Apple released a developer preview of its new Photos app for OS X Yosemite on Thursday. The app is part of the new OS X 10.10.3 beta now available to members of Apple's Developer Program.
First previewed at WWDC 2014, Photos is a replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture.
OS X Yosemite: Apple’s new Photos app explained. Monday, August 18, 2014 12:31 pm 7 Comments. News “Photos for iOS 8 brings significant enhancements to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. For starters, OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 includes the new Photos app, which replaces the old and clunky iPhoto and lets you browse photos by time and location in several new views. Create a new Photos library and see if your issues persist: Quit Photos. Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos. In the dialog that appears, click Create New. Give your new library a name, then click OK. Note whether Photos opens successfully with this new library. To return to your main Photos library, quit Photos. With the Photos app on OS X Yosemite open, select the 'Albums' from the list of tabs at the top of the screen. Next week's Apple event will see Apple introduce three new Macs with Apple. Don't like the new Photos app in OS X Yosemite 10.10.3? Apple didn't remove iPhoto from your computer; it was only removed from your dock. Before you go back, however, make sure that you've looked around the new Photos app to confirm that the feature you want isn't there. The new Photos app is very sparse.
See also: OS X Yosemite Review: An Equal Partner for iOS 8
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Photos works in conjunction with iCloud Photo Library to help keep all your photos on all of your Apple devices accessible, manageable and in-sync.
We've had a day or so to play with Photos, and although it is definitely still in beta, the app has been promising so far.
New look, new approach
The app has been designed from the ground-up to better address the photo needs of today's user. If you think about it, the way we manage our digital photo libraries today differs from how it was even ten years ago.
It's sometimes hard to remember a world before our phones became our primary cameras. Apps such as iPhoto and Aperture were built for a time when user's primarily took photos with a digital camera, transferred those photos to a computer over a USB cable or a card reader, edited those photos into albums or sets and then either printed the albums out or burnt them to CD-Rs.
As a result, looking at Photos, especially compared to the old iPhoto or Aperture apps, feels distinctly modern. Snap for mac app free.
The app was built with all of the latest OS X Yosemite UI. The windows are translucent, the chrome and the buttons are minimal and the app is designed to be front and center.
The app is designed into sections:
Within the Photos section, photos are organized by moments, collections and years — in a manner very similar to the Photos app on iOS 8.
You can use gestures to sort through years worth of photos and to view photos by date or by location.
New editing tools
The biggest change to the app is with its editing tools. Click on any photo to view in its full glory. At this point, you can add a photo to a project or album, identify people in it and most importantly, edit the photo.
Clicking on auto-enhance will automatically apply the most common settings to photos — a great way to even out white balances or skin tones or to lighten up an overcast image.
The crop tool will look familiar to iOS 8 users because it has a similar look at feel as the tools on the iPhone and iPad. This makes cropping and straightening photos extremely easy. The auto-straighten tool can find the horizon in a background and instantly adjust a photo accordingly. You can also crop photos to specific aspect ratios.
The Filters menu brings all the filters from iOS 8 to the Mac. One-click and you can preview how a photo looks with a number of new Instagram-like filters.
New Photos App Mac Yosemite 10.10
The best feature, however, are the new Smart Adjustments. These sliders allow users to easily control how an image looks, without having to bother with a lot of tools and settings.
In the 'Light' adjustments, users can just move the slider to granularly adjust settings like exposure, highlights and brightness.
Here's where the photo editing tools get super cool: click on a down arrow and you can expand the tools to access specific sliders and settings for more granular controls.
This means that if you're a more advanced user — or you just want to learn — you can adjust brightness, black point and contrast to your own specifications.
New Photos App Mac Yosemite El Capitan
In this way, Photos is a great hybrid between iPhoto and Aperture, wherein it's easy for beginners but powerful for experienced users.
You can also adjust black and white levels and color settings. You can even go to advanced adjustments to add a histogram, adjust noise reduction and create vignettes.
https://anbrown659.weebly.com/blog/non-essential-mac-apps. It also includes pro-quality white balance options and there is an auto white balance tool that works really, really well in our tests.
The new Photos app might note sate all hardcore professional Aperture users, but frankly, it doesn't really have to. Adobe has made a great product with Lightroom and if you're a pro, that's probably what you should use. For everyone else, however, we think Photos will do the job and then some.
iCloud Photo Library
The biggest feature within Photos is how it operates with your other Apple devices. For years, Apple has had a shared photo stream between its devices. In theory, the idea was that photos you took on your iPhone would show up in iPhoto on your Mac and albums you created on your Mac would sync back to your iPhone or iPad. In theory.
In practice, the integration always felt clunky and incomplete. We're happy to report that even in this developers preview, the iCloud integration with Photos for OS X and iOS 8.2 beta is fast. Like, really fast.
A photo I took on an iPhone 6 showed up in my Photos library almost instantaneously. Photo edits, albums and projects I created on my Mac were likewise visible on the iPhone.
Even better, the non-destructive edits you make on your iPhone or on the Mac can be undone or further edited. So if I make some changes to a photo on my Mac and then decide later that I want to revert it to its original state, I can do that.
Yosemite App Store
iCloud Photo Library is also designed to store not just your photos from your iPhone or iPad but all your past photos from your iPhoto or Aperture libraries in one place.
Yosemite Photos For Sale
To do this, you'll probably need to have a bigger iCloud data plan — and the Photos app will show you how much space your photo library will take in iCloud and you can decide if you want to upgrade. Apple's cloud pricing options are now much more affordable than they were before and the ability to have all of your photos on all of your devices will likely appeal to a lot of people.
That said, there are still a few caveats with iCloud Photo Library. My biggest issue with how the program works now is that there isn't a way to keep your files in the cloud but not necessarily on your phone.
What I mean by that, is say I have 70GB of photos in my photo library in Photos for OS X. I can have this saved in iCloud Photo Library and that's awesome — but it also means that I need enough room on that device to load all of my photos.
In a perfect world, I would be able to backup my photos to iCloud Photo Library and the Photos app, without having to have them necessarily have those photos taking up space on my phone.
Right now, you can choose to optimize your phone or computer storage, which means that smaller files are stored on your phone or computer while the full-resolution version is on the cloud. We'd love the ability to just have photos on the cloud and keep only certain albums available locally (you could choose to download them later).
Still early, but it looks good
Photos for OS X is still very much in developer beta. A full beta for consumers will be available soon and the final product is expected this spring.
For now though, we're impressed with what Apple has done with Photos. It's a brand new app that manages to be powerful and fast. It's editing options are great and the iCloud Photo Library integration actually works.
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