“We got a chance to spend some time with a ‘developer seed’ version of Photos, which is available to registered developers starting today. A final version will be available with an update to OS X later this spring, and a public beta should also be available sometime before that. Even though the Photos app we used was not yet finished, we’re quite impressed with what’s here, and it’s clear that this is a pretty giant leap forward over iPhoto,” Dan Seifert writes for The Verge. “It fully replaces iPhoto and brings a lot of the ideas Apple debuted on the iPhone and iPad to the desktop, including refined edit tools, automatic organization based on time and location, and integrated iCloud backup.”
“The new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, and you can quickly page through your collection, marking images as favorites,” Seifert writes. “There are also some really nice details, like a “loupe” mode that lets you preview images when you mouse over them. All of that contributes to making Photos much more enjoyable to use and a more modern experience than iPhoto ever was. We’ll have to see if those performance improvements hold up once we have thousands of our own photos in the final version later this year, but we’re crossing our fingers that the days of managing multiple libraries just to keep their size down are in the past.”
“Photos’ other new big feature is its deep integration with iCloud Photos. While it was possible to sync photos to iCloud Photos with iPhoto, it always felt like a tacked-on feature and wasn’t very easy to use,” Seifert writes. “That’s completely changed with Photos; it’s easy and painless to back up all of your photos and videos to the cloud and then access them on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad wherever you are. All of the photos you take with your iPhone are available on your Mac and vice versa. Gone are the confusing and arbitrary limits to how many photos could be stored in the cloud with Photo Stream. Photos will now just use the storage available in your iCloud account.”
Read more in the full article here.
In a companion article for The Verge, Josh Lowensohn and Nathan Ingraham write, “One of the biggest problems right now is what to do with all our photos. Taking them is easier than ever. So is sharing them. But storing and organizing them all in different places still manages to be an experience filled with gotchas, and one that varies wildly depending on what companies you’ve sworn allegiance to with your phone and computer. And if that company’s been Apple, you’ve basically been a guinea pig in a good idea that was hastily (and poorly) executed. Apple might have just fixed that for Mac users with the new Photos app.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Apple’s all-new ‘Photos’ app turns iCloud’s silver lining into pure gold – February 5, 2015