Dear OT - whose responses to queries specific to this I've now read going back quite a ways - and to anyone who may be able to help/advise.
I've followed all the threads and topics and references I can find (precious little from Apple online or from "geniuses" either), but either I'm the only one in the world with this perspective, or it's not been asked and answered
Beginning with the basic of *this* thread: How do I uninstall? I'd summarize the responses as "don't", or go through a tortuous process of uninstalling iPhoto, reinstalling, etc.... "It is what it is", but here is what it is to me, and out of desperation (despite some research skills) come here with my precise context and goal.
#1 I have learned to love iPhoto upon embracing Mac some years back.
Specifically: My most important reasons for having fully adopted iPhoto:
- Geotagging the images from my iPhone or GPS-enabled devices. Automatic. Seems to me essential. Why have GPS/iPhone tagging otherwise? I am not eager to have lose or forego tens of thousands of useful tags. #1 disgust for the "dumbing down" of Mac & iPhoto to be like a big iPhone. I am a serious photographer, and have used various organizers and use external editors. I have no problem importing from iPhone to iPhotos on any of my machines.My strategy has been to download into the library (raw images, etc.) and then export back the big files I don't immediately need into external storage. I keep "in the library" things I would like to imminently work on, or showcase as edited versions.
-Events/albums - Sorry, but again, I want more than a Facebook feed or iPhone stream. I LOVE how I've been able to organize albums easily, and send things from events to albums simply, or recreate events. But more than albums, with several Terrabytes of images I'm managing (only about 500 GB at a time on the Mac, in the library), the MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT for daily use is the organization and ability to find things. I get dizzy looking at the huge nonstop mosaic of tiles on the iPhone, and seeing it replicated on an rMBP was sort of equally nauseating. But I went with the update and found I still had iPhoto and could ignore the (to me useless) Photos app, and I removed it from the doc.
QUESTION #1 - I've read and heard the technical (but vague) descriptions of how the one library serves both iPhoto and Photos. So... (sorry to echo months of another thread I followed fruitlessly) does accepting (but not using) Photos grow the database or add new masters or in some other way bloat my limited SSD space allocated for images? Related:
QU#2 - If I delete the entire thumbnail collection on Photos, how does that impact what I want to use, iPhotos? I ask this seriously, as I did a test at first and deleted some selective (blurry, not important) images from Photos, after it imported from iPhoto. In this case the removal from Photos did not effect iPhotos - the thumbnails were still "there" and the masters too. But I've no way of knowing if I'll somehow corrupt a shared library, or if there is any real benefit.
(Short version, I wish I could just delete or never allow Photos to darken my doorstep in the first place. So far I've succeeded on 1 of 3 devices. The third is hounding me to "update" (haha) to Photos, today or tomorrow. I'd prefer not, but may have no choice.
QUESTION #3 follows #1. If I have 500 GB of images on my 1TB Mac HD (as I want it, and with sufficient empty space for apps, docs, etc.), and I allow that blasted Photos to install on my Mac, what will become of the 500 GB of images and library files, etc. now a part of iPhoto?
LAST, and maybe most important:
QU#4 - With about a million images "under management" here, but using the Mac as my master editing and viewing station, it is CRITICAL that I be able to use an integrated viewer (as I now use iPhoto to organize, do light edits, and export into storage or a photo editor for serious work). There is no way on earth I could do anything at all without each image being labeled by its image/filename. Everything I've ever used or owned does this - until Photos! At least in the import-from-iPhotos-library step (as I said, I did "upgrade" on my rMBP), what came through was one big stream of photos with no names, and nothing to divide one "album" or even one day from the next. THE most important aspect of iPhoto as a day-to-day organizer - being able to find images, preferable by date, image file, or titles I assign. This is now (with "Photos") just a great big iPhone photo feed, dumbed down from ALL useful functionality in my world of photography, anyway.
So the question: Can one import from an iPhone or camera into "Photos" on a Mac (Yosemite 10.10.2) along with information about the image, as in its file number at the least? Anyway to separate by date easily for finding or examining individual images? If not, I cannot find one single thing which "works" any longer, and I too feel betrayed by Apple. I came into this with Apple being the benchmark for graphics and photography, combined with Jobs' design ease. But elegant design doesn't require "dumbing down to the point of uselessness" and becoming just like a phone app for the selfie-masses...
Now two of my devices have the awful "Photos" and so add my two hands to the still-unanswered/unanswerable question of "how can I delete it" - while keeping iPhotos? If it takes up no space and leaves my imports to iPhoto alone, ok, that's something. But for me it's not at all a case (as it is for many, as I read) of not really caring or working too much about images. For me it is a significant and important part of my life, and I feel that a serious tool has been yanked away in favor of a toy which "anyone can use". Fine. But I'd like to know if there's any way to avoid Photos *before* it forces me to install it on my 3rd Apple computer, and I sense many would really like an answer to "How can I (or can I) remove Photos.
In sum: Are we stuck with this, is there anyway to mitigate the space an unused "Photos" will usurp, and aside from another 3rd party app, is there any way within Photos to have the basic functionality of iPhotos - to wit, geo-tagging, file labeling, and ability to maintain longtime "albums" as such, and with the entire "stream" having some way of dividing up into bite sized "events" as iPhoto so splendidly does? Sorry if I've offended anyone, I may be atypical, but I suspect others may be in my shoes as well. With a need for organizational tools, file-names, dates, and places.
Apologies too if "I should post a new topic", but I don't see an option and every thread I follow (six months or so now) seems to end up "here", more or less, with these issues, non-issues, fixes, and possible workarounds. I truly hope my past half-decade embracing iPhoto and Apple was not mis-placed. Feel free to share with Apple. Photos has a few nice things for some people, but for those who actually use and like and *depend* on iPhoto, this is an awful move away from serious photographers' needs towards being one big happy small-screen tile mosaic which is (in theory) made to share easily. I prefer iPhoto.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. (First time post, and possibly last, so not to worry - I won't write more tomes.) But Apple: I'm soooooo disappointed!