Ways to organize your media library in iPhoto. In-depth review of Photos for Mac - everything you need to know about the iPhoto and Aperture replacement

iPhoto has been a staple photo tool on the Mac for 13 years. However, in the last few years it has been actively criticized for significantly lagging behind the development of the operating system of which it is a part. Too slow, with an outdated interface and insufficient functionality, over time iPhoto began to look like Apple's least loved child. Many Mac owners have studiously avoided having to reboot this dinosaur, but with the release of OS X Yosemite, there's a great excuse to send the photo app in for a major overhaul.

Announced back at WWDC 14, the Photos app was supposed to arrive in early 2015, and Apple has kept its promise. In the first build of OS X Yosemite OS X 10.10.3 for developers, the disgraced iPhoto icon disappeared, and in its place a minimalistic colorful circle with the caption “Photo” appeared. Many reputable publications have already tried the new product and were very pleased with the changes, so at iGuides we decided to prepare our own review of the application and talk about its features, advantages and disadvantages.

First of all, it’s worth recalling the background to the appearance of the Photos application. Apple decided to use it to kill two birds with one stone: the outdated iPhoto and the professional Aperture. Instead of developing two products in parallel for different target audiences, it was decided to focus on one application that is as universal as possible. Looking ahead a little, I would like to say that everything turned out great with the “home” application, the professional product was irrevocably killed. Adobe, with its Lightroom, very correctly began to lure away former Aperture users, since there are no other options for the latter. You cannot cross iMovie and Final Cut, or GarageBand and Logic Pro, leaving the simplicity of the first products and the limitless professional capabilities of the second.

Photos app for Mac. Beginning of work

Photos for Mac is currently only available as part of testing the OS X 10.10.3 update. Immediately after launch, you are prompted to synchronize your iPhoto or Aperture library and get started. Importing photos is fast, but the speed depends on the number of photos stored on your computer.

Currently, iPhoto remains in the Applications folder, but once you start using Photos, you'll see a warning at startup that your library has already been moved. Most likely, after the release of the general Yosemite update, the iPhoto application will disappear from the operating system.

The first thing that attracts attention is the modern interface, reminiscent of the mobile version and the speed of the Photo application. Even on the relatively fresh MacBook Pro 13 from mid-2013, I was not eager to use iPhoto again, but now the Photos application risks becoming the main tool for storing and organizing a photo library on a computer. Even with tens of thousands of photos, the performance of the new application remains very high.

Photos app for Mac. Interface

As I said, the look and feel of Photos for Mac is very similar to the mobile version of the app. Of course, it was created taking into account the features of desktop interfaces, but the similarities are still obvious. There are four main tabs: Photos, General, Albums and Projects.

The first tab contains all the pictures that are in the library. By analogy with the mobile version, you can change the display scale, down to tiny thumbnails, when hundreds and even thousands of pictures appear on the screen at the same time. The “General” section contains albums that the user has decided to share with other people. If you enable the appropriate option, photos and videos added by other participants, as well as comments, will be collected there.

The third tab is Albums. It contains both automatically created folders and custom ones. For example, Albums contain your favorite photos, photo stream, and face recognition. The final section of the Photo application Projects is reserved for creating and printing albums with pictures. In Russia this function still does not work.

Photos app for Mac. iCloud Sync

Thanks to the iCloud Drive cloud service, Photos are closely connected to mobile devices. Currently, there are two tabs in the application settings: main and iCloud. The second allows you to enable the iCloud Photo Library function to automatically upload and store pictures in the cloud, as well as synchronize between all devices within the same Apple ID account. In other words, once you take a photo on your iPhone, it will immediately appear on your iPad and Mac. The same is true in other combinations - wherever a new image appears, it will be automatically added to other devices.

Users can choose to store original photos and videos on their computer and access them offline, or use optimized storage. The second will be useful to owners of computers with small-capacity storage devices, since they allow you to store photos and videos in the cloud with their original resolution, and download them to your computer only if there is enough free space. In addition, in iCloud settings you can enable the My Photo Stream option, which stores only recent photos without using up space in iCloud Drive, and there is also iCloud Photo Sharing for sharing certain albums with other users.

Photos app for Mac. Editing photos

In addition to organizing your media library, the Photos app has tools for editing photos. In the processing mode, a dark color scheme is automatically turned on, as if emphasizing the transition from storing and organizing a media library to more interesting and serious capabilities of the application. There are six main tools and categories: Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Correction and Retouch.

The most useless tools, in my opinion, are Enhancement and Retouching. The first, in automatic mode, tries to make the photo more impressive by changing the brightness, contrast, saturation and white balance settings. In practice, the result is almost invisible and is much inferior to the automatic image enhancement of popular graphic editors, for example, Pixelmator. The retouching didn't impress me either. Its operation is similar to the Repair Tool in other image applications and is supposed to remove unwanted objects and minor imperfections in a photo by analyzing neighboring pixels. In practice, the result leaves much to be desired, since the source of the “healing” pixels is not always determined correctly, but if this can be solved by manual selection, then the problem with frequent blurriness of the retouched area is more difficult to overcome.

The Rotate, Crop, and Filters tools should already be familiar to users of the Photos mobile app. The first allows you to rotate pictures around its axis, the second is responsible for arbitrary cropping, selection of popular proportions, as well as automatic cropping in accordance with the rule of thirds. In addition, in the “Crop” mode, you can straighten a littered horizon. The filters are also no different from mobile ones; a set of eight pieces is unlikely to be enough for most users.

Of greatest interest is the set of tools under the general name “Correction”. By and large, these are settings that will be useful for advanced beginners and hobbyists interested in something more than one-button photography. Theoretically, they should instill a love for color correction and other image manipulations in order to eventually transfer users to more serious applications (read Adobe Lightroom). The available options can be added or removed depending on your preferences, and they are divided into three categories: Basic, More and Advanced. The name is not very informative, but in the first public version of the Photo application there are localization flaws every now and then, which will probably be corrected for release. Some menu items can also be renamed.

So, in the Correction mode, color adjustments are available, including exposure, saturation, sharpness, noise reduction, white balance, levels, desaturation and histogram viewing. This set will be enough for most users for home use and selective processing of the best photos. It’s convenient that you can display only the necessary tools on the toolbar, thereby simplifying the application interface. There is a theory that in the future the Photos application may have plugins to expand functionality and add professional photo processing capabilities, but there are serious doubts that Apple will allow third-party developers to invade its product by changing its functions.

This week Apple released the final version of the OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 operating system, including a new application for storing and processing photos. The new product - Photo - offers a more convenient way to organize a media library between all iGadgets, as well as built-in tools for editing pictures.

The photo library is intended to replace the iPhoto viewer and the professional Aperture package. It has a “flat”, simple and intuitive interface. It can be easily understood by those who already have experience working with Photos in iOS. Navigation in the program consists of four main tabs - Photos, General, Albums, Projects.

By default, Photos on Mac only works with one photo library, and there's no obvious way to connect a new one. In fact, with a simple trick, you can use two different photo directories in parallel.

How to create a new library in Photos on Mac:

Step 1: Close the Photos app on Mac.

Step 2: Launch from the Dock or Photos Programs folder while holding ALT on your keyboard.

Step 3: Click "Create new..."

Step 5: After selecting a suitable name, click OK.

Step 6: You can now use two different photo libraries on your Mac. You can switch between them by holding the ALT button while starting the program. Unfortunately, it is not possible to open two directories at the same time. When you try to open a second copy, the first one automatically closes.

By the way, the ALT key technique also works with the iTunes multimedia content directory.

By forcing users to switch to “more advanced and easier to use” software – “Photo”. It took me exactly a month to get used to the new solution, but my eyes still refuse to work with the new product. Let's bring iPhoto back.

At the moment when the newly created application Photo became available for download, thousands of users reacted with peace of mind to the next innovation from Apple. “I’ll update and take a look. If you don’t like it, I’ll delete it,” alas, this scenario did not come true for everyone. On most Macs, after updating OS X Yosemite to the latest version and installing Photos, the good old iPhoto application simply refused to launch.

A dialog box prompts you to update iPhoto from the Mac App Store, but it's no longer there and you'll get an error "Application unavailable". The icon remains gray, and any attempts to launch iPhoto are futile.

Fortunately, there is still a solution to return the functionality of the iPhoto application.

Mac App Store

Purchases

iPhoto

4. Install the application. The proposed version will be fully compatible with the latest current version of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3.

Now feel free to return to Programs. The dreaded gray application incompatibility icon is gone. Launch iPhoto and in the first window indicate access to Media library your photos.

If you agreed to voluntarily switch from iPhoto to Photos as part of repeated warnings from Apple, I strongly recommend creating separate photo library. This way you can certainly avoid a possible conflict between the two applications.

Force launch of any version of iPhoto

When releasing the next software update, Apple periodically restricts user access to outdated versions of programs. The same thing happened with iPhoto. Having discovered this, I immediately sent the application to the Trash - 2 GB of free space on an SSD drive is never too much. If iPhoto remains on your Mac and continues to sadly loom as a gray icon, you can correct the situation using the terminal.

Terminal

/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto &

Alas, you will have to write this command line every time you need the iPhoto application. That is why the first method is more preferable.

One way or another, it looks like we'll have to give up using iPhoto sooner or later. You can always speak out on this matter on the company’s official website, leaving your thoughts and impressions of the proposed alternative in the form of a Photo.

Useful information about iPhoto:

website A month ago, Apple finally removed the iPhoto app, forcing users to switch to “more advanced and easier-to-use” Photos software. It took me exactly a month to get used to the new solution, but my eyes still refuse to work with the new product. Let's bring iPhoto back. At the moment when the newly created Photo application became available for download, thousands of users reacted with peace of mind...

I tried the app for a few hours on my iPad 2 and iPhone 4S (with iOS 5.1 of course, since that's the system requirement), and in my opinion, it's a very powerful app. As I'll demonstrate next, Apple has been able to port many of its advanced photo editing capabilities and advanced technologies to the mobile version of iPhoto, making it almost higher iPhoto for Mac allows you to edit, quickly adjust, and interact with your photos. Once mastered, the new gestures and commands can be quite powerful, although learning how to use a new interface is not easy. I also think iPhoto for iOS suffers from a serious file management problem - the best example of this is the lack of a centralized file system for apps to easily communicate with each other and share files and modifications to them.

I'd like to get this out of the way before I get to the (very) good part. If you were hoping Apple had come up with an easy way to import photos without duplicates and manual controls, I'm sorry, but you'll be disappointed with the app. iPhoto for iOS is another standalone app that simply can't "sync" changes you make to a photo.

I say "simple" because iPhoto for iOS doesn't use the photo upload system that iPhoto for Mac does. Since every iOS device comes with a system-wide "Camera Roll" directory that other apps can access, Apple developers had to make sure that iPhoto had access to this location - and this is where I started to run into problems.

First, let's familiarize ourselves with some basic terminology:

iPhoto for iOS is an app.
Photos.app is another app from Apple that comes pre-installed on every device.
Camera Roll is a system function.
System-wide albums.
System-wide events.
If you import photos using the Camera Connection Kit, you will find "Last Import" and "All Imported" in iPhoto and Photos.app.

When you first launch iPhoto for iOS, the app will update your photo library, and this will happen very frequently as you add new photos to the Camera Roll (like screenshots). This can be quite annoying if you're reviewing iPhoto, but I think regular users will rarely pay attention to such "issues". In any case, as you can see from the screenshots, the main window of iPhoto for iPad contains all your albums in the form of a shelf, and at the top there is a panel for switching between sections. However, this Albums tab contains not only albums created in Photos.apr (they are presented in the form of a gray book), but also Photo Stream, Camera Roll, Last Imported, All Imported (blue books), Edited and Favorites (brown books). Brown albums are specific to iPhoto only.

When I started using iPhoto for iOS, I moved some photos to other albums. During the test, I noticed several details:

Edited photos are not automatically saved to an album or Camera Roll.
The Everything Imported album displays different thumbnails in iPhoto and Photos.app (at least on my device).

For the iPhoto test, I imported a few photos using the Camera Connection Kit, saved a few from Photo Stream to the Camera Roll, and selected a few existing ones from the Camera Roll. After a few minutes of exploring the interface and editing with various functions, I returned to the main screen of the program in the hope of seeing that all my changes were automatically saved to the system Camera Roll album. My reasoning was that if iPhoto for iOS, unlike the Mac version, can import photos from a central location (Camera Roll), then the changes will also be automatically synchronized. Not so fast. It turns out that Camera Roll is not centralized at all, and every photo change made in iPhoto is exported to Camera Roll as a new file. Even better, if you're editing something in iPhoto from the Camera Roll "album", further editing the same file from the system Camera Roll in Photos.app will cause iOS to fail to inform the changes, and you will end up with two different files in one Camera Roll.

From this point of view, some of you may disagree with me that such file management is built into the design of iOS. Of course, I can recognize that Apple's sandbox architecture improves security, but at the same time limits applications in terms of synchronization between each other (and the system. However, here I see how two applications access resources from the same system function (Camera Roll) cannot synchronize the changes made. As I said, I ended up with a different file in Camera Roll.

Another counterargument would be that iPhoto is a standalone photo editing app sold on the App Store and does not replace the changes Photos.app makes to Camera Roll. Looking at the problem from this perspective, we can call Photos.app a more "priority" application for saving changes - for example, even with my "miscellaneous files" problem, third party applications integrated with Camera Roll identify the file from Photos.app, and not from iPhoto. So I can agree that iPhoto for iOS was created as a photo editing tool on top of Photos.app and the system's Camera Roll - a tool that saves its duplicates. But I disagree that not being able to import a new edited version of a photo after making changes in iPhoto and Photos.app is a good sign. Actually, I think this is a bug and should be fixed.

An edited photo from Camera Roll displays an "edit" icon in Camera Roll in the Edited album in iPhoto. Camera Roll in Photos doesn't have this.
Saving a photo to Camera Roll from iPhoto creates a new file.
Try this: edit the file in iPhoto, don't export. Open the same photo in Photos and edit it. Launch iPhoto again. iPhoto doesn't show the changes you just made in the system's Camera Roll, but instead shows the old "edited" version. I think there is a bug at this stage, because the Cancel button causes the photo to be deleted. The new modified version from Photos.app appears here, but cannot be imported into iPhoto.

That's the point. iPhoto is a new application, and it is common for it to have bugs. I hope this issue of editing one file in two applications will be fixed soon, because it can really confuse the user. However, the main “problem” remains the same - the iPhoto program is not a full-fledged replacement for the standard Photos.app application and cannot become one, contrary to many expectations. With that in mind, I can say that the rest of the app is very interesting and works just fine in some areas.

Various metaphors are widely used in interface elements. Libraries are made up of glass shelves, albums are presented in book form, photographs are arranged against a linen background, and brushes look like real brushes, with effects organized in a rotating menu/palette. Don't forget that the horizon cropping and straightening tool interface is also presented in the form of a rotating disk.

While interfaces are a matter of taste, I found it interesting in iPhoto for iOS that almost every feature can be accessed in two ways: gestures or sliders. To crop, you can make the familiar pinch & pan gesture, to adjust highlights/shadows and exposure, you can use the slider at the bottom or hold a touch on the screen, then slide your finger across the screen and manually select the intensity of the adjustment. To adjust saturation, skin tone, blue sky and greens, you can do the same thing, just in a different tab. Some settings like white balance (there are 9 options) and the aforementioned effects are only available through the interface, but I think it's important to note the role gestures play in the app. They become like hot key combinations, like on a computer.

Personally, I didn't really like the pop-up images of brushes and effects (screenshot below) - not only because my tastes differ from Apple, but also because these elements feel like they slow down the interface, especially on the iPad 2. Or, again However, these could be bugs from the first version of iPhoto - it’s quite possible, although I think the animation in general (opening/closing the brushes panel, turning pages) could be faster. However, I really liked two things - hints, which can be called up at any time using the button, and sound effects (they can be turned off in the settings). I don't like some aspects of the iPhoto interface on the iPhone, which is designed to be "simpler" than its iPad sibling.

I think Apple could do a better job with iPhoto's navigation system. Especially on the iPad, I think the app should take a simpler approach to the photo selection process - instead of moving the sidebar to the center (which can be quite confusing), it would be better to take a page from Photos.app's book with a simple grid → full-screen process. Basically, the Photos view (which contains photos from all albums except Photo Stream) has a grid interface, but iPhoto's Camera Roll does not. When you open the Camera Roll album (where you'll most often be importing photos from for editing), the app will switch to a split interface with a side (landscape mode) and bottom (portrait mode) panel where photo thumbnails will be displayed. In landscape mode, the sidebar can be resized to display only one column of thumbnails. If you enlarge it, you will be able to view three columns at once. The same applies to portrait mode, only horizontally. Additionally, in the sidebar (I'm guessing you'll use iPhoto more often in landscape mode) there's a pop-up window to show All Photos, Starred Photos, Edited Photos, Hidden Photos, or All and Hidden Photos. (Photos can be hidden using the X button in Edit mode.) One last thing: the sidebar can be moved to both sides of the screen by dragging it by the header.

Thumbnails in the sidebar can be used. A simple tap lets you preview a photo, a double tap lets the app automatically select multiple photos (and it works pretty accurately), and a delayed tap on a thumbnail adds it as a highlight to the main panel.

This is the most confusing part of iPhoto, and one that many bloggers criticize the app for. It's not clear whether the sidebar can be moved, and it's not clear what all these . Clicking the grid button in the top toolbar shows and hides the sidebar, but you can also do the same with a bezel gesture from the edge of the screen. However, try adding several photos to the selection: the main panel will also become a grid, the selections are somewhat unclear, and tapping on the selection in the main panel will open the photo not in full screen, but above the grid. I think it all works together in a confusing way. There is no “clear all” button; a simple tap does not remove the selection. If you double-tap and hold (yes, you heard that right), you'll have the Loupe tool open in the preview section. In my opinion, you now understand how easy Photos.app is to use compared to the stunning iPhoto.

Ultimately, iPhoto for iOS isn't as bad as you might think. The app is powerful, yet designed for mobile devices (don't forget the iPhone), and costs $4.99. The effects are pretty good, the sharing capabilities are decent, and the Journals feature is one that users like my mom will love and geeks will ignore. The editing functionality in iPhoto works, and I'm not going to write something like "Apple is a disappointment" because this is only the first version of the application and it may have bugs. There's no doubt that iPhoto is an impressive piece of engineering, maybe a little less so in terms of design, but that's personal preference. However, there are issues here that need to be mentioned and limitations of the app (and iOS in general) that Apple will have to address. If we have one Camera Roll directory, why can't Apple allow two apps to treat it as one directory? If Apple made both apps, why can't they make the overall design and navigation elements without using different sidebars and grids that can confuse the user? Why can't Apple be consistent in its use of tap, tap and delay button labels?

There are a few things iPhoto could do better. iPhoto is a powerful app, again, it even works on your phone, but there shouldn't be any duplicates in the Camera Roll. The editing engine is good, the application contains a huge number of functions. I can't wait to try it on the new iPad with Retina display.

via by Federico Viticci

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