While Apple's hardware remains consistently superior, their software appears to have suffered badly in the last couple of years, with image management standing out as a failure. All of their solutions seem increasingly focused solely on the beginner: someone who buys their first iPhone and starts talking pictures. For anyone who has an existing collection of photos and videos who wants to access and manage these through iOS devices, you're shit out of luck.
Based on my testing, Apple appears to be sorting images, events and albums based on the date when they were created on the phone or the date when they were imported - while completely ignoring the true creation dates or file/folder names for imported files. Any imported photos are, for sorting purposes, treated as new. So that album you imported from five years ago named "2010-08-01 Kids' Birthday" will be sorted right next to your 2015 photos with no way around it.
I'm a long time Apple supporter but frankly I'm not getting my hopes up for anything great. Everything I've seen from Apple since iOS8 and Yosemite has frankly been a mess. None of the tent pole features have worked as promised. I've yet to see any intelligent management of images and videos on my iPhone 6, with frequent warnings about running out of storage space but no clear, practical path to resolution. Buying phones with more storage or adding more cloud storage is not a solution since the space will eventually be gobbled up anyway, not to mention Apple's stinginess in terms of device and cloud storage options and pricing.
Given Apple's focus on photography as a central feature in their product line, if they still haven't figured out something as basic as image sorting or storage space management, I have very little faith in the upcoming version 1.0 Photos app.
I agree. Apple's hardware is still the best out there, but I do not utilize **any** software from Apple. It's amazing how a company that can do so many things right, continues to do many things so wrong.
You can be assured that Apple will slap the "beta" tag on the new photos app and it will unusable like most of the other software they have recently produced.
their software appears to have suffered badly in the last couple of years,
Um, no.
Quote:
Originally Posted by freediverx
Based on my testing, Apple appears to be sorting images, events and albums based on the date when they were created on the phone or the date when they were imported - while completely ignoring the true creation dates or file/folder names for imported files. Any imported photos are, for sorting purposes, treated as new. So that album you imported from five years ago named "2010-08-01 Kids' Birthday" will be sorted right next to your 2015 photos with no way around it.
The hell are you talking about? Its called META DATA. Import a photo that actually has it, and it will appear in the timeline correctly. This is how the Photos tab in the Photos app on iOS works, and will continue to work in Photos for Mac.
The All Photos/Camera Roll album on iOS, conversely, purposely sorts them by Date Added instead.
Working for me, on both beta.cloud and regular iCloud. Probably just a temporary glitch. U.S. based, developer. I got excited that it might come back up with new features, but it appears to be the same as before; probably went offline for development.
It depends what you're doing. I love the fact that I can open and edit exactly the same Pages document on both my Mac and my iPad - a huge step forward in terms of ease of use and consistency. But when I wanted to perform a mail merge late last year I had to load up the old Pages to do it. Also, I've begun editing our local village magazine and really would have loved to have linked text boxes - but they've been removed too in the latest Pages.
It said in the original Macintosh programming manuals that "A little consistency is worth a lot of correctness". Most of the time I'm happy with iWork, but every now and then Apple's recent feature removals bite me.
I've used Aperture exclusively since 1.5, but I'm expecting some very annoying feature removal in Photos for OS X, though in the main I will probably love it, until I really need something that used to be there in Aperture and I'll fire that up hoping that it's file (library) compatible and works with the latest version of OS X.
It was gone, then back...now gone again...on a dev iCloud account in NE US...
Back up for me in Florida in OS X with what I think is a new feature, a select option akin to the iOS select, might have been here before I can't remember for sure. Here is a screen shot.
Tip: Cmd-Shift-4, then hit the spacebar, after which you can choose a window screen dump with your mouse, as opposed to a full screen screen dump which you posted. In Windows it's Alt-print screen for a window, Shift-print screen for the whole screen.
It said in the original Macintosh programming manuals that "A little consistency is worth a lot of correctness".
Funny bunch, these Apple devs.
I've used Aperture exclusively since 1.5, but I'm expecting some very annoying feature removal in Photos for OS X.
Same here. And same expectation: I think some handy tools won't make it over to Photos, like the ability to import a .gpx track to layout your photos on a map. Hopefully this will be addressed by companies like Mapeture.
The hell are you talking about? Its called META DATA. Import a photo that actually has it, and it will appear in the timeline correctly. This is how the Photos tab in the Photos app on iOS works, and will continue to work in Photos for Mac.
The All Photos/Camera Roll album on iOS, conversely, purposely sorts them by Date Added instead.
Wrong. I've used Aperture to explore and edit every conceivable data point within the meta data and none of them result in the album sorting in iOS according to the desired (creation) date.
I'm looking at my Albums folder now, and I see albums dated 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2013, Intermixed with these are random app-specific folders like Retrica, VSCO Cam, Photo Sphere, and GoPro Album - and they aren't consistently sorted neither alphabetically or chronologically.
Digging into my Events subfolder, again all my sync'd event folders equally out of order: 2011, 2009, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2009, etc. And again, I've gone over every folder and image and made sure its file and meta data dates match the dates when created.
Apple support has no information or guidance. Apple user forums have plenty of other complaints such as mine, also unresolved. This could be fixed with something as simple as a sort button, allowing users to sort by date or filename.
Based on what happened with the iWork suite I wouldn't get my hopes up that this new app will be anything more than an improved iPhoto app. My guess is it will be more geared towards the masses and not the pros.
I don't knock Apple for how they evolved iWork or Final Cut. In both cases the apps were rebuilt on a better foundation and they've steadily enhanced the new apps to catch up with their predecessor's feature sets. The could have done a much better job with the communication and transition, but I think it was the right move overall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
As I had mentioned last week, I took the plunge and went LightRoom.
It would be great if I considered LR an acceptable alternative to Aperture, but I don't. I can't stand any Adobe apps. While they may have very powerful and advanced capabilities, I detest their user interface and workflows.
While not addressing your specific comments I am starting to wonder if trying to please consumer / prosumers and professionals in one set up is mission impossible.
I can empathize with that challenge, but I don't think a simple sort control (which is found on virtually every piece of image or file management software on the planet) is too much to ask for. One thing that frustrates me with Apple is how they get so many of the hard things right but then drop the ball with the simplest of features.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii
You need a program that takes file/folder dates and names and puts them in to the photo EXIF metadata.
Been there, done that.
A) Still didn't work.
Even if it had worked, that's way too much trouble e for something that could be more logically addressed with a simple sort button.
Apple's approach to chronological image management is too simple-minded and limited.
What about when someone scans photos from an old album and wants those photos to appear chronologically in the time when they were taken, rather than when they were digitized or imported into an app?
What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event?
To address those scenarios, I long ago made it a habit to store all my events into folders, and named those folders in a consistent way that would make them easy to sort chronologically (e.g., "2014-12-25 Christmas Party). This system is not only easy to implement and use, but it's also platform agnostic, working perfectly no matter what app or operating system you access the files with. Leave it to Apple to break my unbreakable system, lol.
At minimum, they need to provide sort controls and should should sort chronologically based on creation date not last edit or last import date.
It wouldn't hurt to provide a simple date edit feature that edited whatever date iOS uses for sorting.
Tip: Cmd-Shift-4, then hit the spacebar, after which you can choose a window screen dump with your mouse, as opposed to a full screen screen dump which you posted. In Windows it's Alt-print screen for a window, Shift-print screen for the whole screen.
Thank for Link ... I will go and explore ... I use Photomatix HDR, Perfectly Clear and DxO a lot..
Phil ... I used shift command 4 to drag around a small portion of my VM window and created a screen shot on the Mac desktop of just the area intended, I included the extra area to prove it was windows deliberately to show it was Explorer, it wasn't even close to a full screen otherwise you'd have seen my VM plus my Apple LCD 27" screen behind that.
@freediverx - your experience here is similar to what Apple did (and may still do) on iTunes - they have a release date against every album but often they were as much practical use as a plastic teapot. An example of this would be something like Dark Side of The Moon which was released in 1973, but if they had the 20th anniversary edition in the iTunes Store then it would be dated 1993. Technically, this may be correct, but if you are trying to create a smart playlist of 90s music you don't want DSOTM turning up in it!
I spent SO much time batch fixing dates from iTunes Store albums, grabbing the release dates from Wikipedia and it was tedious in the extreme. I think they finally updated some to reflect the original release date. I can see the argument for an updated re-release date, but it's not very helpful for the way most of us (I imagine) actually relate to our music from a particular time period.
It would be great if I considered LR an acceptable alternative to Aperture, but I don't. I can't stand any Adobe apps. While they may have very powerful and advanced capabilities, I detest their user interface and workflows.
Not sure if you read my post all they way through ... I said same as you after my experiment with LR. I am back to Aperture.
Apple's approach to chronological image management is too simple-minded and limited.
I agree, though I do believe it is their goal to design it in such a way it 'couldn't be simpler' yet me as a techie sometimes fail to see how something works intuitively.
What about when someone scans photos from an old album and wants those photos to appear chronologically in the time when they were taken, rather than when they were digitized or imported into an app?
I think that's a silly example; anyone will understand that a scan doesn't have any meta data embedded and the only thing a photo management tool can do is make use of the date the photo was imported.
What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event?
That happens in Aperture? Never seen that behaviour.
I can empathize with that challenge, but I don't think a simple sort control (which is found on virtually every piece of image or file management software on the planet) is too much to ask for. One thing that frustrates me with Apple is how they get so many of the hard things right but then drop the ball with the simplest of features.
Been there, done that.
A) Still didn't work. Even if it had worked, that's way too much trouble e for something that could be more logically addressed with a simple sort button.
Apple's approach to chronological image management is too simple-minded and limited.
What about when someone scans photos from an old album and wants those photos to appear chronologically in the time when they were taken, rather than when they were digitized or imported into an app?
What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event?
To address those scenarios, I long ago made it a habit to store all my events into folders, and named those folders in a consistent way that would make them easy to sort chronologically (e.g., "2014-12-25 Christmas Party). This system is not only easy to implement and use, but it's also platform agnostic, working perfectly no matter what app or operating system you access the files with. Leave it to Apple to break my unbreakable system, lol.
At minimum, they need to provide sort controls and should should sort chronologically based on creation date not last edit or last import date.
It wouldn't hurt to provide a simple date edit feature that edited whatever date iOS uses for sorting.
I have now come to the conclusion I will stop griping about the import creation date in the internal library (after using LR I will never criticize Aperture again lol). In the actual user interface it is very simply to create Albums by anything you want, if the date they are taken is important just create a series of smart folders.
"What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event"
We are talking about Aperture here I assume : In which case, they don'! They stay where they are next to the RAW master after any non destructive editing, I use auto stacking to keep them tidy.
I have now come to the conclusion I will stop griping about the import creation date in the internal library (after using LR I will never criticize Aperture again lol). In the actual user interface it is very simply to create Albums by anything you want, if the date they are taken is important just create a series of smart folders.
"What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event"
We are talking about Aperture here I assume : In which case, they don'! They stay where they are next to the RAW master after any non destructive editing, I use auto stacking to keep them tidy.
Sorry, I've been skipping around a couple of similar message threads so perhaps I wasn't clear in my comments. I'm not complaining about Aperture. Aperture is almost perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I'm referring to iOS 8's handling of images, albums, and events synced from Aperture. In iOS, the sort order for those albums and events is a) fixed and not user selectable, b) not clearly defined, and c) not based on either of the two data points I care about: image creation date or album/event file name.
As a result, on my iPhone and iPad all of my synced events and albums appear in seemingly random and inconsistent order, intermingled with Apple-created smart folders for things like videos and third party apps. This makes it extremely difficult and frustrating to browse ones photo collection on an iOS device.
Comments
While Apple's hardware remains consistently superior, their software appears to have suffered badly in the last couple of years, with image management standing out as a failure. All of their solutions seem increasingly focused solely on the beginner: someone who buys their first iPhone and starts talking pictures. For anyone who has an existing collection of photos and videos who wants to access and manage these through iOS devices, you're shit out of luck.
Based on my testing, Apple appears to be sorting images, events and albums based on the date when they were created on the phone or the date when they were imported - while completely ignoring the true creation dates or file/folder names for imported files. Any imported photos are, for sorting purposes, treated as new. So that album you imported from five years ago named "2010-08-01 Kids' Birthday" will be sorted right next to your 2015 photos with no way around it.
I'm a long time Apple supporter but frankly I'm not getting my hopes up for anything great. Everything I've seen from Apple since iOS8 and Yosemite has frankly been a mess. None of the tent pole features have worked as promised. I've yet to see any intelligent management of images and videos on my iPhone 6, with frequent warnings about running out of storage space but no clear, practical path to resolution. Buying phones with more storage or adding more cloud storage is not a solution since the space will eventually be gobbled up anyway, not to mention Apple's stinginess in terms of device and cloud storage options and pricing.
Given Apple's focus on photography as a central feature in their product line, if they still haven't figured out something as basic as image sorting or storage space management, I have very little faith in the upcoming version 1.0 Photos app.
I agree. Apple's hardware is still the best out there, but I do not utilize **any** software from Apple. It's amazing how a company that can do so many things right, continues to do many things so wrong.
You can be assured that Apple will slap the "beta" tag on the new photos app and it will unusable like most of the other software they have recently produced.
their software appears to have suffered badly in the last couple of years,
Um, no.
Based on my testing, Apple appears to be sorting images, events and albums based on the date when they were created on the phone or the date when they were imported - while completely ignoring the true creation dates or file/folder names for imported files. Any imported photos are, for sorting purposes, treated as new. So that album you imported from five years ago named "2010-08-01 Kids' Birthday" will be sorted right next to your 2015 photos with no way around it.
The hell are you talking about? Its called META DATA. Import a photo that actually has it, and it will appear in the timeline correctly. This is how the Photos tab in the Photos app on iOS works, and will continue to work in Photos for Mac.
The All Photos/Camera Roll album on iOS, conversely, purposely sorts them by Date Added instead.
Um, no.
Ummm, yes.
iCloud Photo Library (actually, pretty much anything having to do with iCloud)
iOS7 & iOS8 rollouts
iCloud Drive
iWork on the web "Beta"
Maps on iOS
Dumping a U2 album onto everyone's iTunes account
The countless blunders attributed to Apple's software in the past two years is more than enough to cringe over. Shall we continue?
Um, yes.
It depends what you're doing. I love the fact that I can open and edit exactly the same Pages document on both my Mac and my iPad - a huge step forward in terms of ease of use and consistency. But when I wanted to perform a mail merge late last year I had to load up the old Pages to do it. Also, I've begun editing our local village magazine and really would have loved to have linked text boxes - but they've been removed too in the latest Pages.
It said in the original Macintosh programming manuals that "A little consistency is worth a lot of correctness". Most of the time I'm happy with iWork, but every now and then Apple's recent feature removals bite me.
I've used Aperture exclusively since 1.5, but I'm expecting some very annoying feature removal in Photos for OS X, though in the main I will probably love it, until I really need something that used to be there in Aperture and I'll fire that up hoping that it's file (library) compatible and works with the latest version of OS X.
Back up for me in Florida in OS X with what I think is a new feature, a select option akin to the iOS select, might have been here before I can't remember for sure. Here is a screen shot.
Tip: Cmd-Shift-4, then hit the spacebar, after which you can choose a window screen dump with your mouse, as opposed to a full screen screen dump which you posted. In Windows it's Alt-print screen for a window, Shift-print screen for the whole screen.
lol.
Funny bunch, these Apple devs.
Same here. And same expectation: I think some handy tools won't make it over to Photos, like the ability to import a .gpx track to layout your photos on a map. Hopefully this will be addressed by companies like Mapeture.
http://aperture.pluginsworld.com/index.php?directory=apple&software=aperture&category=0
Back up for me as well. Swell.
Um, no.
The hell are you talking about? Its called META DATA. Import a photo that actually has it, and it will appear in the timeline correctly. This is how the Photos tab in the Photos app on iOS works, and will continue to work in Photos for Mac.
The All Photos/Camera Roll album on iOS, conversely, purposely sorts them by Date Added instead.
Wrong. I've used Aperture to explore and edit every conceivable data point within the meta data and none of them result in the album sorting in iOS according to the desired (creation) date.
I'm looking at my Albums folder now, and I see albums dated 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2013, Intermixed with these are random app-specific folders like Retrica, VSCO Cam, Photo Sphere, and GoPro Album - and they aren't consistently sorted neither alphabetically or chronologically.
Digging into my Events subfolder, again all my sync'd event folders equally out of order: 2011, 2009, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2009, etc. And again, I've gone over every folder and image and made sure its file and meta data dates match the dates when created.
Apple support has no information or guidance. Apple user forums have plenty of other complaints such as mine, also unresolved. This could be fixed with something as simple as a sort button, allowing users to sort by date or filename.
Based on what happened with the iWork suite I wouldn't get my hopes up that this new app will be anything more than an improved iPhoto app. My guess is it will be more geared towards the masses and not the pros.
I don't knock Apple for how they evolved iWork or Final Cut. In both cases the apps were rebuilt on a better foundation and they've steadily enhanced the new apps to catch up with their predecessor's feature sets. The could have done a much better job with the communication and transition, but I think it was the right move overall.
As I had mentioned last week, I took the plunge and went LightRoom.
It would be great if I considered LR an acceptable alternative to Aperture, but I don't. I can't stand any Adobe apps. While they may have very powerful and advanced capabilities, I detest their user interface and workflows.
While not addressing your specific comments I am starting to wonder if trying to please consumer / prosumers and professionals in one set up is mission impossible.
I can empathize with that challenge, but I don't think a simple sort control (which is found on virtually every piece of image or file management software on the planet) is too much to ask for. One thing that frustrates me with Apple is how they get so many of the hard things right but then drop the ball with the simplest of features.
You need a program that takes file/folder dates and names and puts them in to the photo EXIF metadata.
Been there, done that.
A) Still didn't work.
Apple's approach to chronological image management is too simple-minded and limited.
What about when someone scans photos from an old album and wants those photos to appear chronologically in the time when they were taken, rather than when they were digitized or imported into an app?
What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event?
To address those scenarios, I long ago made it a habit to store all my events into folders, and named those folders in a consistent way that would make them easy to sort chronologically (e.g., "2014-12-25 Christmas Party). This system is not only easy to implement and use, but it's also platform agnostic, working perfectly no matter what app or operating system you access the files with. Leave it to Apple to break my unbreakable system, lol.
At minimum, they need to provide sort controls and should should sort chronologically based on creation date not last edit or last import date.
It wouldn't hurt to provide a simple date edit feature that edited whatever date iOS uses for sorting.
Thank for Link ... I will go and explore ... I use Photomatix HDR, Perfectly Clear and DxO a lot..
Phil ... I used shift command 4 to drag around a small portion of my VM window and created a screen shot on the Mac desktop of just the area intended, I included the extra area to prove it was windows deliberately to show it was Explorer, it wasn't even close to a full screen otherwise you'd have seen my VM plus my Apple LCD 27" screen behind that.
Now this is a full screen dump!
I spent SO much time batch fixing dates from iTunes Store albums, grabbing the release dates from Wikipedia and it was tedious in the extreme. I think they finally updated some to reflect the original release date. I can see the argument for an updated re-release date, but it's not very helpful for the way most of us (I imagine) actually relate to our music from a particular time period.
Not sure if you read my post all they way through ... I said same as you after my experiment with LR. I am back to Aperture.
I agree, though I do believe it is their goal to design it in such a way it 'couldn't be simpler' yet me as a techie sometimes fail to see how something works intuitively.
I think that's a silly example; anyone will understand that a scan doesn't have any meta data embedded and the only thing a photo management tool can do is make use of the date the photo was imported.
That happens in Aperture? Never seen that behaviour.
Your Dock is so long I presume it reads "to be continued" at either end.
But yes, thanks for clarifying!
I have now come to the conclusion I will stop griping about the import creation date in the internal library (after using LR I will never criticize Aperture again lol). In the actual user interface it is very simply to create Albums by anything you want, if the date they are taken is important just create a series of smart folders.
"What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event"
We are talking about Aperture here I assume : In which case, they don'! They stay where they are next to the RAW master after any non destructive editing, I use auto stacking to keep them tidy.
I have now come to the conclusion I will stop griping about the import creation date in the internal library (after using LR I will never criticize Aperture again lol). In the actual user interface it is very simply to create Albums by anything you want, if the date they are taken is important just create a series of smart folders.
"What about when you go into an older album and make a few touch-ups and edits to your favorite photos? Why should those photos now appear as recent and completely disconnected from the others taken at the same event"
We are talking about Aperture here I assume : In which case, they don'! They stay where they are next to the RAW master after any non destructive editing, I use auto stacking to keep them tidy.
Sorry, I've been skipping around a couple of similar message threads so perhaps I wasn't clear in my comments. I'm not complaining about Aperture. Aperture is almost perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I'm referring to iOS 8's handling of images, albums, and events synced from Aperture. In iOS, the sort order for those albums and events is a) fixed and not user selectable, b) not clearly defined, and c) not based on either of the two data points I care about: image creation date or album/event file name.
As a result, on my iPhone and iPad all of my synced events and albums appear in seemingly random and inconsistent order, intermingled with Apple-created smart folders for things like videos and third party apps. This makes it extremely difficult and frustrating to browse ones photo collection on an iOS device.