For those who have installed Photos Beta - a few questions (thanks)

Mark Alan Thomas · Mar 27, 2015

Shaul said:
There are shades of grey in between.

Quite a few posts here are written under the assumption that the world is partitions into two groups of people: the pro photographers with heavy and expensive equipment, who routinely do heavy-duty post processing, and the iPhone photographers, who know nothing and don't care about photography at all.

Well, there is at least one more group of photographers (which includes at least one person - myself). People in this group like to shoot with DSLR, know something about photography, but do very light post processing (and usually stick with JPEG rather than RAW).

I manage a library of amore than 80,000 photos. I tried Aperture and found it very powerful, but decided that for my relatively simple uses, iPhoto is simpler and more intuitive to run. I hardly do post processing, and when I do, the tools of iPhoto are sufficient for me. I do invest in organization: all the faces are tagged, I assign keywords, and create many smart albums.

There are two main issues with iPhoto that I would like to improve. First, its performance. While its performance on my desktop is OK, my Macbook Air has some difficulties. From the reports I read until now, I understand that Photos has much better performance.

The second issue is the problem of working with the same library across several machines. iCloud Photo Library solves this problem - but the cost is too high (10 times the cost of the new offer from Amazon).

Mark Alan Thomas said:

Shaul said:

I don't understand why anyone expects Photos to ever be anything but a rudimentary beginners app aimed at the iPhone set. Photos is a free app bundled with the OS. You can't expect a lot of value from a diamond ring you got as a prize in a box of Cracker Jack.

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Click to expand...

Steven Wandy · Mar 27, 2015

Mark Alan Thomas said:
Quite right. And in a lot of ways, I consider myself to be in this gray area.

I think that Apple needs to make iCloud storage unlimited and free for any customer running iOS or OS X on an Apple device. What better way to compete with the likes of Amazon which has shown itself willing to lose money in order to gain leverage in business? And Apple wouldn't even lose money. Oh, I suppose they might harm profits short term in some calculable way meaningful to a suit with a calculator, but I can't see how it couldn't eventually increase profits by encouraging sales of Apple hardware.

On the other hand there's a reason Tim Cook is CEO and I'm just sitting in this chair of mine.

I would love your idea but I don't see FREE UNLIMITED happening - and this is from someone who with their wifey own two iMacs, two iPhones and two iPad Minis. But I think that their pricing must come down to a more competitive level from the initial levels. Still don't know if I would upload my entire library from Aperture (over 65,000 images) just so I could see them on all my devices, but I would like to upload more than the ones we take with our iPhones.

Mike in Kansas · Mar 27, 2015

Mark Alan Thomas said:
Shaul said:

There are shades of grey in between.

Quite a few posts here are written under the assumption that the world is partitions into two groups of people: the pro photographers with heavy and expensive equipment, who routinely do heavy-duty post processing, and the iPhone photographers, who know nothing and don't care about photography at all.

Well, there is at least one more group of photographers (which includes at least one person - myself). People in this group like to shoot with DSLR, know something about photography, but do very light post processing (and usually stick with JPEG rather than RAW).

I manage a library of amore than 80,000 photos. I tried Aperture and found it very powerful, but decided that for my relatively simple uses, iPhoto is simpler and more intuitive to run. I hardly do post processing, and when I do, the tools of iPhoto are sufficient for me. I do invest in organization: all the faces are tagged, I assign keywords, and create many smart albums.

There are two main issues with iPhoto that I would like to improve. First, its performance. While its performance on my desktop is OK, my Macbook Air has some difficulties. From the reports I read until now, I understand that Photos has much better performance.

The second issue is the problem of working with the same library across several machines. iCloud Photo Library solves this problem - but the cost is too high (10 times the cost of the new offer from Amazon).

Mark Alan Thomas said:

Mark Alan Thomas said:

I don't understand why anyone expects Photos to ever be anything but a rudimentary beginners app aimed at the iPhone set. Photos is a free app bundled with the OS. You can't expect a lot of value from a diamond ring you got as a prize in a box of Cracker Jack.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

robgendreau · Mar 27, 2015

Shaul, I feel you. I don't always need the post processing in many of these applications. And I do tons of iPhone photos of all sorts of stuff from receipts to menus to dear family members and friends. I almost never do anything but crop, store and share that stuff.

But organization is critical to me. These might be some ugly-a photos, but they mean a lot to me. And that's my beef with iPhoto and Photos. They offer surprisingly little in that regard, and what they do provide is unnecessarily inflexible.

Let's take keywording. One of the things that drove me away from iPhoto to Aperture years ago was this "feature." Image files have been able to store keywords in a standardized format in IPTC for decades; once in files, it's usable in the Finder, Spotlight, Windows file explorer, and virtually every image editor, DAM, cataloguer or other software. But iPhotos didn't bother to write those keywords into files. I got a plugin to do that, and it was broken by an iPhoto upgrade and never upgraded. I had to move to Aperture, which was great. And discovered hierarchical keywords; what a boon!

Here we are, years later, and Photos has the same lame approach to keywords. What info you put into Photos stays in Photos. I could maybe understand this if you use a managed library, but with referenced photos? Ridiculous. You can spend your precious time captioning, titling, keywording, adding faces (but heaven forfend not geolocating) in Photos, but it won't make it into your photo files. That is such a glaring omission that it makes the Photos application basically useless even for the sort of person who wants an iPhoto substitute, and who never adjusts a single image. You can't even use Apple's own Spotlight searching on the info you add in Photos; how lame is that?

The more I use the beta, the more I see this as the kind of bloatware that is actually verging on harmful, rather than helpful. Even if they add some features (gee, "edit in..." would be helpful) I can't see, given these shortcomings, why it would be useful even for those in a gray area.

Mark Alan Thomas · Mar 27, 2015

robgendreau said:
Shaul, I feel you. I don't always need the post processing in many of these applications. And I do tons of iPhone photos of all sorts of stuff from receipts to menus to dear family members and friends. I almost never do anything but crop, store and share that stuff.

But organization is critical to me. These might be some ugly-a photos, but they mean a lot to me. And that's my beef with iPhoto and Photos. They offer surprisingly little in that regard, and what they do provide is unnecessarily inflexible.

Let's take keywording. One of the things that drove me away from iPhoto to Aperture years ago was this "feature." Image files have been able to store keywords in a standardized format in IPTC for decades; once in files, it's usable in the Finder, Spotlight, Windows file explorer, and virtually every image editor, DAM, cataloguer or other software. But iPhotos didn't bother to write those keywords into files. I got a plugin to do that, and it was broken by an iPhoto upgrade and never upgraded. I had to move to Aperture, which was great. And discovered hierarchical keywords; what a boon!

Here we are, years later, and Photos has the same lame approach to keywords. What info you put into Photos stays in Photos. I could maybe understand this if you use a managed library, but with referenced photos? Ridiculous. You can spend your precious time captioning, titling, keywording, adding faces (but heaven forfend not geolocating) in Photos, but it won't make it into your photo files. That is such a glaring omission that it makes the Photos application basically useless even for the sort of person who wants an iPhoto substitute, and who never adjusts a single image. You can't even use Apple's own Spotlight searching on the info you add in Photos; how lame is that?

The more I use the beta, the more I see this as the kind of bloatware that is actually verging on harmful, rather than helpful. Even if they add some features (gee, "edit in..." would be helpful) I can't see, given these shortcomings, why it would be useful even for those in a gray area.

I think you’re going through the same thing a lot of us are going through with Apple: realizing that Apple’s priority is to delight rather than to serve.

Adding keywords to photos is hard. It may not seem hard to you, but to the average Apple customer it is. They never do it. Apple knows this, and Photos reflects it.

You’re not in the Photos demographic.

robgendreau · Mar 27, 2015

Mark Alan Thomas said:
I think you’re going through the same thing a lot of us are going through with Apple: realizing that Apple’s priority is to delight rather than to serve.

Adding keywords to photos is hard. It may not seem hard to you, but to the average Apple customer it is. They never do it. Apple knows this, and Photos reflects it.

You’re not in the Photos demographic.

Ouch. You're right, of course. They don't like tags much either, and I use those. Sigh.

I think this is a key point. If you don't do anything with your images, Photos makes sense. Lack of features. Most editing hidden away. All-or-nothing automatic synching. All of which is fine, but somehow I doubt even your average Mac user, who has no camera but an iPhone, will ultimately be happy with it. But Apple's brief really only extends that far; it's up to others to provide tools for someone who wants to do more.

linetest · Mar 27, 2015

My wife will LOVE Photos.

My daughter will LOVE Photos.

I will NOT like Photos.

So two out of three. Apple will hit the target audience for sure. But that audience is not in these forums.

Shaul · Mar 28, 2015

robgendreau said:
Shaul, I feel you. I don't always need the post processing in many of these applications. And I do tons of iPhone photos of all sorts of stuff from receipts to menus to dear family members and friends. I almost never do anything but crop, store and share that stuff.

But organization is critical to me.

Also for me. I invested much efforts into organizing my iPhoto library and like my organization very much.

robgendreau said:
These might be some ugly-a photos, but they mean a lot to me. And that's my beef with iPhoto and Photos. They offer surprisingly little in that regard, and what they do provide is unnecessarily inflexible.

Let's take keywording. One of the things that drove me away from iPhoto to Aperture years ago was this "feature." Image files have been able to store keywords in a standardized format in IPTC for decades; once in files, it's usable in the Finder, Spotlight, Windows file explorer, and virtually every image editor, DAM, cataloguer or other software. But iPhotos didn't bother to write those keywords into files. I got a plugin to do that, and it was broken by an iPhoto upgrade and never upgraded. I had to move to Aperture, which was great. And discovered hierarchical keywords; what a boon!

I used iView Multimedia Pro before iPhoto and was trained (by the community here) to make sure my keywords are stored in the file's IPTC. But once I moved to iPhoto I decided to accept its philosophy. I am using managed library and find it extremely convenient - being able to move and copy my library as one unit. I also accept the idea that the library is a database of photos (not files) and if I need a file I need to export it from the library - in which case I can include the keywords, if needed.

Regarding hierarchical keywords - first, large part of my keywords was related to people. Thus, when faces were added, my use of keywords was reduced significantly. Second, as the search box and the smart album can search a part of the keyword, it is very easy to emulate hierarchy (by keywords such as "vacation:santorini").

Most of my organization is done via hierarchy of smart albums which I find very convenient and very powerful. I use combinations of faces, places, keywords and dates to define useful smart albums. My only wish is that they allow to include smart albums in the criteria of smart albums - like we do in iTunes. This simple extension would have added a lot of power to the smart albums.

robgendreau said:
Here we are, years later, and Photos has the same lame approach to keywords. What info you put into Photos stays in Photos. I could maybe understand this if you use a managed library, but with referenced photos? Ridiculous. You can spend your precious time captioning, titling, keywording, adding faces (but heaven forfend not geolocating) in Photos, but it won't make it into your photo files. That is such a glaring omission that it makes the Photos application basically useless even for the sort of person who wants an iPhoto substitute, and who never adjusts a single image. You can't even use Apple's own Spotlight searching on the info you add in Photos; how lame is that?

I must disagree (not with everything - I wish the geotagging would remain). If you accept the idea of managed library, writing into files is not an issue. I usually search for photos while in iPhoto and search for mail in Mail (and not using spotlight).

Just a disclaimer - I write all this without trying the Photos software. I assume that Photos is indeed an improvement over iPhoto.

robgendreau said:
The more I use the beta, the more I see this as the kind of bloatware that is actually verging on harmful, rather than helpful. Even if they add some features (gee, "edit in..." would be helpful) I can't see, given these shortcomings, why it would be useful even for those in a gray area.

robgendreau · Mar 28, 2015

Shaul said:
robgendreau said:

Shaul, I feel you. I don't always need the post processing in many of these applications. And I do tons of iPhone photos of all sorts of stuff from receipts to menus to dear family members and friends. I almost never do anything but crop, store and share that stuff.

But organization is critical to me.

Click to expand...

Also for me. I invested much efforts into organizing my iPhoto library and like my organization very much.

Shaul said:

These might be some ugly-a photos, but they mean a lot to me. And that's my beef with iPhoto and Photos. They offer surprisingly little in that regard, and what they do provide is unnecessarily inflexible.

Let's take keywording. One of the things that drove me away from iPhoto to Aperture years ago was this "feature." Image files have been able to store keywords in a standardized format in IPTC for decades; once in files, it's usable in the Finder, Spotlight, Windows file explorer, and virtually every image editor, DAM, cataloguer or other software. But iPhotos didn't bother to write those keywords into files. I got a plugin to do that, and it was broken by an iPhoto upgrade and never upgraded. I had to move to Aperture, which was great. And discovered hierarchical keywords; what a boon!

Click to expand...

I used iView Multimedia Pro before iPhoto and was trained (by the community here) to make sure my keywords are stored in the file's IPTC. But once I moved to iPhoto I decided to accept its philosophy. I am using managed library and find it extremely convenient - being able to move and copy my library as one unit. I also accept the idea that the library is a database of photos (not files) and if I need a file I need to export it from the library - in which case I can include the keywords, if needed.

Regarding hierarchical keywords - first, large part of my keywords was related to people. Thus, when faces were added, my use of keywords was reduced significantly. Second, as the search box and the smart album can search a part of the keyword, it is very easy to emulate hierarchy (by keywords such as "vacation:santorini").

Most of my organization is done via hierarchy of smart albums which I find very convenient and very powerful. I use combinations of faces, places, keywords and dates to define useful smart albums. My only wish is that they allow to include smart albums in the criteria of smart albums - like we do in iTunes. This simple extension would have added a lot of power to the smart albums.

Shaul said:

Here we are, years later, and Photos has the same lame approach to keywords. What info you put into Photos stays in Photos. I could maybe understand this if you use a managed library, but with referenced photos? Ridiculous. You can spend your precious time captioning, titling, keywording, adding faces (but heaven forfend not geolocating) in Photos, but it won't make it into your photo files. That is such a glaring omission that it makes the Photos application basically useless even for the sort of person who wants an iPhoto substitute, and who never adjusts a single image. You can't even use Apple's own Spotlight searching on the info you add in Photos; how lame is that?

Click to expand...

I must disagree (not with everything - I wish the geotagging would remain). If you accept the idea of managed library, writing into files is not an issue. I usually search for photos while in iPhoto and search for mail in Mail (and not using spotlight).

Just a disclaimer - I write all this without trying the Photos software. I assume that Photos is indeed an improvement over iPhoto.

Shaul said:

The more I use the beta, the more I see this as the kind of bloatware that is actually verging on harmful, rather than helpful. Even if they add some features (gee, "edit in..." would be helpful) I can't see, given these shortcomings, why it would be useful even for those in a gray area.

Click to expand...

Shaul · Mar 29, 2015

robgendreau said:
robgendreau said:

Another factor to consider is your storage. For managed users that library can be a convenient container of everything, although I suspect most never move it anywhere. But if you start using say a 256GB Air, and can't store all your photos in one library, you are gonna have issues. Ditto if you use iCloud Photo Library, since only one library syncs with it. If you have other photos you DON'T want to sync you can use a separate library, but then because all your keywords, etc are stored in that closed library you can't access it. Bottom line: you'll need space for one huge library. You can't both reference and manage an iCloud Photo Library BTW.

Click to expand...

Rob

One feature of Photos that I attracts me is the "optimized storage" option. If it works as reported it will actually solve all the storage problems for me. I will disable this option on my desktop, thus having my entire library cached. On my laptop, however, I will enable this option, and Photos will take care of performing the right caching. Here is what I read in

Loading…

www.imore.com

"If you select optimized storage, your computer will only store a percentage of your images on-device at high resolution, with the rest available from iCloud. That percentage changes depending on how much free space you have available on your Mac, and it intentionally doesn't take up the entirety of your hard drive. (You won't have to worry about your optimized library only leaving you 500 MB of free space to work with on a 128GB MacBook Air, for instance.)

High-resolution pictures and video are prioritized behind the scenes, with specific groups of images — say, favorites and recently edited photographs — chosen to be stored locally. Additionally, any time you open up an image to edit it, the high-resolution version is pulled down from iCloud's central repository."

robgendreau · Mar 29, 2015

Shaul said:
robgendreau said:

Shaul said:

Another factor to consider is your storage. For managed users that library can be a convenient container of everything, although I suspect most never move it anywhere. But if you start using say a 256GB Air, and can't store all your photos in one library, you are gonna have issues. Ditto if you use iCloud Photo Library, since only one library syncs with it. If you have other photos you DON'T want to sync you can use a separate library, but then because all your keywords, etc are stored in that closed library you can't access it. Bottom line: you'll need space for one huge library. You can't both reference and manage an iCloud Photo Library BTW.

Click to expand...

Rob

Click to expand...

One feature of Photos that I attracts me is the "optimized storage" option. If it works as reported it will actually solve all the storage problems for me. I will disable this option on my desktop, thus having my entire library cached. On my laptop, however, I will enable this option, and Photos will take care of performing the right caching. Here is what I read in

http://www.imore.com/what-you-need-know-about-photos-os-x

"If you select optimized storage, your computer will only store a percentage of your images on-device at high resolution, with the rest available from iCloud. That percentage changes depending on how much free space you have available on your Mac, and it intentionally doesn't take up the entirety of your hard drive. (You won't have to worry about your optimized library only leaving you 500 MB of free space to work with on a 128GB MacBook Air, for instance.)

High-resolution pictures and video are prioritized behind the scenes, with specific groups of images — say, favorites and recently edited photographs — chosen to be stored locally. Additionally, any time you open up an image to edit it, the high-resolution version is pulled down from iCloud's central repository."

Sort of nice. But I prefer manual control. I have tons of rejects of RAWs, bracketed shots, and so on, and just a lot of stuff I don't want on a mobile device, optimized or not. And ditto on the Mac with iOS photos, maybe even more so.

If Photos let me select what I synced, and if I could reference those photos, it might be useful. Not to mention I don't wanna have to pare down the total library just so I avoid paying Apple huge subscription fees. And I'm offline a lot, so having to download photos is a pain. I prefer LR smart previews, which perhaps are sort of the same idea, although I can manage those rather than have Apple do it.

It's not working very well in the beta from reports I've seen, so I didn't test it. But to be honest I'll never commit enough photos to it so that it would get a real workout. Just too many better alternatives. But I also didn't use Photo Stream, so I'm probably not a candidate. You can try iCloud Photo Library right now though; you don't need the Photos application to use it IIRC.

Mike in Kansas · Mar 29, 2015

robgendreau said:
It's not working very well in the beta from reports I've seen, so I didn't test it. But to be honest I'll never commit enough photos to it so that it would get a real workout. Just too many better alternatives. But I also didn't use Photo Stream, so I'm probably not a candidate. You can try iCloud Photo Library right now though; you don't need the Photos application to use it IIRC.

Can you point some of those out? What I've been following on the public forums, Photos itself is living up to its billing; it's the iCloud sync issues that are causing grief as it appears that is still buggy. I've had to delete my library on my iPhone numerous times and re-download everything. From the cloud. Right now I am only playing with 1000 images and 30 videos or so, so the re-sync is trivial.

Steven Wandy · Mar 29, 2015

Mike in Kansas said:
robgendreau said:

It's not working very well in the beta from reports I've seen, so I didn't test it. But to be honest I'll never commit enough photos to it so that it would get a real workout. Just too many better alternatives. But I also didn't use Photo Stream, so I'm probably not a candidate. You can try iCloud Photo Library right now though; you don't need the Photos application to use it IIRC.

Click to expand...

Can you point some of those out? What I've been following on the public forums, Photos itself is living up to its billing; it's the iCloud sync issues that are causing grief as it appears that is still buggy. I've had to delete my library on my iPhone numerous times and re-download everything. From the cloud. Right now I am only playing with 1000 images and 30 videos or so, so the re-sync is trivial.

I had no "issues" with Photos when I was playing with the beta (uninstalled it because a lot of other stuff was running a bit too slowly for me). But have been using iCloud Photo Library on 4 iOS devices (iPhone 6, iPhone 5 and two iPad Minis) and the only "issue" I have had was at times my iPhone 6 would get stuck while trying to upload photos to the iCloud Photo Library. Now it could be that the hotel we were staying at in Florida had dog slow Wifi - though I seem to remember the same thing happening when we were home before the trip - but the only way I could un-stuck the upload was as you said turning off the iCloud Photo Library on that device, turning it back on and waiting for the sync to download everything. Aside from that, the system worked pretty well, considering it is still technically in Beta.

What I also liked was the ability to finally upload and download photos from iCloud.com. So for now, I am doing is using Aperture to import my photos from the various camera memory cards and then exporting JPEGs of the photos I want on my iDevices and using the iCloud.com website to add them to the iCloud Photo Library. Not as convenient as Photo Stream - and obviously any adjustments I do in Aperture after the upload don't show up in the photos - but it still works for me because I don't want/need my entire photo library in the cloud for now.

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For those who have installed Photos Beta - a few questions (thanks)

Mark Alan Thomas

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