14 DAY TRIAL // In the past few years when Apple released something brand new (software-wise), some of the old features didn't make the final cut.
Yes, Final Cut Pro is the best example. Video editors world-wide were upset because the first version of the new generation software was just a dumbed-down one. It happened again with iMovie, GarageBand, Pages or Keynote. But those were just apps. Photos for Mac is a way to manage and store your memories. Apple cannot mess this up.
Wait until version x.1
Here’s an app I’ve been waiting for for a quite while. Not since Apple announced it, but since I got tired of using iPhoto.
Around 2010 I switched from my “pictures in folders” set-up to iPhoto. I’ve deleted all my pictures as I was adding them to iPhoto. It felt good using the automatic Faces recognition features and the fact that I could search them by location. I have even played with other features for a while and then the app died on me.
It was slow, bloated and I couldn’t really find what I was looking for. Not to mention that my iPhoto library got pretty big and hard to move around or back up. It is now at exactly 122.86 GB.
Today, Apple announced Photos for Mac. What we know so far is that this app aims to replace iPhoto and Aperture, and in Apple’s tradition it will be missing some of the features of the two apps. Nothing major if you were an iPhoto user, but some of the so-called “pro-features” are gone.
Photos looks good and it works much faster than iPhoto. You can get it yourself as a developer preview if you have the appropriate account. Apple advertises the app as an easy-to-use one with a beautiful design. Yes, we'll give them that. The app takes some design cues from iOS and it looks really nice. Just in case you want to get the feel of it, open the Photos app on your iPad and you will see what it feels to be using it on the Mac. Except the iPad one lacks some of the editing features.
Moving to the cloud
Apple makes the case for iCloud Photo Library. The idea is that the Mac finally takes the place of a local device, just like Steve Jobs wanted back when iCloud was released. You no longer sync your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, but you keep everything in the cloud and have it synced or downloaded to the Mac if you really want to.
Basically, every photo you take on any device is added to the other ones linked to your iCloud account. Edit a photo on the Mac or add some visual effects and see them right away on the iPhone.
Apple makes the case of the "filling your library." Why waste precious space on your device when you can just keep the hi-res photos in the cloud and keep lower-resolution ones on the device?
The problem is that you would have to pay for it. The free, basic tier is 5GB. So I guess my 122 GB library will not get there anytime soon. Sure enough, Apple offers up to 1 TB of space in the cloud. For my needs I would have to pay $50 (€43.71) each year and I'm pretty sure my photo library will get bigger and bigger every year.
Wait, how about the iCloud-gate?
It's been only five months since the iCloud "celebrity nude photo" fiasco broke. We now know that it was not Apple's fault and those celebrities were tricked into social engineering hacks to give out their passwords, but do we really trust the cloud?
The main problem with cloud is not the amount of money you need to pay in order to get everything up there, nor the social engineering hacks. The issue is related to how much trust the regular computer guy or the regular family has. And note that we're not talking about iCloud, but about the cloud in general.
Storing your pictures in the cloud means you will have less on your device and you depend on an Internet connection to get them back. I only have about 22,000 photos in my iPhoto library and losing them would mean a disaster. I know a grown man that cried after losing the photos he took for about two years. He handed the camera to his niece and she didn't know she was not supposed to format the SD card.
Imagine losing all your photos because you cannot remember your iCloud password, or because someone broke into your account.
Solving the photos problem
Apple needs to solve this as much and as fast as they can. Photos is only a solution for part of that problem, but there's no guarantee your photos are safe for good. iCloud and the Photos app needs a cold storage solution as a back-up. You need to be able to buy cloud storage that you will not access in years just to back up your... back-up.
Sure enough, you can use a great solution provided by Apple like Time Machine or the awesome app called SuperDuper! to back up your drive just in case something goes wrong.
The way I see the Photos problem solved is creating something like Dropbox where the local copy is still the most important one and it gets synced automatically to the cloud and to other devices.
Photos is an app that will grow into a modern way of managing your pictures, but it will not replace the professional tools photographers use. Will Apple find a solution for that too, or will they just beef up Photos in future releases to match the market's demand for the best Photo manager out there?
