If you’ve ever purchased Apple-branded print products through the Photos app on the Mac, you may have been disappointed to find that the feature disappeared in the macOS Mojave update.
But there’s some good news you may have missed. Back in July of last year, it was announced that RR Donnelley – the same company used to produce Apple-branded print products – was launching its own Photos plugin, under the Motif branding.
That plugin is now available, and I took it for a test-drive with photos I took on a holiday in Cuba …
Custom photo books and calendars make great gifts, and it’s fun to set yourself apart with unique holiday greeting cards. However, after Apple announced it would be discontinuing its native photo printing services this past fall, this is the first holiday season that users will need to find a substitute. Follow along for five alternatives to print your photo books, calendars, and cards with the Photos App on Mac as well as iPhone and the web.
We take photos to capture moments. A great photo can fill in the blanks of our memory, instantly recalling forgotten details and conversations otherwise lost to time. But has looking at a photo ever raised more questions than it provided answers? Let’s look at reimagining the Photos app to better tell the stories of your memories.
In July, Apple announced that its first-party print products would be discontinued at the end of September. The news took me by surprise. While features like iCloud shared albums and Photos app Memories have lessened the need to make books and prints, I still regarded the service fondly.
Over the years, books and calendars from Photos on my Mac (and earlier, iPhoto) have made great gifts and keepsakes for family members and myself. To commemorate the end of an era, I decided to make one last hardcover photo book and theme it around a topic I love, and where many people learned about the Photos print service for the first time: Apple retail stores. My book arrived today.
We learned last month that Apple is discontinuing its long-time printing service that is integrated into Photos and previously iPhoto. Now, Apple is notifying users of the change via email and recommending some alternatives.
Apple announced earlier this month that it would be discontinuing its photo printing service by September 30, 2018. This means that users will need to look at other third-party solutions.
However, today VentureBeatrevealed that RR Donnelley was a partner for Apple’s first-party photo printing service. And with that, the company is also releasing its own app called Motif that lets macOS Photos users continue to purchase calendars and books similar to the ones Apple was offering.
Apple is discontinuing its Photo Print Products service, which has been integrated into iPhoto since its launch in 2002. The service expanded from simple prints, to albums, photo books, and calendars. It stayed around on the Mac when iPhoto was replaced with the Photos app a couple of years ago, but the service never made the leap to iOS.
Later this year, Apple will stop offering the service altogether. A new message in macOS 10.13.6 Photos app says that final orders for Apple’s built-in service must be placed by September 30, 2018.
One of the more controversial changes in iOS 12 is how the photo library is managed in the Messages app. Previously, the photo picker was available when tapping the camera icon. However, with iOS 12, Apple has turned Photos into a full on Messages app and now sits in the App Store tab versus the camera tab.
Gemini Photos is a new iPhone app from MacPaw that uses machine learning to help you clean up your photo library and free up storage space. The new app marks the first iOS app from MacPaw, which makes CleanMyMac 3, Gemini 2, and the app subscription service Setapp for Mac. Similar to Gemini for Mac, Gemini Photos for iOS specializes in finding similar images and even photos that it believes may be notes so you can slim down your photo library to just the images you want to keep.
If you happen to delete all of your photos by accident, you may be concerned that there’s no way to recover any of the photos. Luckily, Apple’s Photos app has a way to recover recently deleted photos.
Sharing photos and videos that you shoot on your iPhone isn’t always totally straightforward. There are lots of common edge cases when formatting and quality just isn’t preserved, and it can be difficult to master what works and where without lots of experience. That’s why Johann Werk put together a thorough flow chart that walks you through how each method works.
You can easily spend between $100 and $200 on a Wi-Fi digital photo frame, but these often have clunky interfaces for syncing photos and the displays can be quite poor. A better solution may be repurposing an old iPad or putting your current iPad in photo frame mode for special occasions.
Apple used to include a handy photo slideshow button on the iPad lock screen years ago, but this feature was abandoned with iOS 7 and later. While I’d love to see this feature return in the future, it’s possible to create a Wi-Fi digital photo frame mode for your iPad using built-in features in iOS today.
Apple’s latest video series promotes an iOS 10 Photos feature called Memories that automatically builds collections of related images and videos around themes like dates, places, and people. The series includes both a full-length iPhone ad as well as a new tutorial on using the Memories feature.
If you use Google Photos on your iPhone and iPad (and you should), you can now use AirPlay to view selected photos on your Apple TV. Google quietly added the feature in an update to the app yesterday…
iCloud Photo Library is a great feature built into Apple’s iOS and macOS operating systems, but it can feel a bit foreign depending on how you have been managing your photos and videos up until now. Follow along for how to set up this feature across your various Apple devices as well as upload photos to iCloud Photo Library.
Apple’s Photos app on macOS Sierra and iOS 10 lets you view photos on a map and search for images based on location, but your images won’t be included if they don’t have location data assigned. iPhones assign this data when shooting, but most standalone cameras can’t collect location by default. Fortunately, Photos lets you easily discover images in your library with missing location data so you can map out all your shots.
It wasn’t that long ago when creating 360-degree photos that you could share with others online required special camera kit, and you had to post them on websites that supported the feature. It’s since got much easier, and as of the latest update to the iOS Facebook app, you don’t need anything more than your iPhone and the stock camera app.
Simply take a panorama with your phone […] and then post it on Facebook as you would a normal photo. From there, we’ll convert it to an immersive 360 photo that people can explore, similar to how people experience 360 videos on Facebook …
Photos on OS X includes eight photo filters as standard to jazz up images with some creative and nostalgic effects. Macphun is today releasing a free Photos Extension app that adds an additional 30 photo filters. It’s a really simple app that can be launched standalone or as an extension natively integrated in the Photos app Edit panels.
A new iPhone 6s/6s Plus passcode bypass flaw is making its rounds on the internet today, and it’s similar to flaws we’ve seen in the past on iOS. Don’t be overly alarmed, though, as the odds of this happening to you are slim. Besides, if you are concerned, there are some bonafide ways to go about protecting yourself. Expand Expanding Close
Apple’s Cards app introduced in 2011 and discontinued two years later remains one of my favorite iPhone apps to date. The service was fantastic: snap photos on your iPhone, then turn them into personalized letterpress cards sent through the mail to friends and family. Stamp and envelope included, you’d pay $2.99 for anywhere in the US or $4.99 for anywhere around the world. You can still send personalized letterpress cards using Photos on the Mac, but the service was perfect for me as an iPhone app.
I’ve tried a handful of similar iPhone apps since Cards shut down with Postly being the latest and perhaps most modern. Available for iPhone and iPad, Postly lets you create personalized postcards from your iPhone that deliver worldwide for $1.99.
I’ve been all in on iCloud Photo Library since Apple replaced iPhoto with the new Photos app on the Mac last year and I haven’t looked back since. I pay $2.99/month to sync my 13,206 photos and 1,087 videos (plus iOS device backups) with iCloud, and this allows me to take or save photos and videos from any device and have them appear across the others including the web, edits, albums, and all. I even have a system to help ensure to if something in the cloud gets hosed that everything will be fine at home (and if the house burns down hopefully the cloud is still there).
This also enables me to access my 155 GB photos library in the Photos apps on iPhones and iPads that otherwise couldn’t fit that much content. Thumbnail previews are available at all times, and full resolution versions download on the fly as needed. When you’re iPhone, iPad, or Mac needs more local storage, Photos can remove full-res images and downloaded videos to make more space using an optimize storage option. This works pretty well especially on higher capacity devices, but there’s one problem…
Over the weekend a good friend of mine shared a screenshot of a really scary error message from Photos for Mac. Every photo and video taken over the last two weeks failed to open, saying instead that ‘An error occurred while downloading a larger version of this video for editing.’ The solution? ‘Please try again later.’ and press OK. What’s worse is he was relying on the app’s Optimize Mac Storage setting to fit the library on his local storage and trusting iCloud not to screw things up along the way. And he didn’t have local copies backed up, a mistake he for obvious reasons regretted.
Stories like these aren’t rare, which is why my colleague Jeremy wrote earlier this year that “iCloud Photo Library still isn’t worth the hassles,” despite Apple lowering iCloud storage costs. But I still recommend Photos and iCloud Photo Library, new features that topped my “favorite new Apple things from 2015 that will last for years” list, just not with the default setup. As with any cloud service, the one major caveat is ensure you have a reliable local backup (followed by plenty of patience at the start).
While there’s no turning back data loss, I shared my personal Photos plus iCloud Photo Library setup with my friend, which he’s moving to now for a hopefully better experience. Below I’ll detail each step, which required a little research before I figured it all out, so you can hopefully have a positive experience with Photos and iCloud Photo Library as well.
