Almost every new gadget has a camera these days, which means almost every moment can be captured for posterity. But the sheer number of photos we collect as we go about our lives is becoming a nightmare of organisation.
To start with, how do you store photos? In virtual albums? One massive mess sorted by date? By people, or place? Or perhaps by camera?
Then there’s the pile of poor photos, the ones out of focus, misaligned or just plain missing the subject; do you weed them out, and how do you go about doing that?
Apple’s iPhoto was one of the best ways to organise photos on a Mac for non-professionals. Aperture was Apple’s professional solution. Both have been replaced by just “Photos”, released last week with the latest version of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3.
Photos is a complete rewrite of Apple’s photo management software, although you wouldn’t know it if you weren’t paying attention.
Migrating from iPhoto is relatively straightforward. Fire up the free Photos app, select your iPhoto library and hope for the best. I migrated just under 40GB of photos from an iPhoto library, but Photos insisted on “repairing” it first. Everything went without a hitch, but I backed up the library first, just in case.
Once the migration is done, the app presents users with what appears to be iPhoto, just without the sidebar (which can be reinstated).
Events are now called “Albums”, which makes more sense, “Faces” are still there and tags people using facial recognition, while “Photos” is now organised into “Moments” similar to an iPhone or iPad.
In fact, it’s difficult to tell what’s changed on the surface, but the app loads and operates noticeably faster and takes up 66MB of space compared to 1.7GB – a vast improvement especially for laptops with limited hard drive space and processing power.
In terms of actually organising your photos it’s the same deal as iPhoto – sort them manually by album or by name of album, or just view them as one big pile. Smart albums can automatically generate collections based on picture information such as capture location or keywords you’ve manually applied to the photos.
Albums can be sorted into folders of albums, which is quite useful for grouping collections together, while Photos automatically groups certain types of media together such as videos, time-lapse, burst or slow-mos taken with an iPhone.
Photos is not a revolution in solving organisational issues. There’s no way to automatically find duplicates, it has no intelligence to find those photos you could safely get rid of that are out of focus or just plain poor, and you can’t sort albums by date, only manually or by name.
Photos is a big step up in image processing, however, with a raft of easy to use but powerful image editing features. Adjusting the lighting, saturation and turning the image black and white is easy using simple sliders, or can be broken down into individual settings for fine tuning. Tools for adjusting white balance, sharpening an image and adjusting colour levels are all easier to use than most other image editing apps, with impressive results.
A range of Instagram-style colour filters are available, as is an auto enhance feature, while crop, rotate, resizing, healing and red-eye removal tools are all there. For the vast majority of image edits and quick touchups, Photos is all most will need.
Neither iPhoto or Aperture will be updated going forward, which means users of either are faced with a dilemma – upgrade to Photos for free, switch to a more advanced product like Adobe Lightroom, or stay stuck with their current version until it can no longer run.
For most users Photos is at least as good as iPhoto. It’s not revolutionary in the organisation department, but it is an improvement in speed and image editing. For Aperture users, however, it’s a step down. If you made batch adjustments based on camera, lens or lighting settings you will need to look elsewhere.
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