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These are similar to the icons across the bottom of the screen in the iPhone and iPad Photos app. The main screen of Photos has a toolbar with just four big buttons: Photos, Shared, Albums and Projects.

The new Photos sweeps that all away, while retaining major features.

In my search tests - “Steve Jobs,” “Beijing” and “wedding” - I was quickly able to narrow things down by date, name, location and more.Īs for clutter: While iPhoto started out as a simple program 13 years ago, over time it acquired so many options and controls that it became complex. Scrolling - even through 18,000 images - is fast and fluid. The new Photos app imported my existing iPhoto libraries quickly and accurately (which is different from syncing them to the cloud).

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Apple’s new Photos app for Mac devotes more of the screen to your pictures.

PhotosĪpple had three main goals in designing the replacement for iPhoto: Greater speed, less clutter and somewhat more sophisticated editing.

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This was resolved with a back-end workaround, but I can’t consider this a full solution. And even that was only possible because I asked Apple about it for this review, and the company (with my permission) analyzed my library and found a “rare bug” it says it had never seen before. While syncing my locally stored photo library, the cloud service failed to do its job properly.Įven though my iPhoto library of 18,000 images isn’t considered large by Apple standards, and my home Internet is speedy in both directions, my library took nearly three days and nights to upload to the cloud - far longer than Apple estimated. That’s because Apple says the two photo products are closely “intertwined.”Īlas, my positive feelings about Photos on the Mac didn’t extend to iCloud Photo Library. It’s faster, easier to use and has a more modern feel.Īnd although the new Photos software can be used without the cloud service, I’ve been testing that, too, roping an iPhone and two iPads into the process. I’ve been testing the new Photos app on two different Macs, and I consider it a big improvement over iPhoto.

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It’s essentially a Mac app that catches up to the superior look and feel of the Photos apps on the iPhone and iPad, but with greater power.Īt the same time, Apple has introduced an optional service, called iCloud Photo Library, which stores all your photos in the cloud and syncs them among all your Apple devices.īoth have been in beta, or test releases, but became available to everyone last week as part of Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3. It’s much faster, less cluttered and has more editing options, yet still makes them simple to use. Now, at last, Apple has replaced iPhoto with a new, free Mac app called simply Photos. It was often slow to scroll through thousands of pictures, and its minimal editing tools seemed increasingly inadequate. Rather than focusing on tweaking individual photos to perfection, it was centered on easy organizing of the many images people were beginning to accumulate via digital cameras.īut as a tidal wave of photos arrived from smartphones in recent years, the iPhoto software became overwhelmed. When Apple introduced iPhoto in 2002, it was a tremendous boon to casual photographers.

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