Djennison

Q: Photos - Is it worth the hassle?

Hi all,

 

I've been reading the discussions and struggles of everyone converting to Photos and i was wondering, is it worth the hassle? Should i just stick with iPhotos.

 

Let me know your thoughts...

 

Thanks D.

Posted on May 3, 2015 2:22 AM

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Q: Photos - Is it worth the hassle?

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  • by petermac87,

    petermac87 petermac87 May 3, 2015 2:33 AM in response to Djennison
    Level 5 (7,402 points)
    May 3, 2015 2:33 AM in response to Djennison

    Stick with if if you do not like Photos. Eventually Photos will be highly improved and iPhoto will most likely not be supported by some future OS X. But eventually it will pay to learn to use. Note that I choose not to at present, but I also remember the 'disaster' that was iPhoto when it was initially released. Everyone here was screaming about it. More than are screaming about Photos. So these Forums are not a representation of Photos in general amongst the tens and tens of millions of Mac users out there. Just my two bobs worth.

     

    Cheers

     

    Pete

  • by léonie,Helpful

    léonie léonie May 7, 2015 8:38 AM in response to Djennison
    Level 10 (107,834 points)
    iCloud
    May 7, 2015 8:38 AM in response to Djennison
    I've been reading the discussions and struggles of everyone converting to Photos and i was wondering, is it worth the hassle? Should i just stick with iPhotos.

    It depends on what you want from a system photo library.

    • Photos is great,
      • when you want your photos in iCloud, synced to all your devices, and want your photos accessible on all platforms, with all your edits applied. Edit on Mac, view on your iPad.
      • when you want the interface and the library organization to be the same across all devices.
      • when you do not want to be bothered to organize your library - Photos does it automatically.
      • Photos has some nice, new smart adjustments, compared to iPhoto, like automatically straighten the horizon.
      • Processing in Photos is much faster than iPhoto.
    • iPhoto is much better than Photos, if your library is large and not just a toy library with snaps from your iPhone:
      • Photos does not (yet) have much support to add annotations to your photos and to structure the library thematically. Photos will organize the library based on the locations and dates, but you cannot add location data.
      • You cannot rename the Moments and move photos between Moments, like you could do with the events in iPhoto.
      • You cannot name the Places, that are shown in the Moments and collections. In iPhoto it was possible to define a place as "Test site 1" or "Landing site", "base camp 1" or similar. Now we get only the generic names from the places database. And if there is no place, something pretty useless like "North Atlantic Ocean".
      • There is no batch change for titles and captions.
      • The filenames do not show below the thumbnails.
      • There are no longer star rating from 1 to five, and no flags, only Favourite or not Favorite.
      • Hidden photos are not hidden from the albums, only from the Moments, Collections, Years views.
      • The Places view is much more restrictive. You can only show Moments and Collections on a map, but not the photos in an album or smart album.
      • You can copy and paste adjustments between photos, but only for one at a time.
      • You cannot sort and arrange the photos freely. It will depend on the current View, if you can sort by capture date or date imported, and you can only sort ascending. So the oldest photos will always be on top of the list. Faces cannot be sorted by name.
      • The handling of timezones has a bad bug for migrated Aperture and iPhoto libraries. The dates from different timezones are not converted correctly, when sorting the photos.
      • You cannot change the background color of the browser. It will always be white when browsing, and black when editing.
      • The GUI is very simple, just like on the iPad or iPhone,  Most options are hidden by default, and it requires a lot of clicking, to see the metadata for your photos. You cannot customise the toolbar. And there are not many Preferences settings. Photos does not make much use of the larger display on a Mac. You cannot even compare two photos enlarged side-by-side or increase the size of the fonts.
      • You can no longer reveal all original image files in the Finder, only referenced image files.

     

    I hope, Photos will be improved with future updates. My strategy is, to keep my main photo libraries  in Aperture and iPhoto for the time being, but use a smaller Photos library for syncing with iCloud and my other Macs.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie May 3, 2015 3:23 AM in response to léonie
    Level 10 (107,834 points)
    iCloud
    May 3, 2015 3:23 AM in response to léonie

    I forgot: 

    • You cannot use external editors and plug-ins with Photos, until the external editors are updated. Pixelmator is the first editor to work with Photos.
  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R May 3, 2015 4:26 AM in response to léonie
    Level 6 (17,685 points)
    May 3, 2015 4:26 AM in response to léonie

    Regarding dates in Years/Collections/Moments & time zone corrections, one of the few batch change operations Photos supports is changing the date & time of any number of selected photos, but these batch changes are relative -- IOW, all the selected photos' date & time are changed by the same amount, not to the same date & time. This can drive you crazy until you figure out what's going on, & it makes it very tedious & time consuming to change multiple items to the same date & time.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie May 3, 2015 5:10 AM in response to R C-R
    Level 10 (107,834 points)
    iCloud
    May 3, 2015 5:10 AM in response to R C-R

    one of the few batch change operations Photos supports is changing the date & time of any number of selected photos, but these batch changes are relative -- IOW, all the selected photos' date & time are changed by the same amount, not to the same date & time.

    Right, but that is the "Adjust Date and Time" (from iPhoto or Aperture), to correct an inaccurate time setting in the camera. iPhoto's  "Metadata > Batch change" of the times to set the date of photos to a given time is missing.  This Batch Change option is also missing in Aperture, and it was one of the nice iPhoto Features that made me come back to iPhoto frequently. The other one was the "Show in Finder" for managed files.

  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R May 3, 2015 5:37 AM in response to léonie
    Level 6 (17,685 points)
    May 3, 2015 5:37 AM in response to léonie

    léonie wrote:

    iPhoto's  "Metadata > Batch change" of the times to set the date of photos to a given time is missing.

    Yes, that is what I was trying to point out -- that Photos "Adjust Date & Time" feature supports batch changes just like the iPhoto version, but the app lacks any way to change the date & time of multiple items to the same values in one operation.