Daniel Hruska
It is not so long ago that Apple entered the world released the third update OS X Yosemite. In addition to bug fixes and new emoticons, a brand new app was included in the update Fotky (Photos). It is now a fixed part of the system, similar to Safari, Mail, iTunes or Messages.
Before I go into more detail, I'd like to set my photo management straight. There is basically none. It's not like I don't take pictures at all, I take several dozen pictures a month. Although on the other hand - some months I don't take any pictures at all. At the moment I'm more in the phase of not taking pictures, but that doesn't matter.
Before Photos, I worked with my library by transferring my photos from my iPhone to my Mac once in a while, where I honestly have folders for each year and then folders for months. iPhoto didn't "fit" me for some reason, so now I'm trying it with Photos.
iCloud Photo Library
If you turn on iCloud Photo Library on your devices, your photos will sync across those devices. It's up to you whether you want to store the originals on your Mac or keep the originals in iCloud and only have thumbnails.
Of course, you don't need to use the iCloud photo library at all, but then you lose the above-mentioned benefits. Not everyone trusts storage somewhere on remote servers, that's okay. If you use it, you will probably quickly run out of the 5 GB that everyone has for free with their iCloud account. The lowest possible capacity increase to 20 GB costs €0,99 per month.
The user interface
Take the Photos app from iOS, use the standard OS X controls, stretch across a larger display, and you've got Photos for OS X. In other words, if you're used to using the app on your iOS devices, you'll get the hang of it in no time. From my point of view, the transformation to a "big" operating system was successful.
At the top you will find four tabs – Photos, Shared, Albums and Projects. Additionally, a sidebar can be displayed to replace these tabs. The main controls also include arrows for navigating back and forward, a slider for choosing the size of photo previews, a button to add an album or project, a share button and an obligatory search field.
When you move the cursor over the image preview, a heart will appear in the upper left corner to include the favorite borders. By double-clicking, the given photo will expand and you can continue working with it. To avoid having to go back and select another photo, you can view a sidebar with square thumbnails. Or you can move the mouse to the left/right edge to go to the previous/next photo or use the arrow keys on the keyboard.
Sorting
You can manage your photos in the four previously mentioned tabs. You know three of them from iOS, the last one is then only available in Photos for OS X.
Photography
Years > Collections > Moments, there is no need to describe this sequence at length. These are views of your library, where in Years you can see small previews of images grouped by year up to Moments, which are groups of photos from a shorter time interval. The locations where the photos were taken are shown for each group. Clicking on a location will display a map with photos.
Shared
Sharing your photos with other people is easy. You create a shared album, add photos or videos to it, and confirm. You can invite specific users to the album and allow them to add their photos. The entire album can be shared using the link to anyone who receives the link.
Alba
If you like order and want to organize your photos yourself, you will probably enjoy using albums. You can then play the album as a presentation to your friends or family, download it to your Mac, or create a new shared album from it. The application will automatically create albums All, Faces, Last import, Favorites, Panoramas, Videos, Slow motion or Sequences according to the imported photos/videos.
If you need to sort photos according to specific criteria, you use Dynamic Albums. According to the rules created from photo attributes (eg camera, date, ISO, shutter speed), the album is automatically filled with the given photos. Unfortunately, dynamic albums will not appear on your iOS devices.
Projects
From my point of view, the presentations are the most important from this tab. You have several themes to choose from for slide transitions and background music (but you can choose any from your iTunes library). There is also a choice of transition interval between frames. You can run the finished project directly in Photos or export it as a video up to a maximum resolution of 1080p.
Further under projects you will find calendars, books, postcards and prints. You can send finished projects to Apple, who will send them to you in printed form for a fee. The service is certainly interesting, but it is currently unavailable in the Czech Republic.
Keywords
If you not only want to have everything sorted, but also need to search efficiently, you will love keywords. You can assign any number of them to each photo, with Apple creating a few in advance (Kids, Vacation, etc.), but you can create your own.
Editing
I'm not a professional photographer, but I enjoy taking pictures and editing them. I don't even have a high-quality IPS monitor to take my editing seriously. If I were to consider Photos as a standalone application that is free, the editing options are at a very good level. Photos combine basic editing with some more advanced ones. Professionals will continue to use Aperture (but here's the problem with the end of its development) or Adobe Lightroom (in April a new version has been released), certainly nothing will change. However, photos can also show laymen, similar to iPhoto until recently, how photos can be further handled.
Click the button while viewing the photo Adjust, the background of the application will turn black and editing tools will appear in the interface. Automatic enhancement, rotation and cropping belong to the basics and their presence will not surprise anyone. Portrait lovers will appreciate the option of retouching, and others will appreciate the filters that are identical to those of iOS.
However, Photos also allow for more detailed editing. You can control light, color, black and white, focus, draw, noise reduction, vignetting, white balance and levels. You can monitor all the changes made on the histogram.
You can independently reset or temporarily disable each of the aforementioned adjustment groups at any time. If you're not happy with the edits, they can be completely removed with one click and start over. The modifications are only local and will not be reflected in other devices.
záver
Photos is a great app. I think of it as a catalog of my photos, like iTunes is for music. I know I can sort images into albums, tag and share. I can create dynamic albums according to selected attributes, I can create presentations with background music.
Some may miss the 1-5 star style ratings, but this may change in future releases. This is still the first swallow, and as far as I know Apple, the first generations of its products and services had rather basic functions. Others came only in later iterations.
It is important to mention that Photos comes as a replacement for both the original iPhoto and Aperture. iPhoto has gradually turned into a very confusing and above all cumbersome tool for once easy photo management, so Photos is a very welcome change. The application is extremely simple and, above all, fast, and for non-professional photographers the ideal way to store shots. On the other hand, Aperture will not replace Photos by any chance. Maybe over time they will get more professional features, but Adobe Lightroom is a more adequate replacement for Aperture right now.
If you would like to learn even more about the new Photos application, you can learn its secrets on the course "Photos: How to Take Photos on Mac" with Honza Březina, who will present the new application from Apple in detail. If you enter the promo code "JABLICKAR" when ordering, you will get a 20% discount on the course.
It's just a shame that Adobe Lightroom, which I currently switched to from Aperture, cannot be synchronized to Apple TV or iPhone... there's just an error with iTunes support :(
For me, after switching from iPhoto to Photos, the ability to view photos on a Mac disappeared from Apple TV (as if Apple canceled this option and left only the option to view photos on iCloud). Is anyone else affected the same way?
It goes…. everything just needs to be updated
Ha! Thanks for the direction!
Problem solved - in iTunes, the Photos app must be selected in the "File/Home Sharing/Choose photos to share with Apple TV" menu. I looked through the Preferences etc. place, but it didn't occur to me to look for some settings in the "File" menu for a long time :(
Lightroom can be connected to mobile :)
But I mainly want to get it to Apple TV :(
In that case, the only thing left to do is run Lightroom on the iPhone and stream it to the Apple TV via AirPlay.
and this is called a simple solution a la Apple? F...ck...
Thanks for the article. I found out from the screenshots that Photos can do more than I thought :) I personally struggle with them - I don't want to use iCloud for photo archiving, I liked the concept of PhotoStream, but in Photos the use of PhotoStream is kind of unclear.
It works, I have iCloud turned off and Photostream turned on. I transfer photos to the iPhone classically via iTunes synchronization from the given address book (or the entire library - as you like) and I see the photos from the iPhone immediately after taking the photo in the Photo application on the Mac. It works flawlessly then…
So I'm curious, I'll have to try it out and maybe €0,99 per month isn't too bad either. Rather, the whole concept of storing photos in iCloud annoys me, that on both iPad and iPhone I often save "valuable" photos to Pictures as well as all kinds of crap that sooner or later I want to delete, but they are still in iCloud.
It's true that they aren't, in this case iCloud, in particular Photos, is really great, you make an edit and delete it on one device and it will automatically be reflected on the other devices, you don't have to delete it in multiple places as was the case with Photostream. Although the deleted photo remains in the file for 30 days, you can also delete it.
Is it possible somewhere to set only the indexing of photos in the library so that all the photos from the directories are not copied to my new library? It works in iTunes…thanks for the advice
uncheck from the menu "preferences > general > import (Copy items to Photos library)" and the photos as such are not copied to the library.
After some time, I already know how to use "Photos", it just seems to me that the application is much more demanding than, for example, iphoto with a larger number of photos. I have a little over 30GB of photos and the processor load is quite high. But we've never left it on for very long and I don't know if there might be some lengthy first update.
Today we increased the space on iCloud, so I'll see what that does when all the photos are sent there. And most importantly, how much space does it take up on the phone.
I will be interested in practical experience - specifically, how quickly and reliably the photos are synchronized. I use shared albums via iCloud and viewing them on Apple TV is not a big deal - it takes a long time for the entire album to pop up on Apple TV and the photos appear in random order.
So the first synchronization was really hell.. it lasted all night (but we had 20.000 photos there) and it's all on the phone today. But I can see everything on my PC and on iCloud, so it fulfilled what we expected from it.
The only thing I still have to make work is sharing ideally the entire library to a friend within the "family". So far it looks like I have to go through the albums, which is a bit tedious.
I don't use Apple TV so I can't judge. But it's relatively cool and fast on the iPhone.
This is mainly about the internet speed and the router in the given place. On the AppleTV at home, where I have 120 megabytes and airport extreeme, it runs fine, but for example, with my mother-in-law, who has 10 megabytes at home and some noname router for a few hundred, it really sucks on the AppleTV. But on iPads and iPhones, viewing albums is pretty cool.
I'm also an occasional, undemanding photographer, and that's why I'm bored of continuing to use Photostream. There are only two differences between iCloud Photo Library and Photostream:
1) photos in iCloud Photo Library are in the original size suitable for printing billboards and videos in Full HD, in Photostream they have a limited size of 2048 x 1536 and videos are "only" HD 720.
2) you pay for space with the iCloud photo library, and soon even 20 GB is not enough. On the other hand, photos and videos in Photostream are free and have UNLIMITED space, they do not count towards iCloud space. But Apple is deliberately silent about this
So either you want to have your photos in the size of billboards and pay regular Apple fees and in the future buy more and more space thanks to huge photos, or a smaller resolution is enough for you, absolutely sufficient for television screens and smaller print, and unlimited space for free. Speaking of which – when was the last time you printed a photo on paper?…..
No, Photos didn't and won't work for me, I stay on Photostream and cough on iCloud Photo Library. Regardless of the fact that, for example, Flickr offers the same concept as Apple, but gives 1 TB for free photos and videos... But yes, that's another topic...
You are wrong, photos are only stored in photostream for a month and a maximum of 1000 items, which is enough time and number for those photos to be distributed to all your devices via apple servers. Otherwise, photostream is not used for storing photos at all, so your comparison is useless. If I want to look at those photos in two months and I don't have them physically downloaded on my computer/iPad/iPhone, I will never get to them again - they will be deleted. And if, following your advice, users would lose their photos because they didn't know how it works... they would surely thank you.
So for next time - if you only know the name then don't comment, you didn't understand that iCloudPhotoLibrary and PhotoStream are completely different things, one is for storing photos and the other is only for distributing the latest ones. If you don't believe, nothing prevents you from finding how it works on the net, e.g. here
http://www.imore.com/icloud-photo-library-and-photo-stream-whats-difference
I am not mistaken, not even a little bit. It can be seen that you don't know much about it either. The 1000 photos and 30 days only applies to UNSORTED photos in the basic Photostream album. Once you SORT these photos into the albums you create in Photostream, the photos stay in those albums forever. You will always have them in the ALBUMS. Those 30 days and 1000 photos are the time and space intended for you to sort them. This is exactly what many people don't know, and of course Apple doesn't present it much anywhere, it prefers paying customers. I personally have dozens of albums with thousands of photos in Phoptostream for several years, I also have old photos of my children, videos from vacations, etc. And I have them available everywhere I am connected to my iCloud, on all computers, on television via appleTV, on iPhones, etc. In addition, I also have shared albums of my daughter and my friends from various trips to which I was invited. In the same way, our whole family, including the grandmothers, has access to all these albums on their iPads on their iClouds, to albums that I send them an invitation to. Don't accuse others of ignorance when you don't know what you're talking about. :-)
And I will add one more thing - if you sort the photos into those albums during those 30 days, you can easily delete them from the basic album and from the iPhone, they will remain in the ALBUMS in Photostream. And they don't take up space anywhere on your computer or phone. They are only and only on UNLIMITED iCloud space and do not count towards the prepaid space of 5 GB and any additional purchased. And from there they are available anytime, anywhere, even on the web if you give someone a public link.
Ah, that's interesting, I didn't know that! And is it possible to use it with the Photos app if I haven't yet turned on iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone and still have My Photostream turned on? I tried to sort it out, but somehow it doesn't work as you describe. Maybe it can only be done through the original iPhoto?
Honestly, I have no idea, because I don't have 10.3 on my mac yet, and therefore I don't even have the Photos app. But I assume that albums from Photostream are in Shared, similar to iPhoto. And there should be albums created in the past, as well as new ones. Try to look and work with the photos there.
I don't send photos and videos from iPhone automatically, I have "my photo stream" turned off in iPhone preferences, as well as iCloud library turned off, I only have "iCloud photo sharing" turned on. When I take, say, 50 photos, I sort through them on my iPhone, select maybe 20 good ones, and then send them to "shared on iCloud", to an existing album, or create a new album with the + button. And after sending, I delete all the photos from the iPhone.
Correction, of course I mean 10.10.3 I don't really want to go to Yosemite yet, I have no reason to rush.
Thanks a lot Jirko for the instructions, I'll try to figure it out!
Well done, it looks like it works as you write! Great, thanks a lot!
Before you go around saying he doesn't know what he's talking about, admit that you wrote it in a misleading way. Photos in original size are available on photostream for 30 days and a half. It doesn't matter what is in the albums, because they are no longer the original photos, so Petr is right, because the photos are there so that you can sort them, but to distribute them to the device in their original size, because then they disappear. What you put in the albums is simply not the original photo.
Besides, I don't want to play grammar nazzi, but "albums" are killing me. Go to the center, to the museum building and talk to the statue of Zeus about it.
I'll skip the unnecessary would-be witty invective at the end, I didn't come here to argue. The time of 30 days is intended for the user to do with them as he sees fit. Leave it up to him and you don't dictate to him where to distribute them. Some people put them somewhere on the computer, others save them on iCloud. And the fact that the photos in the albums are smaller in size is what I emphasized. With the fact that even this limited size is absolutely sufficient if someone does not print billboards at home. So it's a very easy alternative to the Photos app, which doesn't offer anything at all, apart from the ability to store original size photos on paid space.
"To sort them out" is good enough too!
do you know if it is somehow possible to display a map with pins like it was possible with iphoto? and also if it is possible to use classic sorting, e.g. photostream May, etc.?
yes it works the maps work, but I don't have my own tab.
I bought some plugins for Aperture and of course they don't work in Photos. Converting the Photos library means I can no longer use it in Aperture. So Photos is dead for me at the moment and I'd rather just keep using Aperture. And if Apple won't let me use the plugins in Photos, I'll switch to Lightroom, where I can use those plugins without a problem. Anyway, I don't like the photos one bit at the moment.
Same with me. My wife takes a lot of pictures and also uses Aperture. In contrast, iPhoto is enough for me. And he doesn't intend to change until he really has to, which is not imminent. And it sends selected photos and albums to Flicker, which gives it 1TB for free and works with full-size photos, similar to iCloud Photo Library on iCloud.
Am I really the only one with Photos unusably slow? E.g. even just normal scrolling through the sidebar gets unbearably stuck.
Does anyone know why photos from Photos can't be easily transferred to, for example, Skype?