ICloud Photo Library isn't perfect, and it's more expensive than I'd like. They have to sync seamlessly, quickly, and not send the end-user into a panic because they're suddenly missing chunks of their lives. They can't be duplicated into a million copies. It's the first of iCloud's sync services that I can honestly say, in my multiple months of testing, "just works."Īnd as anyone who's tried to manage images online before knows, "it just works" is pretty darn important when it comes to your digital memories.
And it does so in a secure, smart, and controlled manner. It integrates iCloud Shared Streams to bring your pictures to your friends and family. It syncs all your photos with all your devices. If Photos for OS X is meant to be your photography home base, iCloud Photo Library is the service that spreads those images to the world. (And while Apple's at it, smart albums you can also edit on the iPhone wouldn't be too shabby, either.) iCloud Photo Library Sadly, smart albums and Faces are currently exempt from this syncing, though I'm hoping we see that integration down the line. For the first time, I'm not worried that I'm going to have to redo my entire management strategy over for each device I own, or worry about syncing special albums over to my iPhone via iTunes.
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This solves one of my biggest, oldest iPhone photo management irritations: I can manage albums on my Mac and have them sync to my iPhone, and vice versa. And best of all: Do something once, it syncs everywhere else. iCloud Photo Library, Apple's online service, opens up photo management to all your devices. Of course, Photos for OS X is just part of Apple's overall Photos equation. The new Favorites function also easily lets you flag images you want easily accessible. Like in iPhoto, you can still add keywords to photographs rating systems and flags are gone, but the beefed up keyword manager lets you add keywords to that effect. (Of course, that's what Smart Albums are for.) Photos's beefed-up search field is also a nice companion for quickly finding people, places, times, and keywords or filenames, though it lacks the boolean operators to make it a true powerhouse. But though I poo-poohed Moments and Collections when I first saw them in Photos for iOS, they're a fantastic way to quickly find photos of certain events: I know when I took the photo, so, it reasons, I should be able to quickly find the photo itself.
Now, unorganized, you might think that such a unification would prove disastrously messy. But at the end of the day, I had every photo and video I'd ever taken that was still available to me, all unified under one roof. A few duplicates, most of which were weeded out during the import process. Then I tossed in sixty folders' worth of random iPhone images I'd been offloading.
It took a few hours, sure, but all my photos were imported. I first got an inkling that Photos for OS X might be something special when, in its earliest beta, it handled me throwing a gigantic Dropbox-hosted iPhoto library into it without complaint. I finally ended up dumping my old iPhoto Library and every miscellaneous photo and video I could find into a Dropbox folder labeled "PHOTO MESS, CLEAN UP SOMEDAY". I tried keeping everything in folders, labeled by the date. Especially if you wanted to keep those photos on your iPhone for later viewing.Īnd so, I tried cloud services, like the now-acquired Loom and Picturelife. When you're taking hundreds of photos a month, that meticulous management becomes maddening, and eventually impossible without extra hours in the day. That all, unsurprisingly, went out the window when the iPhone came into my life. There are new special smart albums, including Timelapse, Favorites, Slo-mo, and Bursts they automatically collect images and video from those categories for your perusal. Apple's face-recognition algorithm, Faces, has been reimagined as a special sort of smart album, and sports all the same features (and bugs) as its iPhoto predecessor. Smart Albums and nested folders are at your beck and call, ready for you to organize accordingly. The moments, collections, and years view is fun, but where Photos for OS X showcases its power is in Albums. But for the vast majority of users - beginner to prosumer alike - Photos for OS X is more than enough for your photo management needs.
It's got a long way to go before it's ever going to be Aperture - and honestly, Apple may be ready to cede the true pro-editing market to Adobe and the like. They've taken lessons from those launches, and Photos for OS X actually sports a surprisingly robust feature-set. The Photos team could have followed the iMovie '08 or iWork template and gutted the program to its core for this redesign, leaving out all features but the essential ones - but they deliberately chose not to. But just because the Photos for OS X interface is simplified, that doesn't mean it's lost its underlying power.
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