Dislike Apple’s iPhotos app on your Mac? You’re not alone, and it looks like Apple has a fix for that. The Cupertino company is working on a brand new Photos app for Mac users, that brings over several features from Photos on iOS, with a lot more to offer than before.
So what is Photos for Mac? At a glance, it looks very much like Photos on your iOS device with a simple and clean interface – there’s also an automatic collection of photos based on location and time. The Verge notes that it is also extremely fast too, at least, a lot faster than what iPhoto offers at the moment. It makes backing up your photos to the cloud a lot easier, as well as packs some useful editing tools.
If you’re a novice user, you’ll definitely want to use Photos. According to The Verge who had a preview of the developer seed of the app, there are new editing tools that are much better and easier to use than before. Easily apply Instagram-like filters to your photos, manually control parameters like exposure, highlights, and shadows, make basic touch-ups to your pictures, or have the auto-crop tool crop automatically straighten out your image or crop a photo according to the rules of thirds. Unfortunately though, more advanced users will have to stick to Aperture app for a more powerful image editor.
That’s not all, the new Photos app also makes iCloud storage a lot more useful than before. Remember Photo Stream on your iOS devices that will sync the latest 1,000 images to your devices? The new Photos app will replace that with a new album when you opt into iCloud Photos. Instead of just 1,000 images, it will store your entire collection into iCloud Photos and easily access them on your Mac – “Photos makes it easier than ever to get images from your Mac into the cloud”. However, this means that the 5GB of free storage per account (despite the number of devices you have), will definitely not be enough – iCloud storage is a lot cheaper now, but will you pay to opt in?
Apple has already distributed the developer seed version of Photos, and the company said that the public Photos beta will be released in the near future. The final release of Photos is due in Spring (around March to May 2015), and will be available for Mac users as part of a free software update.
(Source: The Verge 1, 2)
