or Amazon. > Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? That model has its own weaknesses: a single NAS box requires you to play sysadmin and is vulnerable to things like theft, accidents (never assume anything survives kids & pets!), and security problems. If enough people put everything on single systems, they're going to start looking like great targets to the kind of people who make ransom-ware – once the attacker blocks your access to the only copy, you have no choice but to pay up! An interesting project would be figuring out how to solve those problems – e.g. a box which did strongly-encrypted off-site backups with guaranteed minimum retention periods would be interesting both as a hedge against many of those threats and as a way to get the recurring revenue needed to support a serious software project with non-trivial security exposure. You could probably even open-source everything since the vast majority of people are more interested in paying someone to handle ops than saving a latte per month in service charges.

OmarIsmail 12y ago

I would love to be able to use my unlimited storage capacity with Amazon prime as a cloud storage center for this, but alas. It's obvious that the seamless cloud storage will become the default moving forward, I just hope it doesn't take too long for other services to implement the same functionality. I really really don't want to be locked into Apple's ecosystem, but damn are they making it tempting.

gress 12y ago
How does this lock you in? Your photos are all still on your Mac filesystem.
- OmarIsmail 12y ago
  Locked in from the perspective that if I want to extract all the important value from Photos then I need to be using iOS devices, my family needs to be using iOS devices (for easy sharing). As soon as you cross the non-Apple boundary the experience goes from wonderful to garbage.
  - gress 12y ago
    You mean that if you want the features of Apple software, you need to use apple hardware?

Someone 12y ago

"And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud" So, the big question: is that really _can_be, or is it _must_be stored in the cloud?

_jsn 12y ago
Can, not must.
- Someone 12y ago
  Thanks.

ryandetzel 12y ago

Now if only they let my Android upload photos to iCloud I would be a buyer.

numbers 12y ago

I have a frew questions for users who already have Photos: 1. Is it possible to use Photos without paying for iCloud? 2. Does it work like iPhotos where there's a huge library that's created and organized by Photos and I can't just go in that folder using finder to look at something? 3. Is it fast?

outsidetheparty 12y ago
Yes, Yes, and Yes
- zyxley 12y ago
  "Free" has the caveat that it uses iCloud storage, though.
  - outsidetheparty 12y ago
    iCloud is optional.
aikinai 12y ago
Everyone complains about the monolithic library "file," but it's actually a directory you can explore if you want; it's just disguised as a file by Finder. Right-click and select "Show Package Contents" to view it in the Finder, and then your photos are all nicely organized in the Masters folder.

martingordon 12y ago

I've been using the betas and have added most of my photos to iCloud Photo Library. My only issue with Photos.app is that there's no way to geotag and add/edit metadata on either platform. I've resorted to writing an iOS app to give me that functionality (using the new-in-iOS 8 Photos framework).

kingnight 12y ago
I am crossing my fingers that your work on iOS will be very handy for a Mac Photos extension come WWDC. Is it on the App Store or open source by chance?
chkuendig 12y ago
I have the same problem. is your app in the app store? i have a lot of photos i'd like to geotag...

secstate 12y ago

Given how little traction Apple has gained with web apps and storage, you'd think they'd be a little humble and offer a native app that interoperated with Android devices, and different storage backends (store you're photos on Amazon, organize them with Photos). Either that or unlimited storage. I can't remember the last time I considered a distributed storage service from Apple reliable, secure or flexible. Additionally, as an Android user with a Lenovo T440s with Linux and a MacBook Pro, I am increasingly frustrated with how closely integrated all the Apple toys are these days. And I know it's kind of always been this way, but it seems they're growing myopic with regards to other devices people may own. While I'm not in the majority with Linux on one device I KNOW I'm not in the minority with an Android device.

wmeredith 12y ago
Humble has never been part of Apple's DNA. They sell a phone that's "unapologetically plastic" after all :D
mayneack 12y ago
Have you tried dropbox/carousel for photos? The carousel photo organization has some rough edges (I'd like to be able to organize by folder if I want), but the platform compatibility works great for me (mbp, linux desktop, android phone). Anything that's hidden by the carousel view I can always get into the actual filesystem and look at the photos easily.
adamlett 12y ago
Apple's business model is selling devices at a premium. Every choice they make is guided by that. In order to sell at a premium (as opposed to competing on price) their products have to be differentiated. This means no generic back-ends. No Android apps. The unlimited storage I guess they could do, but their customers self-select to be more willing than the average consumer to pay for value, so why should they?
jsz0 12y ago
Any device with a modern web browser can access Photos libraries via the iCloud web site. You can also use apps like DropBox/OneDrive/etc to upload you photos to other cloud services. Why should Apple be a middleman in that process? The apps can access the photo library directly.

binarycrusader 12y ago

What terrifies me (as a MacBook Pro owner) is the recent realisation (due to some random corruption of iphoto data, and yes I have a backup device to restore from) that OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem sitting on top of ever-expanding storage devices that many of us are depending on to archive our photos and other data. I don't understand why Apple keeps pushing the capabilities of the system further and their hardware but haven't yet addressed the critical data storage issues that are eating away at the edges.

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem Unfortunately so is every other filesystem. Which is also why Apple heavily emphasizes making backups.
- dman 12y ago
  Have you looked at ZFS?
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Have YOU looked at ZFS, and how it's unfit for desktop use?
    - laumars 12y ago
      That's unsubstantiated FUD. You only have to glance through this thread to see that there are people (myself included) who run ZFS on their desktop machine (laptop in my case). People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS anyway, so it's not worth the marginal overhead. However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.

lispm 12y ago

A huge downgrade for Aperture users. :-(

scrumper 12y ago
Is it? I was looking for some information that compared it to Aperture which I've been using since v1. I'd love to have an Aperture which works seamlessly with iCloud photo library; nearly all my photos are taken on an iPhone these days and it'd be great to have them integrated into the stuff I use for more deliberate photography.
- sib 12y ago
  Yes, it's a pretty big step down in functionality from Aperture. It's basically 80% iPhoto, 20% Aperture.
  - udp 12y ago
    How does Aperture compare to Lightroom? (I've only ever used the latter.)
    - kingnight 12y ago
      Aperture had way better UI. Lightroom had more powerful editing. I think Photos will have the best of both worlds once Photos.framework comes to Mac.
kmundnic 12y ago
What happens to Aperture after the upgrade? Will decide to upgrade in the near future based on what happens to it.
- rimantas 12y ago
  Aperture will not be updated any more. They announced that quite a long time ago (maybe when first introducing Photos, I don't really remember).

wmeredith 12y ago

Oh thank god. iPhoto is a bag of hurt and has been for years. Now if they'll only kill iTunes.

stinkytaco 12y ago
I feel like I'm the only one in the world who doesn't mind iTunes. There are ways I would change it, but it terms of: 1. Making my music browsable and searchable 2. Making my library pretty with a decent album art library (supplemented by manual art for missing albums) 3. Making playlist creation and updating easy 4. Integrating a large amount of media like podcats and audiobooks 5. Most important: syncing with my devices It's fine. It's not great, but foobar doesn't really handle sync very well (iTunes will update playcounts from my device) and it requires additional pieces to handle podcasts or audiobooks in ways I want. I've begun to let my phone handle some pieces of this (some podcasts with PocketCasts and audiobooks are great with Smart Audiobook Player), but iTunes is still a fiddle free one stop shop.
- snsr 12y ago
  You're not the only one - I still use it daily.
- brandon272 12y ago
  I like it too. It's not perfect (what is?) but I'm not sure what I would be using if not iTunes.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Cog? I use it on the Mac because it is small and light, and I organise MP3s by album directories with their own M3U playlists and a global large playlist anyway; I rip my own CDs. (Yes, this is considered archaic by some but at least I still have 16bit lossless physical media and fascinating sleeve notes to refer to, right?)
    - shinratdr 12y ago

lloydde 12y ago

There is a lot of references to "your" in the OP, but I suspect it is not the plural form. The problem my family has is our ever diverging personal photo collections. I've yet to find a solution.

lh7777 12y ago
That's right. To some degree it makes sense -- most families probably don't want to share every photo they take. But most probably also won't bother to manually add every photo they do want to share to a shared stream. I'm not sure there's a great solution to this, but it'd be awesome if somebody figured it out. My wife and I have a similar problem with our music libraries. I have all of our music in my library and on iTunes match. I'd like for her to be able to access music in iTunes match too, but there's no way to do that without sharing an iCloud account and thus sharing everything else iTunes related.

jader201 12y ago

Does this still come with the required bloated and brittle metadata libraries and structure that prevents you from setting it up on a shared NAS so that your other non-Mac machines can access it? This has always been my complaint with iPhotos, and I'm betting this is no different. Ideally, it would manage to keep the metadata abstracted from the structure so that you could set it up however and wherever you wanted. But unfortunately for users, their model isn't about building an open and flexible photo storage solution, but rather a solution that depends on the iCloud and the need to purchase more storage capacity.

joezydeco 12y ago
Amazon Cloud Drive for photos won't even accept it, probably because it knows better. They programmed it into the client to reject iPhoto libraries when you try to drag the thing over, recommending that you export every. single. picture. and uploading that instead. That reminds me, I need to cancel that thing...
hyperbovine 12y ago
Fortunately for users, their model is about building something that works transparently and seamlessly across all of their products, a feat which Apple has proven again and again people are willing to pay a little extra for. 99.8% of users think metadata is the act of meeting a child's father.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  across all of their products By "their" you mean "Apple's," right, not "the user's"? Not being facetious, it's true but the phrasing is ambiguous.
pbreit 12y ago
Symlinking/aliasing doesn't work?
bluthru 12y ago
You can now access your photos through icloud.com. Yes, their free tier should be much larger.

gadders 12y ago

Looks like Apple have invented Picasa. Seriously - what is new here?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jchimney 12y ago

They finally got this right. Photos, for me, was a major upgrade to iPhoto. Allowing me to have full resolution copies on numerous machines, and size optimized copies on mobile, secondary machines with no syncing effort on my part. May not be for everyone; but I love it.

peapicker 12y ago

But I don't want my photos in the cloud.

wmeredith 12y ago
They don't have to be in the cloud.

yitchelle 12y ago

Anyone know if this will work in a household that has a mix OSX and Android devices? Eg, will I be able to see the photos on my Samsung S4 that my wife have just uploaded with her iPad mini?

uptown 12y ago
If you browse to iCloud.com you should be able to.

jonathankoren 12y ago

What I really need is something that allows both my laptop and my wife's laptop to view and edit the photos. Not even simultaneously. Just from two different machines and two different accounts. Right now we store the photos on a NAS Picasa to view and edit them. (Picasa hates network drives, but symlink magic fixes that.) I don't really like Picasa (It insists on G+ too much, and the UI doesn't integrate well with MacOSX, specifically Finder.), but it works better than iPhoto for large collections. Unless I'm mistaken, this looks like the standard Apple approach where its tied to a single iCloud account. Is family photo sharing/editing really that difficult? We can't be the only ones that want that right? Also 1 TB isn't enough space. We have 14 years of photos we'd have to upload. That's a lot, and these price points are just too expensive.

kamilafsar 12y ago
I never used it myself, but there is actually a "Family Sharing" feature for iCloud. > When Family Sharing is turned on, a shared album is set up automatically in the Photos app on all family members’ devices. https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/
- josephlord 12y ago
  Be aware that you can't family share in-app purchases (even persistant upgrade type purchases).
- jonathankoren 12y ago
  Isn't that read only?

frik 12y ago

Hopefully some of its new features make it to iOS8 "Photos" app. The various views (like "Year") and editing tools would fit perfectly for iPad and to some extend also iPhone.

eibrahim 12y ago

I use Lightroom on my MacBook pro and my library is saved inside Dropbox. I can easily share folders with a Dropbox link and my photos are synced everywhere. The Dropbox upgrade gives me a terabyte of storage and can be used for more than just photos.

speik 12y ago
That's not a bad system. Can I ask how long it took you to upload it all to Dropbox?
- eibrahim 12y ago
  Not sure. I have a very fast connection and my MacBook is always on. I wasn't paying attention but I think everything was uploaded in a couple of days or so.
- fernly 12y ago
  Would it not take as long to upload to iCloud?

akoster 12y ago

The one feature I'm really going to miss is the ability to set the location of photos manually, as I was able to do in iPhoto. This would make using the "Places" feature work really well as I could browse photos by geographic location and insure the photos taken on an iPhone (with GPS data embedded) and photos taken with my older digital camera (without this embedded GPS data) would show up at the specified location. Does anyone know any ways to manually set a photo or album's location in the new Photos app? (Or do I need to revert to using something like Exiftool http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ to set GPS data manually prior to importing pictures into Photos?)

mattnewton 12y ago
I think this is what you wanted? https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/#/phta4e5a733f https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/#/phta4e5a733f Edit: actually it doesn't mention editing map data in the list of editable things. That's good feedback for http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

username223 12y ago

I don't care that much about the "cloud" stuff -- I already pay for unlimited online backups -- but it looks like Photos will finally do lens correction. Yay! Now I can finally shoot raw without messing with Lightroom.

username223 12y ago
"EDIT": Nevermind. I installed it, and it still apparently doesn't do lens correction. Dear Apple: some people like to do more than take phone selfies.

flipmonk 12y ago

Finally! This beta has proven beyond reasonable doubt of their reasoning behind shuttering aperture. In love! Phenomenal product, this.

mahyarm 12y ago

iCloud doesn't scale in this case. Take about 1 1:00 video per week for a few years and you've already gone over the 1TB iCloud service limit. Anyone who's kept their personal photo history for 7+ years probably already goes over this limit. It's pretty sad, because it's probably the fastest photo management app out there.

iambatman 12y ago

I've got 200GB+ of photos,maybe 10 times that in video, all because I have kids and I'll probably never look at most of them again , yet I NEED to save them somewhere!

greyskull 12y ago
https://www.backblaze.com/ https://www.backblaze.com/ ? Archive the older stuff. Simple suggestion.
broken_symlink 12y ago
i've been thinking about using amazon glacier for that. maybe just do a back up once a year or so.

dankohn1 12y ago

How can I have two photo streams both feed into the same Photos account? My wife and I take tons of pictures of our kids. How should we configure things so that we can see all the pictures we've both taken?

zachberger 12y ago
Have you looked at family sharing? https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/
- dankohn1 12y ago
  There doesn't seem to be a way to have all photos taken added to the family album. I still have to manually add each photo.

jjmata 12y ago

Has anybody gotten confirmation of EyeFi cards being able to upload to iCloud so we can use Photos as the universal photo browser?

Osiris 12y ago

This feels a lot like vendor-lock-in to me. It "just works" as long as everything you own runs OS X or iOS.

callesgg 12y ago

i am terified of apple and photo library's. cause I used iphoto and suddenly one day the meta data like sorting and descriptions and tags went corrupt. then it happened again and I stopped using it.

jmgtan 12y ago

Really excited to try this out, had bad experience with iPhoto's performance the past few months. I recently switched to using the Photos functionality of Synology. It's not as pretty as Apple's software but it's very fast.

honeybooboo123 12y ago

And the US police state will be happily data-mining everyone's photos for facial recognition data and your social graph.

hsshah 12y ago

I currently use Carousel by Dropbox and have 200GB worth of pics and family videos. Ofcourse I use selective sync to not have them on my MBP I like Apple photos auto smart sync and a native Mac app. If I want to move/copy my pics from Dropbox to iCloud drive, any alternatives to having download them to local machine and upload again to Apple server? Any cloud based sync product that supports iCloud?

sozerberk 12y ago

Even though this functionality is very handy, I think I will never trust iCloud ever again due to many loss of data and time to solve syncing problems. If this photo syncing is anything like keychain syncing, I will have very bad time and while password recovery only takes time, photo recovery won't be possible.

andygambles 12y ago

Would really like to see Album Sharing rather tha shared photostreams. Help reduce duplicate photos on the device. Also as a Family Sharer I'd prefer the icloud space to be shared across all. Rather than buy 200GB for 5 people I can get away with 200GB for everyone.

cc22 12y ago

Does this still work with 'get my iPhone photos in a normal folder' (e.g. for Lightroom) hacks like photostream2folder?

mcbetz 12y ago

Photos are probably the most valuable digital files quite everyone has. And as with all things that are precious, there comes (or at least should come) caution. There is nothing that I fear more than loosing my photos, my visual biography. That is why I am super conservative when it comes to software that wants to handle my photos. What are the requirements for software that I allow to manage my photos: - Very good chance of still being in the market in 5-10 years. This basically rules out all Google (Picasa), Apple (iPhoto, Aperture, Photos) products. - Possibility to backup my photos on various destinations (not only one commercial cloud) - A library format that is readable from external applications (SQL, metadata files) - Good tools to search, compare and sort my library - At least support two major platforms natively Unfortunately, the only software that meets most of these requirements is Adobe's Lightroom. And this is very sad: - It has too many features that I do not need - I am not a professional photographer - It does not care about native UIs and its usability I still find weak - It asks for a premium price for professional photographers (both the one-time fee and the creative cloud version) How about alternatives? - Aperture was a very good alternative, despite being only available for Mac - I was disappointed by all open source alternatives; most of which are not easily available for Mac and Windows (Lightzone, Darkroom, Digikam, Shotwell) - Digikam comes closest, but as it's KDE based, installation and native support on Windows and Mac is still weak - Capture One Pro 8 works on Mac and Windows but is even more expensive than Lightroom and hence not worth it - I do not know about any other photo management tool that is stable, multi platform and meets most of the conservative demands

danieldk 12y ago
This. Having gone through some discontinued products already (keychain sync, Aperture, iDisk), I have learned to rely on Apple for the hardware and operating system and on others for software and synchronization. I switched to LightRoom when Aperture became stagnant. It has many advantages for the long term, e.g. being able to export collections as separate catalogs (ideal for backuping RAWs and adjustments for stuff that is done, e.g. holidays), storing metadata in XMP sidecar files, continuous and quick updates for RAW support for new cameras. I agree on the pricing as well. I do use some raw editing features, but it is relatively modest. For that, it is relatively expensive, and has gone through four iterations (paid upgrades) already since I first started looking into it.

tempodox 12y ago

This is one product that's definitely not for me. The UI is dumbed down beyond the pain threshold, removing access to the settings that interest me, organising photos after criteria that are irrelevant for me. And iCloud storage? Worst idea ever since mobile carriers make you pay through the nose for every byte of download and thrice as much for upload. I can't for the life of me figure out who this product is for. Apple destroyed what has worked before, leaving us with broken crap that's too expensive to use, if you even wanted to use it. There was a time when I used to look forward to what Apple might come up with next. By now, I only expect more destruction of previously existing functionality in exchange for higher prices. Apple has become a poisoned fruit.

tempodox 12y ago
Seriously, if I need an external service for everything from text editing upward, why the heck would I even bother with this non-OS? Oh, right, I'm locked into it if I want to make native iOS apps and the like. That's really the only reason that remains.