I don't get the reasoning behind keeping iPhoto around now that Photos is here. Especially considering if you open iPhoto, you get a warning about trying to add or edit pictures. Why not just make a clean break and replace it outright? Or at least offer to delete itself the first time you open it after the upgrade? If they're going to have both on the system, then maybe Photos should have been a separate download and not automatically included at all.
1. A user might decide that they'd prefer to keep iPhoto on until Photos has some missing feature put in that they depend on.
2. The warning only reminds you that the two libraries are now separate; changes in one won't be reflected in the other.
3. Delete itself? Why, when it's so easy to simply delete the application yourself, when you want to.
Admittedly I haven't played with it for very long, but I dislike:
0. When I first launched it, it didn't offer to allow me to import my iPhoto library, which is in a non-standard location (actually in my Dropbox folder), so it instead created another library that appears to be connected to iCloud. When I searched on how to import my iPhoto library, it turns out I had to launch Photos while holding down the option key, and this would allow me to select another library - in this case my iPhoto library. That I needed to do it that way, rather than use File->Import, which did not work, is stupid, and tells me that Apple no longer sweats even the most obvious details.
I regret updating for sure. If you want to release a replacement app, it should at least be on a par with the app it replaces, feature wise.
0. Or you can just right-click on your iPhoto library and select Photos as the application to open it with.
Replacing a, what, 10+ year old application with a clean-sheet, newly-written application, complete feature for feature might just not be as simple as it sounds.
I find it laughable that this is being promoted as a replacement for Aperture. Where are the brush adjustments, for one thing? How about plug-ins?
Not yet it isn't, even by Apple. Which is one reason that Aperture got its (tiny) update to run in Yosemite.
There was discussion back when Photos was first revealed that it wouldn't be feature-complete on release, and at the WWDC there was further mention of a planned plug-in architecture for it.
The title is misleading since Photos hasn't replaced anything (even if it's meant to replace iPhoto or is the new iPhoto). iPhoto and Aperture are still on your hard drive if you wish to use those instead.
Photos can't replace Aperture since it's not designed for that (I mean, it can, if you wish, but it's not really a replacement). Aperture is/was a professional program, so only moving to Lightroom or some other equivalent can really replace that (even if it doesn't make Aperture users happy - me being one of them unfortunately). It still works and will continue to work into the foreseeable future, but it wasn't replaced and won't be. It's discontinued.
Photos can replace (and is a replacement or "upgrade" for) iPhoto as that is what it was really meant to be, a consumer level, modern, photo management program with light editing features, the same as iPhoto. It is in this that it performs fantastically well, as it's much faster and efficient than iPhoto ever was. The unfortunate side of this is that, like the rewriting of the iWork apps, by using the iOS version as the base app, a lot of features and interface elements people loved have either moved or been eliminated, and sometimes in weird ways or for no reason (iOS users will feel right at home though). Logically, like the other apps, it will improve over time as it develops... unless Apple decides to dump it and write a new one, of course.
Also, removing the i from the name makes sense, since it seems Apple is moving away from the iDevice naming scheme (Apple TV, Apple Watch, ... –generic? Yes, but it's also making a statement about the products.). So one can think of this as the new iPhoto, but it doesn't replace the old one automatically, no. You have to choose to do so, like with the older versions of iWork or iMovie, except without the i. Some people will love it, some will hate it. I personally think it's going in the right direction (except for the killing of Aperture, which is a shame and I hope isn't a trend as I don't see sending us into Adobe's arms as the right direction for Apple's professional app users).
A sad day for pro photo users. Abandoning the much loved Aperture in favor of dumbed down for plebes Photos will move many to head Adobe's way. A very odd message to the original core mac supporters who work in graphics, photography and video. Those who buy high end mac pro's and big screens were the reason Aperture and Final Cut were developed. For me Adobe is massively powerful yet horrifically poorly designed and unintuitive. Learning curve step, GUI extremely poor and logic in use over time...well...where was that command located again? For a company with billions in the bank and who haven't at all poured any kind of money into updating and refining Aperture or Final Cut near as much as their competitors, this introduction of a dumbed down mixed up iPhototure is a deal breaker. Great for anyone who snaps, extremely poor for anyone who has any sort of interest. Boo Hiss Apple! Another blow to the photo and graphics community.
Photos is like Java for C++ programmers (iPhoto users); unfortunately it's also like Java for Objective-C or Swift programmers (Aperture users).
Apple is currently going the way of the peacock: following an initially good trend of nice feathers (simplification) ad absurdum where it becomes an evolutionary liability by being too long to escape predators (giving its user base no path for growth.
Adobe apps are no replacement for Aperture for several reasons: - they have a horrible workflow - they are inefficient, bloated cross-platform software - they have no integration with system services, iCloud, etc. - they are buggy and overpriced subscription products
Jobs knew what he was doing: key creative markets, each a pro and a consumer products. The pros using the pro products gave the platform street cred, giving the consumers confidence in their platform choice, and the pro products gave consumers a growth path as they outgrew the consumer products.
This worked particularly nicely with GarageBand and Logic, which share a common engine but have different UI.
It started to work really nicely with iPhoto and Aperture once they had a arrived at a common library format.
(Not sure how things are at the moment with FinalCut and iMovie haven't used either recently since I do mainly photography these days...)
Nixing Aperture is essentially a disaster: DxO Pro, Lightroom/Photoshop, Gimp, GraphicsConverter, etc. etc. all have some good aspects but none have the wonderful non-linear workflow of Aperture. Even if I were to use Photos for my Library and other Apps for editing: disk space required would easily double, triple or quadruple, and I'd have much less insight into my adjustments and much less repeatability, or editability.
Aperture, if you didn't want a paint app like Photoshop, was nearly perfect: It needed a few plugins for perspective and lens correction, a plugin to make HDR stacks and depth-of-field stacks and to stitch panoramic images. If Apple doesn't have the know-how in-house they could have done a couple of acquihires and a bit of code optimization and they would have had the killer app for pro photographers.
Instead they slept on a product with massive potential simply because all their marketing department can think about is iPhone photos, which essentially suck for anything but snapshots (a few nice artistic shots made with an iPhone don't change the fact that the resolution is too low, low-light performance sucks, there's no effective depth-of-field control, no variable focal length, etc.)
It's like Apple is selling out everything that doesn't directly relate to the iPhone.
What's next? The iPhone getting dumbed down to the Apple Watch level?
I was managing my photos in iPhoto and editing only few in LightRoom. After a long search on internet I'm not able to find answer to manage them in Photos and edit them in LightRoom.
Can someone help me with that ? Or is this impossible to do ?
I was managing my photos in iPhoto and editing only few in LightRoom. After a long search on internet I'm not able to find answer to manage them in Photos and edit them in LightRoom.
Can someone help me with that ? Or is this impossible to do ?
TIL the few people actually using Aperture sure like to post online.
In all seriousness, Photos is a fantastic application and basically THE photo organization app I've been dreaming about since the first day of iPhoto. I don't care that it has basic editing function. Thats not what its for. I'm sorry to those of you bummed about the discontinuation of Aperture, but that it is a standalone event not related to the release of Photos. Apple could have maintained Aperture at the same time if they wanted to. They don't.
So, Photos is great, and I'm glad every iPhoto user now gets to experience the sheer joy of a modern Photos experience when they migrate over.
I agree with you that Photos is a fine replacement for iPhoto. There are some things missing, but hopefully they will make their way back in. Places/geotagging perhaps being the biggest head-scratcher. Come on Apple, you should be better than that.
However, calling the discontinuation of Aperture "a standalone event not related to the release of Photos"? Huh? Where have you been? The announcements of Photos and discontinuation of Aperture have been lock-step, hand-in-hand communications directly from Apple from day one. It may be true that Apple never explicitly said Photos was a "replacement" for Aperture. But many of of the communications from Apple about the upcoming Photos app was accompanied by statements that iPhoto and Aperture would be discontinued. And EVERY statement by Apple about the discontinuation of Aperture has been directly associated with the upcoming release of Photos. Even the Mac App Store page for Aperture had a warning at the top of the page stating that once Photos was released Aperture would no longer be available on the App Store?
So "unrelated to the release of Photos"? Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Anybody coming from Aperture should seriously consider holding off on photos. I thought I'd give it a try. What could possibly go wrong? All my Projects have basically disappeared. Hundreds of photos and many folders found themselves in the system trash for no obvious reason. So it is not like missing features are the only thing that should keep you away from photos.
Anybody coming from Aperture should seriously consider holding off on photos. I thought I'd give it a try. What could possibly go wrong? All my Projects have basically disappeared. Hundreds of photos and many folders found themselves in the system trash for no obvious reason. So it is not like missing features are the only thing that should keep you away from photos.
Except that your original Aperture Library should still be there. There's a new photo library that is a migration of your existing library. Allows you to try photos without worry.
TIL the few people actually using Aperture sure like to post online.
In all seriousness, Photos is a fantastic application and basically THE photo organization app I've been dreaming about since the first day of iPhoto. I don't care that it has basic editing function. Thats not what its for. I'm sorry to those of you bummed about the discontinuation of Aperture, but that it is a standalone event not related to the release of Photos. Apple could have maintained Aperture at the same time if they wanted to. They don't.
So, Photos is great, and I'm glad every iPhoto user now gets to experience the sheer joy of a modern Photos experience when they migrate over.
Well opinions differ. I've just tried to use Photos as my photo organization app and after 3 hours my conclusion was clear. It is a nice program for faces, basic editing , ... but as a photo organization app Photos on OSX is very disappointing, its importing and exporting functions suck beyond repair. I definitely prefer the great pleasures of the free digiKam.
This is more a photo manager app than an edition tool. Drag and drop to other apps no longer works (snapheal, HDR darkroom, Tonality, ...) I didn't find any away to change the edit app instead of using the photo edit (i used to edit with pixelmator from iphoto). I will have to export my photos to disk, edit them and only put them back when I am completely done.
Its looks like an app for children's... Fotor (a free app) puts photo to shame. Photo is a front to manage youre icloud photos, that is pretty much it.
I hope they fix icloud drive soon so we can setup if we sync folders or not. I have 50gigs on folders and its syncing on my ipad and iphones even if there is no way to access those on ios devices. We need a way to customize the syncing of folders on both mac OS and iOS. I cant even enable icloud on my macbook because I dont have enough free space to sync folders, so I have to disable the entire service. I went back to google drive, the current icloud drive is just unusable.
Basicly, its a major fail for photo, icloud and icloud drive.
Sorry but Photos is not an Aperture replacement. Not by a long shot even though Aperture was long in the tooth. Photos is for the consumer who does not know much or expect much from editing photos. This is for the Instagram, take a photo of my food crowd. Not someone who needs a powerful editing tool. This is baby steps.
I agree, I was using Aperture to import photos from my Olympus DSLR. I have many projects for clients that I was using Aperture to organize and retouch. I also liked that I could send photos to Pixelmator (or Photoshop) right from Aperture, and I could choose which photos to add to the iCloud photo library. The new Photos App, on top of the retouching being much less powerful, at this point doesn't export to an external app, I can't see a way to limit which photos are pushed to the cloud, I had to turn that off (I have a huge Aperture library and my iCloud Photo Library was full in seconds) and only have the iCloud photo sharing on with select photos.
Photos will work for my personal photos I take on my iDevices, but not usable for photography I do for clients, and I understand it isn't meant to be used that way, but I needed to find an Aperture replacement, I can't have hours of work invested in a program that is end of life, and I doubt my begging for Apple to continue developing it on their suggestion site will do any good at all, so I reluctantly need to move on. I really loved Aperture, so this has been hard.
I can't stand Adobe programs (I have to use InDesign, sometimes Photoshop, but not adding any other of their bloatware to my workflow), so I am not going to Lightroom. So instead I downloaded the software that Olympus gives me for free with my camera to organize and retouch photos. It isn't as nice as Aperture, the interface is clunky, but it works, it exports to Pixelmator and updates the photos that I work on in Pixelmator, it allows easy geotagging, recognizes faces, of course works well with my camera! I can organize by library or just use the folders in the Finder, it has a lightbox for easy culling of photos, uses RAW format, it has fairly good retouching tools, no paint in adjustments like Aperture but I can do that work in Pixelmator (or even Aperture) and add to the iCloud photo library from Pixelmator. The Olympus App plays very nicely with Pixelmator and iMovie, so now I have a workflow very similar to what I am used to. It will take a while but I will transfer my projects from Aperture to the Olympus App, I am sure that Olympus will keep developing it, it was updated recently. I just really need something stable to organize my hundreds of photos and this will do it.
Apple is growing and it seems they are picking their battles, they can't be everything to everyone. And there are plenty of third party App developers to fill in the gaps. I am truly sad at the loss (eventually) of Aperture, but it is what it is, and for my personal photos/videos the new Photo App is just fine and in a way it will be better for my to separate the personal and professional images and videos instead of having everything all stuffed in one place.
I hope they fix icloud drive soon so we can setup if we sync folders or not. I have 50gigs on folders and its syncing on my ipad and iphones even if there is no way to access those on ios devices. We need a way to customize the syncing of folders on both mac OS and iOS. I cant even enable icloud on my macbook because I dont have enough free space to sync folders, so I have to disable the entire service. I went back to google drive, the current icloud drive is just unusable.
Yes, that was the killer for me, and I was having a hard time permanently deleting photos, so I just trashed the first library (it was an import from Aperture that is huge!) and started fresh with a new blank one. I will just use it to sync the iPad and iPhone photos and nothing else (see long winded post above!)
But I do agree that was the very worst part of the new app!!
The fundamental flaws with iCloud, besides security and file safety, is access and speed. That varies and it is sweeping the problem under the carpet to assume it is always available and alwayscapable of handling the large number of large files, and growing.
There is also the added complexity when trying to work out where your files are and what to do when things go wrong, as they do.
I opened Photos and being cautious after the initial problems with the dumbing down of iMovie (events, sorting, basic stuff missing! - although it was eventually added back in), I wanted to find out more, so went to the "further information" link that takes you to the Apple support pages, only to find it still references the old Photo Stream-only set up, so even the "help" isn't much - not a good arbiter for moving to Photos.
So I took the plunge and the first thing it does is tell you you don't have enough iCloud space, so offers options to subscribe to a monthly expense to use it. I have family photos back to 2000 when I got my first digital camera - it's not only going to cost me a lot more per year to use Photos (think I'd have to go to the 500GB option), I dare not think how long it's gonna take to upload 370GB of photos ...
So, it's a no from me I'm afraid. Sorry, Photos, I'll go try the Amazon free photo storage offer for Prime users instead, and stick with iPhoto for now.
Comments
I don't get the reasoning behind keeping iPhoto around now that Photos is here. Especially considering if you open iPhoto, you get a warning about trying to add or edit pictures. Why not just make a clean break and replace it outright? Or at least offer to delete itself the first time you open it after the upgrade? If they're going to have both on the system, then maybe Photos should have been a separate download and not automatically included at all.
1. A user might decide that they'd prefer to keep iPhoto on until Photos has some missing feature put in that they depend on.
2. The warning only reminds you that the two libraries are now separate; changes in one won't be reflected in the other.
3. Delete itself? Why, when it's so easy to simply delete the application yourself, when you want to.
Admittedly I haven't played with it for very long, but I dislike:
0. When I first launched it, it didn't offer to allow me to import my iPhoto library, which is in a non-standard location (actually in my Dropbox folder), so it instead created another library that appears to be connected to iCloud. When I searched on how to import my iPhoto library, it turns out I had to launch Photos while holding down the option key, and this would allow me to select another library - in this case my iPhoto library. That I needed to do it that way, rather than use File->Import, which did not work, is stupid, and tells me that Apple no longer sweats even the most obvious details.
I regret updating for sure. If you want to release a replacement app, it should at least be on a par with the app it replaces, feature wise.
0. Or you can just right-click on your iPhoto library and select Photos as the application to open it with.
Replacing a, what, 10+ year old application with a clean-sheet, newly-written application, complete feature for feature might just not be as simple as it sounds.
I find it laughable that this is being promoted as a replacement for Aperture. Where are the brush adjustments, for one thing? How about plug-ins?
Not yet it isn't, even by Apple. Which is one reason that Aperture got its (tiny) update to run in Yosemite.
There was discussion back when Photos was first revealed that it wouldn't be feature-complete on release, and at the WWDC there was further mention of a planned plug-in architecture for it.
Check back in the future.
The title is misleading since Photos hasn't replaced anything (even if it's meant to replace iPhoto or is the new iPhoto). iPhoto and Aperture are still on your hard drive if you wish to use those instead.
Photos can't replace Aperture since it's not designed for that (I mean, it can, if you wish, but it's not really a replacement). Aperture is/was a professional program, so only moving to Lightroom or some other equivalent can really replace that (even if it doesn't make Aperture users happy - me being one of them unfortunately). It still works and will continue to work into the foreseeable future, but it wasn't replaced and won't be. It's discontinued.
Photos can replace (and is a replacement or "upgrade" for) iPhoto as that is what it was really meant to be, a consumer level, modern, photo management program with light editing features, the same as iPhoto. It is in this that it performs fantastically well, as it's much faster and efficient than iPhoto ever was. The unfortunate side of this is that, like the rewriting of the iWork apps, by using the iOS version as the base app, a lot of features and interface elements people loved have either moved or been eliminated, and sometimes in weird ways or for no reason (iOS users will feel right at home though). Logically, like the other apps, it will improve over time as it develops... unless Apple decides to dump it and write a new one, of course.
Also, removing the i from the name makes sense, since it seems Apple is moving away from the iDevice naming scheme (Apple TV, Apple Watch, ... –generic? Yes, but it's also making a statement about the products.). So one can think of this as the new iPhoto, but it doesn't replace the old one automatically, no. You have to choose to do so, like with the older versions of iWork or iMovie, except without the i. Some people will love it, some will hate it. I personally think it's going in the right direction (except for the killing of Aperture, which is a shame and I hope isn't a trend as I don't see sending us into Adobe's arms as the right direction for Apple's professional app users).
Just pondering...
Apple is currently going the way of the peacock: following an initially good trend of nice feathers (simplification) ad absurdum where it becomes an evolutionary liability by being too long to escape predators (giving its user base no path for growth.
Adobe apps are no replacement for Aperture for several reasons:
- they have a horrible workflow
- they are inefficient, bloated cross-platform software
- they have no integration with system services, iCloud, etc.
- they are buggy and overpriced subscription products
Jobs knew what he was doing: key creative markets, each a pro and a consumer products.
The pros using the pro products gave the platform street cred, giving the consumers confidence in their platform choice, and the pro products gave consumers a growth path as they outgrew the consumer products.
This worked particularly nicely with GarageBand and Logic, which share a common engine but have different UI.
It started to work really nicely with iPhoto and Aperture once they had a arrived at a common library format.
(Not sure how things are at the moment with FinalCut and iMovie haven't used either recently since I do mainly photography these days...)
Nixing Aperture is essentially a disaster:
DxO Pro, Lightroom/Photoshop, Gimp, GraphicsConverter, etc. etc. all have some good aspects but none have the wonderful non-linear workflow of Aperture.
Even if I were to use Photos for my Library and other Apps for editing: disk space required would easily double, triple or quadruple, and I'd have much less insight into my adjustments and much less repeatability, or editability.
Aperture, if you didn't want a paint app like
Photoshop, was nearly perfect:
It needed a few plugins for perspective and lens correction, a plugin to make
HDR stacks and depth-of-field stacks and to stitch panoramic images.
If Apple doesn't have the know-how in-house they could have done a couple of acquihires and a bit of code optimization and they would have had the killer app for pro photographers.
Instead they slept on a product with massive potential simply because all their marketing department can think about is iPhone photos, which essentially suck for anything but snapshots (a few nice artistic shots made with an iPhone don't change the fact that the resolution is too low, low-light performance sucks, there's no effective depth-of-field control, no variable focal length, etc.)
It's like Apple is selling out everything that doesn't directly relate to the iPhone.
What's next? The iPhone getting dumbed down to the Apple Watch level?
I was managing my photos in iPhoto and editing only few in LightRoom. After a long search on internet I'm not able to find answer to manage them in Photos and edit them in LightRoom.
Can someone help me with that ? Or is this impossible to do ?
thanks !
I was managing my photos in iPhoto and editing only few in LightRoom. After a long search on internet I'm not able to find answer to manage them in Photos and edit them in LightRoom.
Can someone help me with that ? Or is this impossible to do ?
thanks !
TIL the few people actually using Aperture sure like to post online.
In all seriousness, Photos is a fantastic application and basically THE photo organization app I've been dreaming about since the first day of iPhoto. I don't care that it has basic editing function. Thats not what its for. I'm sorry to those of you bummed about the discontinuation of Aperture, but that it is a standalone event not related to the release of Photos. Apple could have maintained Aperture at the same time if they wanted to. They don't.
So, Photos is great, and I'm glad every iPhoto user now gets to experience the sheer joy of a modern Photos experience when they migrate over.
I agree with you that Photos is a fine replacement for iPhoto. There are some things missing, but hopefully they will make their way back in. Places/geotagging perhaps being the biggest head-scratcher. Come on Apple, you should be better than that.
However, calling the discontinuation of Aperture "a standalone event not related to the release of Photos"? Huh? Where have you been? The announcements of Photos and discontinuation of Aperture have been lock-step, hand-in-hand communications directly from Apple from day one. It may be true that Apple never explicitly said Photos was a "replacement" for Aperture. But many of of the communications from Apple about the upcoming Photos app was accompanied by statements that iPhoto and Aperture would be discontinued. And EVERY statement by Apple about the discontinuation of Aperture has been directly associated with the upcoming release of Photos. Even the Mac App Store page for Aperture had a warning at the top of the page stating that once Photos was released Aperture would no longer be available on the App Store?
So "unrelated to the release of Photos"? Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Anybody coming from Aperture should seriously consider holding off on photos. I thought I'd give it a try. What could possibly go wrong? All my Projects have basically disappeared. Hundreds of photos and many folders found themselves in the system trash for no obvious reason. So it is not like missing features are the only thing that should keep you away from photos.
Except that your original Aperture Library should still be there. There's a new photo library that is a migration of your existing library. Allows you to try photos without worry.
TIL the few people actually using Aperture sure like to post online.
In all seriousness, Photos is a fantastic application and basically THE photo organization app I've been dreaming about since the first day of iPhoto. I don't care that it has basic editing function. Thats not what its for. I'm sorry to those of you bummed about the discontinuation of Aperture, but that it is a standalone event not related to the release of Photos. Apple could have maintained Aperture at the same time if they wanted to. They don't.
So, Photos is great, and I'm glad every iPhoto user now gets to experience the sheer joy of a modern Photos experience when they migrate over.
Well opinions differ. I've just tried to use Photos as my photo organization app and after 3 hours my conclusion was clear. It is a nice program for faces, basic editing , ... but as a photo organization app Photos on OSX is very disappointing, its importing and exporting functions suck beyond repair. I definitely prefer the great pleasures of the free digiKam.
Well that was interesting.
As usual Spotlight couldn't find it.
A quick tour is all it takes to show that a quick tour is all it takes.
Perfect for Apple's new customers: Don't do much because they can't do much and don't even know there is anything else.
This is more a photo manager app than an edition tool. Drag and drop to other apps no longer works (snapheal, HDR darkroom, Tonality, ...) I didn't find any away to change the edit app instead of using the photo edit (i used to edit with pixelmator from iphoto). I will have to export my photos to disk, edit them and only put them back when I am completely done.
Its looks like an app for children's... Fotor (a free app) puts photo to shame. Photo is a front to manage youre icloud photos, that is pretty much it.
I hope they fix icloud drive soon so we can setup if we sync folders or not. I have 50gigs on folders and its syncing on my ipad and iphones even if there is no way to access those on ios devices. We need a way to customize the syncing of folders on both mac OS and iOS. I cant even enable icloud on my macbook because I dont have enough free space to sync folders, so I have to disable the entire service. I went back to google drive, the current icloud drive is just unusable.
Basicly, its a major fail for photo, icloud and icloud drive.
Sorry but Photos is not an Aperture replacement. Not by a long shot even though Aperture was long in the tooth. Photos is for the consumer who does not know much or expect much from editing photos. This is for the Instagram, take a photo of my food crowd. Not someone who needs a powerful editing tool. This is baby steps.
I agree, I was using Aperture to import photos from my Olympus DSLR. I have many projects for clients that I was using Aperture to organize and retouch. I also liked that I could send photos to Pixelmator (or Photoshop) right from Aperture, and I could choose which photos to add to the iCloud photo library. The new Photos App, on top of the retouching being much less powerful, at this point doesn't export to an external app, I can't see a way to limit which photos are pushed to the cloud, I had to turn that off (I have a huge Aperture library and my iCloud Photo Library was full in seconds) and only have the iCloud photo sharing on with select photos.
Photos will work for my personal photos I take on my iDevices, but not usable for photography I do for clients, and I understand it isn't meant to be used that way, but I needed to find an Aperture replacement, I can't have hours of work invested in a program that is end of life, and I doubt my begging for Apple to continue developing it on their suggestion site will do any good at all, so I reluctantly need to move on. I really loved Aperture, so this has been hard.
I can't stand Adobe programs (I have to use InDesign, sometimes Photoshop, but not adding any other of their bloatware to my workflow), so I am not going to Lightroom. So instead I downloaded the software that Olympus gives me for free with my camera to organize and retouch photos. It isn't as nice as Aperture, the interface is clunky, but it works, it exports to Pixelmator and updates the photos that I work on in Pixelmator, it allows easy geotagging, recognizes faces, of course works well with my camera! I can organize by library or just use the folders in the Finder, it has a lightbox for easy culling of photos, uses RAW format, it has fairly good retouching tools, no paint in adjustments like Aperture but I can do that work in Pixelmator (or even Aperture) and add to the iCloud photo library from Pixelmator. The Olympus App plays very nicely with Pixelmator and iMovie, so now I have a workflow very similar to what I am used to. It will take a while but I will transfer my projects from Aperture to the Olympus App, I am sure that Olympus will keep developing it, it was updated recently. I just really need something stable to organize my hundreds of photos and this will do it.
Apple is growing and it seems they are picking their battles, they can't be everything to everyone. And there are plenty of third party App developers to fill in the gaps. I am truly sad at the loss (eventually) of Aperture, but it is what it is, and for my personal photos/videos the new Photo App is just fine and in a way it will be better for my to separate the personal and professional images and videos instead of having everything all stuffed in one place.
I hope they fix icloud drive soon so we can setup if we sync folders or not. I have 50gigs on folders and its syncing on my ipad and iphones even if there is no way to access those on ios devices. We need a way to customize the syncing of folders on both mac OS and iOS. I cant even enable icloud on my macbook because I dont have enough free space to sync folders, so I have to disable the entire service. I went back to google drive, the current icloud drive is just unusable.
Yes, that was the killer for me, and I was having a hard time permanently deleting photos, so I just trashed the first library (it was an import from Aperture that is huge!) and started fresh with a new blank one. I will just use it to sync the iPad and iPhone photos and nothing else (see long winded post above!)
But I do agree that was the very worst part of the new app!!
The fundamental flaws with iCloud, besides security and file safety, is access and speed. That varies and it is sweeping the problem under the carpet to assume it is always available and always capable of handling the large number of large files, and growing.
There is also the added complexity when trying to work out where your files are and what to do when things go wrong, as they do.
I opened Photos and being cautious after the initial problems with the dumbing down of iMovie (events, sorting, basic stuff missing! - although it was eventually added back in), I wanted to find out more, so went to the "further information" link that takes you to the Apple support pages, only to find it still references the old Photo Stream-only set up, so even the "help" isn't much - not a good arbiter for moving to Photos.
So I took the plunge and the first thing it does is tell you you don't have enough iCloud space, so offers options to subscribe to a monthly expense to use it. I have family photos back to 2000 when I got my first digital camera - it's not only going to cost me a lot more per year to use Photos (think I'd have to go to the 500GB option), I dare not think how long it's gonna take to upload 370GB of photos ...
So, it's a no from me I'm afraid. Sorry, Photos, I'll go try the Amazon free photo storage offer for Prime users instead, and stick with iPhoto for now.
Is there a way to merge two Photos libraries? I have two now, one from Aperture and one from iPhoto and I want to put them into the same library.