Apple yesterday released a preview of its upcoming all-new Photos app for Mac, which replaces iPhoto and Aperture with a simpler all-in-one photo editor and library manager. Most of the discussion of Photos focused on the huge number of changes from iPhoto and Aperture, burying one very important detail: Apple is changing the way it handles cloud-based photo storage.
Before Photos, Apple offered free storage of photos with limitations in a feature called Photo Stream, which didn’t count against iCloud storage. But the new Photos app uses Apple’s beta iCloud Photo Library feature, which was recently added in iOS 8.1. iCloud Photo Library promises to let you synchronize your entire photo collection including edits and albums across all of your devices… but you have to share your iCloud storage with photos, and album syncing and edits don’t apply to the free 1,000 – 25,000 image storage of Photo Stream.
As most long-time iOS users know, the free 5GB of iCloud storage Apple offers is often not enough to store much more than a single device backup, and for many that will mean no spare room for a photo collection. Consequently, Apple is suggesting that users should buy additional iCloud storage, paying monthly fees to store and sync their photos. As the Photos app is rolling out, Apple is allowing users to stick with the old Photo Stream feature and continue using the new Photos app without turning on the iCloud Photo Library. But it remains to be seen if that will be an option long-term once Photos is released publicly and how users will respond when they find out their free 5GB iCloud storage isn’t cutting it for their photo collection…
Today, every iOS and Mac user gets a free iCloud account with 5GB of storage. The space currently holds device backups, your files in iCloud Drive, your iCloud Mail, and settings data from iCloud-enabled apps. If you use both iCloud backups and an iCloud mail account, there’s a good chance you have already seen an “iCloud storage limit reached” warning that you need to delete one or the other to make space.
Your iCloud account will get more crowded when you enable the new iCloud Photo Library feature. When you move from just using Photo Stream, your stored photos will now count against your iCloud storage and appear in a new “All Photos” album, but they’ll also be accessible across all devices and iCloud.com. Photos taken with recent iPhones require around 2.5MB of space each, which means that just your last 1,000 photos from Photo Stream, for example, will consume around 2.5GB of your 5GB of iCloud storage.
The number gets higher if you include photos taken with better cameras: each 22MP photo can easily require 6MB as a JPEG or 30MB as a RAW file. Do the math and even your last 1,000 photos (let alone your entire photo collection) won’t fit within that free 5GB of iCloud storage, assuming that it was empty. The new Photos app will prompt you to upgrade if your existing photos collection is too big for your current available storage when upgrading to iCloud Photo library.
That’s why upgrading to the iCloud Photo Library might also mean upgrading to a paid iCloud plan with more storage. This will depend on the user, how large the image files are, and how much iCloud space is available. It will be interesting to see how many users will be forced to upgrade to paid iCloud storage in order to use the feature: Apple is selling 20GB for $12 per year, 200GB for $48 per year, 500GB for $120 per year, and 1TB for $240 per year, though it bills monthly and lists its prices by month rather than by year.
For now, Apple is allowing users to stick with My Photo Stream and continue using the new Photos app. If you don’t upgrade, you’ll still see the “My Photo Stream” album in the new Photos app, and won’t get to take advantage of Apple’s new system of storing photos with improved syncing, the iCloud.com Photos app, and more. Apple also notes that you can disable iCloud Photo Library in order to recover iCloud storage and (again, for now) just use My Photo Stream. After doing so, iCloud will continue storing the photos for 30 days to give you an opportunity to download them.
How long will Apple allow users to continue using the old My Photo Stream feature? Will it eventually require everyone to upgrade to iCloud Photo Library in order to sync photos using iCloud? The answers to these questions are still unclear, and we likely won’t find out until the new Photos app goes public this spring alongside iCloud Photo Library coming out of beta. It seems obvious, however, that something will need to be done to offset the loss of Photo Stream for iCloud users if that happens. Doubling free iCloud storage to 10GB would be a good first step, but with Yahoo offering 1TB of free Flickr space and Amazon offering free unlimited Cloud Photo service to Prime customers, Apple’s cloud photo strategy seems to be a step behind the times, rather than leading the pack.
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As an avid photographer Photos for Mac is a huge step back. And the all-or-nothing approach Apple is taking to force people into cloud storage plans is insulting knowing the cash horde the company is sitting on. Yet again, more great software is being shut down to convert the entire OSX platform to mobile-quality. I’ll stick to my free 1TB Flickr account and am packing my media up for the move to Adobe which has been a long time coming.
Troll FUD garbage. Go away. This is the Photos app every Mac and iOS user needs. iPhoto is dead in the water, and Aperture is nothing but an imitation pro editing App.
If you need pro editing beyond what Photos can do (not that you’d know the difference) there are amazing products out there….that have existed for a long time….and have always been better than anything Apple has offered.
Look in the mirror and then repeat “i am a tool” a few times. Then maybe YOU’LL get what absolutely everyone else in this comment system has known forever. Wow.
You are an idiot.
So many ignorant assumptions in a single post, it’s hard to know where to start debunking. First of all, there’s no forced use of ANY cloud storage if you don’t want to use cloud storage. Want 100 percent locally stored on Mac? Okay. Want Photo Stream but not iCloud Photo Library? That’s fine too. Want the advantages of cloud backup and syncing to free up space on your device? Pretty cheap! It’s up to you.
Next, Photos is clearly — at least at this point — a replacement for iPhotos, not Aperture. And as such, it is largely a big improvement (did I mention I’ve actually used it and you haven’t?). There are a few things I think people will actually want back, such as manual geotagging, and I expect they will be returned in due course (also see: iMovie, Final Cut, iWork for examples of features being returned after a rebuild, and that’s exactly what this is).
Third, again as someone who has actually gotten to use Photos, the Mac version bears only surface resemblance to the iOS version. As with OS X generally, it borrows good ideas from iOS but is not the same thing as the iOS photos — which you’re probably using already right now, and not whining about.
Fourth, I don’t see where Apple owes you a pro-level photo program, but as someone who loves both iPhoto and Aperture, neither one of them can truthfully be called “great” (and neither can Lightroom!). Iphoto is very buggy, in point of fact. Believe me I would love to see Photos gain third-party extension features as with iOS 8, and some Photoshop plug-ins be transferred over, but Apple’s not going to make a program for pros. I get that. So you can jump to Lightroom/Photoshop (which is pretty cheap these days, if you can deal with rental software) or some other organizer. There is no shortage of them, and I don’t see any reason why Apple would want compete (on the editing front) with Photoshop and Pixelmator.
Finally, you will take note of the fact that while I criticize your wrongness about Photos, I offer nothing but encouragement if you want to go to Lightroom and use Flickr instead of iCloud Photo Library. That’s fine, sounds like a good idea (I’m already there, in fact, though I really don’t think much of Lightroom compared to Aperture). But don’t move out of ignorance, or a lack of understanding that Photos will add features and get better from this strong but start-over first glimpse (as does most Apple software). Do it because that’s the right thing for you do with your stuff. You can stick with Aperture or iPhoto for the foreseeable future — if you’re happy there, maybe you should consider waiting a year and see how things shake out instead of jumping to a bunch of wrong-headed, reactionary conclusions. To me, this is more an opportunity to take a fresh look at my photo workflow and see what options are rather than a moment where I feel like I have to pack up and move house. Just sayin’.
I was reading your reply till I found out you’re a dick, then stopped. Single much?
How do I get the “photo count” next to my albums. They seem to have disappeared with the new upgrade. Any ideas? Thanks.
Totally agree.
The general idea was that Photos for Mac is a replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture. In fact, it is a replacement for iPhoto, Aperture had been discontinued.
I have doubts that cloud storage is going to work for everyone. The majority of consumers who are going to use Photos app are not professionals, that don’t really spend much time sorting their photos, deleting duplicates and leaving only good shots. They tend to keep every photo they made. This basically means that they will run out of their free 5GB or even paid space (I doubt that $240 per year for 1TB is going to be a popular option) so quickly that this will not work for them.
You do not have to turn on the iCloud part at all. Or you can turn it on for part. JUST LIKE aperture only better… sigh… I’m actually using the new Photos.app and love Aperture too. The new photos.app is so fast. It doesn’t have flags, or ratings, or a few more power user things as Aperture but it’s fantastic still.
You are absolutely correct John. I am a retired professional photographer and have been an Aperture user since the original beta. To this day it remains one of the finest, most fully featured professional photo editing tools available, especially if you add plug-ins like the NIK collection. I know of many world-class pros who still use it. My Aperture library is over 3TB in size. Try sticking that in iCloud! Photos is an excellent app… for novice and amateur photographers, especially the “selfie crowd.” It is vastly superior to iPhoto. For anyone who really knows photography and wants to do serious editing, it’s useless.
It wouldn’t be so insulting if they allowed Family iCloud plans. Our family of five own multiple iPhones and iPads, and each one of us has to pay $0.99 for 20GB each for a total of 100GB, when a single $3.99 charge could give all of us 200GB?
Maybe a little off topic, but since it’s mentioned in here….
I have the 200GB of data that I use per month and just back everything up to it. Am I able to share that with my wife? (she is setup under my Family sharing thing) She uses more than the 5 freebie GBs, but if I don’t have to pay more (even if its only 99cents)by adding her into my “cloud space,” it’d be preferred.
I wish there was an inbetween… I use a little over 20GB myself currently
No, of course not. If your wife needs more than the measly 5 GB, she (you) should have to pay for it just like every other individual user on the planet.
There is no need to be condescending. Back in the days of MobileMe (or was it .mac) apple had family storage plans. I was really surprised that it’s not part of the new family sharing feature introduced recently. I’d say they will eventually allow family to share storage.
I’ve been researching this also – reports are a little mixed but generally it seems like family sharing does not mean you get to have one pool of storage for all devices.
That is the one thing I think Apple really needs to do, allow Family Sharing to also combine any paid-for storage. 200GB would be plenty for most families, but as it is I’d have to buy a 200 GB plan for myself, and a 20GB plan for my wife…
There are a few things I’ve read saying that turning on family sharing initially showed the other accounts paid for storage, but then it reverted. So I’m hopefully that Apple plans to have family sharing share data as we would all like…
I’ve been proposing this for a while. Apple should be giving customers iCloud space to match the size of the iOS device they purchase and register. And 5GB with every Mac. Yes, giving, as in FREE. Keep around options to upgrade the space.
Otherwise customers are only going to suffer as it’s doubtful that better options will have first-class integration into the OS and Apple’s apps, like Dropbox, Streamnation, etc.
I still don’t get this.
Customers that want to use the features will pay for the storage.
Customers that don’t see the value, won’t.
No one is suffering.
All I hear is butt hurt whining from people who wish cloud storage was FREE FREE FREE.
But it’s actually not free. Even my “free” isn’t. You pay for the phone. You pay $100+ to bump the storage. A few years later you pay again.
Knowing the iCloud storage is tied to your AppleID and not the amount of storage your device came with I have a hard time understanding how you came to the idea of wanting iCloud storage space to match your device storage.
Even better is what’ I’ve been asking Apple to do for years now, give me an additional 10-50GB’s per iOS/Mac device I buy. Space is only getting cheaper, iPhones and Mac’s (more or less) aren’t.
I am an apple user across the board but all my storage is with my email… which is Google for his very reason. I use Google+ to backup all of my pictures and videos on my iPhone and iPad. Apple is loosing business with the current model.
Apple isn’t losing a dime. Their cloud storage offerings are compelling. They forced Dropbox to devalue their own storage by a magnitude of 10.
And most sensible people wouldn’t trust Google storing their lunch.
Streamnation has a better value proposition. Flickr has good photo storage capacity but lacks great app integration.
As a shareholder who wants to see Apple grow (along with my portfolio), I still think Apple need to do more on the cloud front.
Again, I own an iPhone, and iPad, a Mac mini, an Apple TV, an iMac and a Macbook. I have drunk the kool-aid man but that doesnt blind me to the fact that when it comes to ease of use, Google is hard to beat.
I can upload my music to Google Drive then listen to it on my iphone through a variety of apps. (20,000 songs for free).
I can save files directly to a cloud based drive from my email account and then share them without ever having to download a thing.
I can create collaborative documents with version control with little to no effort.
I can login to any browser and have access to all of my documents, pictures. music which can then be edited without downloading.
I can open another browser window and remote back into my home computer without installing a thing (Google Chrome Remote Desktop).
I have tons of plug-ins to choose from which limit ads and protect privacy across the web, expansive 3rd party template libraries, and cloud-based video, audio, and photo editors that follow me to different computers.
Saying “Apple isn’t loosing a dime” or talking about how much they ultimately effected Dropbox is speculative at best, but not quantifiable. Its becoming an ever more crowded space, and people want solutions that work together.
For the average consumer that is not worried about a company spying on them (90% of the population), Google currently offers the most complete and compelling suite of applications.
Google is currently offering what Steve Jobs envisioned Apples “iCloud” to be in 1997. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE3Ta_NK4-I&list=PL502753D9871A7B1E&index=12)
Any time we take the approach that “our environment is the neplus ultra of all platforms” needs only Google any current Steve Balmer interview. Never get comfortable, always be offering the customer more, always be innovating.
…yet. Wait till the younger generation becomes the ones paying the bills and not wanting to keep a drawer of files like most of us 30’s and up people do. In 20 years, when more or less everything will be in the cloud, Apple won’t be nearly as strong if they’re cloud offerings are as weak as they are now.
Drastically reduced iPad consumption is a clear indicator that Apple can’t sustain their hardware growth forever. If their mobile devices eventually peak and slide back down to a more manageable 10-15% market share like their computer line, they will no longer be the financial juggernaut they are now.
Considering each iOS user has at least one or multiple Apple devices which each costs few hundred dollars in my opinion it’s only fair that Apple should give at least 50 GB or something of free cloud storage to each user. The current 5 GB is a joke!
I’m curious…
In what way does it benefit Apple to give away more storage? I am already paying for the amount of iCloud Storage I need, because I choose to do so for access to the features I want to use. I want to use iCloud Drive extensively, and now the long-awaited iCloud Photo Library.
I want to use that. And do so, I have to pay Apple more money. That’s what I’m doing.
So again…why would it benefit Apple to give away more storage? Are we talking about the same Apple? They are not in the habit of creating a viable revenue stream, and then just giving it away instead.
Releasing Photos and completing the puzzle for iCloud photo storage/syncing is a MORE compelling reason for people to buy iCloud Storage. Not a more compelling reason for Apple to give it away.
Cloud Storage should not be Free. Stick with local, and cable syncing, if you think cloud storage should be free.
You are entitled if you feel the value of the offering is worth the money you are paying. I think it’s clear you are in the minority here so far though. When everyone keeps disagreeing with you on the value/price, maybe it’s a good indicator that you’re missing something from some of Apple’s competitors.
The way it benefits Apple is in keeping things simple for a large number of users. Simplicity is Apple’s hallmark and if everyone needs to start buying storage plans right out of the gate things are not so simple… let people ease into it a bit more. 10GB would be enough for most people to get by for a few years, or longer if they didn’t keep a lot of photos.
If you look closely at Amazon’s balance sheet, you’ll see that its bleeding cash out of its AWS division. I’m sure Yahoo isn’t exactly swimming in cash either. The reality is free cloud storage is non-sustainable, after all, a cloud is still a giant, electricity sucking, heat generating complex that is definitely NOT free to run.
I don’t have a problem with Apple charging for storage when they are providing the app for free. Hopefully, the Photos app adds more of the pro features from Aperture over time, but you can’t really complain about something that is free.
In fact, I’d actually like to see Apple start selling add-on to the Photos app and other apps along the lines of the Freemium app that everyone seems to love. Personally, I’d rather pay up-front but I’m in the minority these days.
There are plenty of plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom. Why not make those same types of plug-ins available for Photos? Sell presets, filters and edge effects for the novice to enhance their photos easily. I’ve often wanted a larger variety of templates for Mail. Why aren’t these for sale from within the app? Same for iMovie and Keynote. The only app that seems to sell upgrades is Garageband in the way of lessons.
As a Adobe Lightroom user and Creative Cloud subscriber, I won’t be using Photos as my main photo application, but I am looking forward to using it to manage my iPhone photos and sync across devices.
I’m still unclear on something. When I activate the iCloud photos, does that mean that iCloud is going to suck up every single photo on my Mac? Like everything going back 15 years or longer? I don’t necessarily want that, but I do want to start using iCloud photos at some point. If anybody knows what the settings are with the new beta Photos for Mac that would be helpful.
Western Digital 3 TB (internal) disk drive with 3-yr. warranty for $114 on Amazon.
Apple’s 1 TB in iCloud for $240 per year compares very unfavorably.
I’m confused. The article is titled, (and presumably written about) the ” … Big Future Changes …” in photo storage, iCloud, etc. but then fails to actually tell us anything about these changes, or what they will be.
Very sloppily written indeed.
The big change is the way Apple is handling photo storage, dropping the free Photo Stream and going all iCloud (which might cost users money). That is the change. I consider it a big one.
I find all the comments raise good points, and to each person the positive and negative is going to mean something different. Personally Icloud photo storage is flawed as you can only store one library, and currently I have 9 libraries totaling over 60,000 photos. When I went to doing this it was because Iphoto can only handle up to 20,000 before its speeds start to slow down, so Apple recommended doing this, instead. But after loading Yosemite, it became apparent that the cloud gets confused, it senses there are other photos in the libraries that aren’t open. [you can only have one library open at a time] And so it doesn’t know what to do and gets stopped and blocked up from proceeding, thus apple recommended to me to just turn off the photo part of Icloud which is what I have done. But what concerns me the most is what happens when and if I am forced by apple to only have storage in the cloud, will I lose all the work I have accomplished?
Devoted Apple user – sorry Apple Flickr embarrasses iCloud for photos. In storage and auto sync. And a 5gb for iCloud? I’ve moved more people to Flickr than I can count. They take a lot of photos – especially the younger crowd. Apple is losing more people that use an iPhone or iPad to a Flickr than using iCloud. And Apple as usual just can’t figure out the cloud/internet thing even to this day.
I’m a serious and long time Flickr user but I don’t consider it an alternative to this; it’s an online photo sharing community and its great at that (well, it was better, Yahoo has mucked it up).
Storing images on flickr that have no backup on your various devices is not what Flickr is about. Apple’s offering is a different animal and will work along side of Flickr, not instead of it.
It is a different animal to a degree. But a free 1 terabyte, auto-upload of your iOS devices photos? And it just works. One then can very easily go to their Flickr and download the photos to their computer. 1TB basically takes away having to manage your 5GB iCloud account.
I get more people, 1 again yesterday calling and saying they’re getting emails and popups on their iPhone saying the device can’t backup because their iCloud is full, what do I do again. Heck I have people call saying I bought more iCloud space but it too is full.
Between all the apps, GAME apps being huge now, email, the device backups basically take up 5GB for the iPhone user within 2 weeks.
Flickr isn’t losing photos for it’s users.
Now what about a huge amount of iPhone/iPad buyers who don’t even use a computer anymore? Apple is basically saying to them, hey to use your iPhone/iPad you really need to buy a Mac too. That too is the past for Apple. Many, many buyers, are iOS device users only now – Apple is telling they need to buy a Mac too. That tide is turning for Apple now.
If I’m not mistaken, you can use onedrive for auto photo backup on ios. Probably Dropbox too. Google+ backups all of my photos on my android. Real nice to see them in the cloud by logging into my Google account
I took the plunge last year and got an annual Office 365 Home subscription which I got for about £50 on Amazon. For that my entire family each get unlimited storage (it was 1TB per user but that has now been removed) and so we now have all our iPhones and iPads auto backing up photos and videos to OneDrive. I think currently we have about 140 Gb of photos and videos backed up from a dozen or so iPhones and iPads in the household. I have also backed up about 400 Gb of photos and videos that were taken with other devices (cameras and camcorders) over the year. The 5 Onedrive accounts are then backed up automatically to our Synology NAS that we use for local storage. Throw in the full office suite for 5 pcs and 5 tablets / ipads and it looks a far better deal than Apple’s offering:
Microsoft – unlimited storage for 5 users for £50 per annum (approx 84p per user per month)
Apple – £14.99 per user (for 1Tb) or £6.99 per user (for 500 Gb) per month
I like Apple but they need to rethink their pricing (alot) if they are to be price competitive.
I think the new photos app looks great and the unified approach with all devices is an important step forward for Apple. For those of us who do higher end work there’s nothing stopping us from continuing to use Lightroom on our Macs but for me, Lightroom is overkill for images I take with my iPhone and for at least some of the images I take with my other cameras.
iPhoto has been twisting in the wind and should be put out of its (and our) misery already. What I don’t get is why Aperture is still for sale when you buy an iMac on the Apple online store.
My hope is that Apple’s servers don’t melt under the weight of all of this.
As for cost: a few dollars a month for a large amount of storage is not a high price to pay considering what some of us already pay to services like DropBox and the like.
Aperture is still on sale because it still, even now, works pretty well. It still has great organizational tools for photos, it still has very powerful editing tools that can do most editing that you need with photos… and lots of companies still sell Aperture plugins (like Nik).
Photos will eventually replace Aperture, but not quite yet… until then there’s no reason not to be able to keep using it – they updated Aperture for Yosemite so it has at least a year or two more of solid support still from Apple.
I own it, tried it, would love to stick with an Apple product but for my purposes Lightroom does a better job. I doubt Photos will fully take the place of a RAW processing application like Aperture or Lightroom so it will be interesting to see what people who use Aperture and shoot RAW do when it’s no longer supported.
I do take your point that until Photos is out they might as well continue selling boxes of Aperture although given its fate that the fact that Photos will be free, maybe they should be giving Aperture away.
All my photos on my android phone get backed up for free with google+. Idk why you would pay for storage, you have google drive, onedrive, Dropbox and others for much cheaper.
1 TB should be standard. I’d rather keep them on my device than pay for cloud storage.
I have 1TB with onedrive, came with office 365 personal on a $200 windows laptop.
This whole article is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Photo Stream does. Photo Stream doesn’t let you store your photos in iCloud, it’s designed to send your photos to your other devices’ local storage. To this end it only holds 1000 photos at a time, and only keeps them in iCloud for thirty days so your other devices have time to download them locally before iCloud forgets them.
And actually, if you use iCloud backups, iCloud Photo Library may actually help *free up* space. iCloud backups right now store the entire camera roll of any device being backed up. With Photo Library on, it no longer does this because all your photos are just in your iCloud Library to begin with, which also means any photos shared between different devices aren’t backed up twice.
I don’t even have iPhoto nor any of the other iLife apps, save for iTunes, on my Mac. I use Aperture since I’m more of a prosumer. I have photo stream turned on, on both iPhone and Aperture, so my photos get automatically downloaded to my Mac. Every so often, I just purge my photo stream to make room for new photos.
One thing I wish we had was syncing of videos on iOS.
I see no reason to move to Photos in the near future as I need the editing features of Aperture. I also use Photoshop CS6 but have no need/want to move to Lightroom.
5GB per account is a bit rubbish – they should at least give 5GB per device after we spend all that money on them!
You can easily put iPhoto and Apeture back into your computer if you back-up your photos, if a program gets lost I always replace it with Time Machine.
I, like many here, have invested hundreds of hours cataloging 10s of thousands of photos in iPhoto and Aperture; rating and manually geotagging the photos and adding descriptions. These features, I wrongly assumed, would always be part of the base offering in Apple’s photo application. Now I’m told that the star rating system is gone, manual geotagging is not supported, and meta descriptions won’t be visible.
The young “Selfie” crowd may not fully appreciate this, but these photo libraries represent the documented history of your life. Capturing every major even as you transition to adulthood, your wedding(s), the birth of your children, family vacations, people you meet on the journey, etc. As you get older, names and locations tend to get fuzzy so this metadata becomes more important. These are also the photos you hand over to your children and to their children. I use Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop to edit my photos, but the beauty of iPhoto was that I could transfer my entire “life” collection to anyone, with all attached information, and it was easy to learn and view.
For the sake of mass adoption, Apple as dumbed down iPhoto to the point where even the biggest moron on the planet can understand it. Money over quality. Great work Apple.
As for iCloud Photo backup, I can’t understand how anyone with a large photo library would want to use this? Unless you need 24/7 access to your collection (mine is 80GB) you’re better off backing it up to a portable hard drive (for $100). I don’t fancy paying Apple a monthly iCloud fee for the rest of my life.
I was a little annoyed at Apple ceasing development of Aperture, particularly as i’d only bought it at the end of 2012.
I do feel however that unifying the experience over IOS and OS X has to be a good thing.
Also, what very few have knowledge of, is what Developers will do with extensions to enhance Photos on both platforms. I’ll continue using Aperture until Photos is released, disected and the first extensions become available.
I’ve no wish whatsoever to move to Lightroom.
Wait a minute, seen this one?
http://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/
It show much more advanced features compared to the overly minimalistic beta version that’s out now.
I wish i had a dollar every time an analyst was proven wrong.
oops commented on wrong article. sorry
I, like many here, have invested hundreds of hours cataloging 10s of thousands of photos in iPhoto and Aperture; rating and manually geotagging the photos and adding descriptions. These features, I wrongly assumed, would always be part of the base offering in Apple’s photo application. Now I’m told that the star rating system is gone, manual geotagging is not supported, and meta descriptions won’t be visible.
The young “Selfie” crowd may not fully appreciate this, but these photo libraries represent the documented history of your life. Capturing every major even as you transition to adulthood, your wedding(s), the birth of your children, family vacations, people you meet on the journey, etc. As you get older, names and locations tend to get fuzzy so this metadata becomes more important. These are also the photos you hand over to your children and to their children. I use Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop to edit my photos, but the beauty of iPhoto was that I could transfer my entire “life” collection to anyone, with all attached information, and it was easy to learn and view.
For the sake of mass adoption, Apple as dumbed down iPhoto to the point where everyone on the planet can understand it. Money over quality. Great work Apple.
As for iCloud Photo backup, I can’t understand how anyone with a large photo library would want to use this? Unless you need 24/7 access to your collection (mine is 80GB) you’re better off backing it up to a portable hard drive (for $100). I don’t fancy paying Apple a monthly iCloud fee for the rest of my life.
Flickr sucks. Its user interface is poor; uploading has frequent problems therefore they can offer 1 TB but when it can’t be use, what good is it?
The solution is simple. Apple should just stop counting the iCloud backups against the Cloud Storage. Why does it have to count anyway?! That’s bothering me from the very beginning.
I would like to point out that while many have chosen to go into the usual anti-Apple stance, there is one glaring point this article fails to mention.
Even with the new beta version of photos in the cloud, the opportunity to use Shared Photo Strams still exist. These shared streams can each hold a combination of 5000 photos and videos, with no limit to streams (that I am aware of. Best part … DONT COUNT TOWARDS CLOUD SPACE!
I have close to 30 streams that I migrate from my regular library over to shared streams. This method works, is effective and a backdoor way of containing your library with losing space.
Having never used the app, what do I know? What I do know is that over the years Apple’s apps have shifted from having a nice blend of power and common sense to being the product of a bunch of tunnel-visioned geniuses. They took iMovie from an app that anyone right down to kids in school could pick up quickly and create great results to something that intimidates them.is intimidating and non-intuitive.
They took Motion and, while adding enhancements, crammed it into what is essentially a one-monitor app in which you can no longer spread out your palettes. Using it now is like having your elbows strapped to your sided and you have to dig in order to do something that used to take a single click.
I was also hugely PO’ed when FCPX came out – and not for its shortcomings but because Apple instantly killed distribution of the most recent upgrade to the previous version – all new old stock was instantly pulled from all distributors the same exact day and without one word or warning. I ended up switching to Premiere so I could keep moving forward while Apple fixed all the shortcomings in its new wonderkind.
Another idiotic thing was when Apple intentionally dumbed down Keynote for the Mac so that it would not be more powerful than the mobile version(!). Frankly, I have found Keynote to be great for quickly knocking together great looking opening sequences for corporate videos. In order to keep doing this, I have to stick with the older version of Keynote. And then there is the Keynote Remote app, which I use for running presentations on my laptop. I have had no success in getting the Keynote app to connect.. It was stupid for Apple to simply kill Keynote Remote. It is a good thing I still have the Remote app because it simply works.
Spotlight was another such item. Suddenly you’re having to turn off all kinds of stuff just so you can search for a simple filename (and even now, you have to stop every time and click on filename (which should be the default). In this one respect, Sherlock and before was far better. Why couldn’t Apple have retained that one feature?
It used to be that folder states used to be automatically remembered but now, unless you stop and click on a box in the View menu for just about every new window you open, it will default to how your previous window was. This problem has existed for 15 years now and nothing has been done.
I’ve also had to slow down with a lot of things. I used to he able to type a couple of characters and hit Tab when creating an email but now I have to wait a half a beat for Mail to fill in the name.
What all of this boils down to for me is that Apple is so focused on coming up with sparkly new features that they are ignoring the basics. They don’t just add new cool features, they also throw away superior features This is because of their mega-corporation tunnel visioned, compartmentalized mindset. It is like they’ve turned everything over to a bunch of young geniuses who have tons of talent but not a drop of wisdom.
Apple should offer free iCloud storage on a per device basis. They created a great integrated ecosystem between iOS and OS X through iCloud. They improved on that with Continuity. Now, they need to enhance their offering through increased storage.
Originally, the 5GBs per Apple ID made sense – when your iTunes purchases and Photos weren’t counted against that amount. Not to mention, that third party apps were not taking advantage of iCloud features in the way they are now.
iCloud storage simply makes more sense on a per device basis. Those who’ve purchased multiple devices are going to need more storage. Apple could offer 5GBs per device, or they could offer more based on type. iPod grants you 1GBs, 5GBs iPhone, 10GBs iPad, 15GBs MacBook, 25GBs Desktop Mac.
Or, a less popular option would be to offer unlimited storage for a flat monthly fee. No free storage for anyone – or only 5GBs free for the first year, following the purchase of a device. They could even remove iTunes purchases from the free iCloud access. Absolutely nothing for free.
Despite not having any free storage, I wouldn’t be mad if Apple were to offer unlimited Cloud storage for $5 or $10 dollars a month.
… and while were at it: integrate iCloud BackUp into Time Machine.
Well, one needs also uplink bandwidth to use these features properly, like all Cloud services. And when your cable network operator offers at home no more that 6Mbit/s uplink for 120Mbit/s downlink, with no plans to change that, and not plan to upload GB of data using LTE/3G dataplan (3G data plan in my case, quite an exception on the German market, at affordable prices), I don’t think the whole thing is an issue for most EU users and myself. I will simply not use them.
UL rates here are ridiculously low…
I’m not paying Apple any more money. Not one dime! I adjusted all of my digital cameras to save files in Jpeg format and I’m going to spend a few hours reformatting all of my RAW and TIFF images to high quality Jpegs which they should have been in the first place. Then I will put them on the cloud. I will keep that cloud storage plan to a minimum. Most I will pay is the $1 plan.
Cloud storage continues to fragment, what started as great idea was ruined by every company wanting to roll their own version of it and then make users have to use multiple services to cloud sync data for multiple apps. Dropbox seems to be the most widely used service , but I have to use iCloud for some apps, pay crash plan for cloud backups, and who knows what will come out next?
Who else things we need a standard cloud storage interface to promote competition i.e. in my vision every app works with every cloud storage solution, and the storage providers compete on price and the quality of the product. No more locking your customers into it.
btw, I didn’t touch on features, coming from Aperture I’d probably be disappointed in the new app. The new icloud storage for this app and the pricing triggered a tirade from me. Lol.
I want the app and it’s photo library to be a success, I just don’t like the management overhead of multiple cloud services and the cost overhead that comes with it as well. Price 3 50GB cloud storage plans vs 1 50GB storage plan and you will see what I mean. Scale matters.
Looks like even though iCloud Photos is now a reality I’ll stick with Shoebox for the moment (FREE, Unlimited storage, same functionality as the new Photos app) .
I find ridiculous that Apple is still only offering only 5GB Free per iCloud account while I spent a fortune on their devices (iPad, MacbookPro and 2 iPhone 6). MEGA.co.nz gives away 50GB, Onedrive 25GB…even Google gives also 25GB. Apple should at least give 5GB per device (greedy f**k*rs!)
Pity cause I love the new Photos app, but for me is useless -unless they increase their free storage plan. Obviously I’m not gonna start paying for a service that I can get for free somewhere else with the exact same functionality (as stated above).
Same here. I can only use iCloud storage for small items because I would go broke trying to store my backups, music, photos, etc there.
How on earth am I going to access my plugins and where are the advanced editing tools?
This morning when I needed to get to my photos to have some printed I was shocked that I can’t even see my photos unless I pay. I am furious! Maybe I will dump my mac and buy a Dell.
Very disappointing – especially since the functionality is really quite mediocre and really NOT ‘Pro-Like’ at all – despite the fanbois saying it is.
On top of this, whilst it isn’t yet fully compulsory you’re nevertheless even further ‘herded’ towards iCloud – even though storage costs are expensive at $20.00 per month – especially compared to a couple of memory sticks on your pocket!
WiFi performance with image loading isn’t great and even over a 4g network, loading small files is abysmal – with near-pro and pro size image files it will be spectacularly unusable.
With the Photos, how do I edit photos in other software like photoshop or lightroom?
well it is official apple doesn’t care about the professional crowd that buy and use its hardware, its funny because the type of people that buy apple hardware are professionals and in one go they have proved that they don’t care about them, it makes me question their management and business skills, this is going to have a knock on affect with the hardware sales, apple will see reduced sales when it cuts the throat of the professional crowd. Oh well apple wants to read up about what happened with blackberry, that company was once better than apple, but apple stole its throne with the hardware and software that it is just discarding with no due care.
I’ve raised my Dropbox space to 18 Go on licence-activation. com