Apple’s upcoming Photos app will give Mac users powerful new tools to manage, tweak and share their favorite images. While it won’t be released until later this year, we got a chance to play around with the beta version now available to developers, and we found it to be an easy-to-use and streamlined piece of software.
For a detailed and visual look at this new iOS-influenced app, check out the video below for a quick run through some of Photos’ hottest new features.
With these tips under your belt, you’ll be that much more of a Photos power user this spring when you finally you get your hands on the feature-packed app, which will replace iPhoto and Aperture.
We’ve got plenty more where that came from. Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.
Ste Smith is Cult of Mac’s video guy based in the UK. Ste has been working in the media industry for over 8 years and is a keen Apple fan. Follow Ste on Twitter @stesmith10 and Facebook.
10 responses to “Hands on with OS X’s new Photos app”
I have had a strange issue, my photos are organised with the correct date on my Mac (using this app) but synced to my icloud account they are showing up with the wrong date on my iOS devices. Anyone have any ideas?
Seems nice and quite useful. Except the disgusting iOS7-like design. Makes it very unusable and quite unpleasant to work with. Also I dislike that Apple are getting rid of the “i” prefix. It worked really well…
One more thing… Is this new Photos app as buggy and unusable as OS X Yosemite and iOS 8?
I really can’t say that i find either OS X or iOS “buggy and unusable”, for most of the issues a clean install is quite effective remedy; I have two Macbook Pros and an iMac, the only bug I have is “wake from sleep” crash I experience on the iMac (disabled sleep altogether). It’s a bit annoying, but apart from that I have no other problems, and the same goes for iOS. The iMac is now running 10.10.3 with Photos, and both the OS and the app are working quite well. Photos is fast and crashed only once in several days of heavy use, which is less aggravation than I can say for iPhoto. Too much unused white area is the only complaint – iOS paradigms don’t always work on a big screen, Apple – but it’s somewhat remedied by turning on sidebar; also, editing images in Photos is quite impressive “just works” Apple-like experience and made me quite enthusiastic about their software after a long while.
Thanks for your reply Peter.
I’m happy to hear your devices are working well with the latest versions of iOS and OS X. Unfortunately I haven’t been so lucky. In my experience, since after iOS 6, updates have been getting more and more buggy… Things just don’t work as they used to. Honestly it’s a shame, I’ve always been drawn to Apple because of their attention to detail, but I hate to say this but since we lost Steve Jobs, they are really demonstrating a lack of this. Same with OS X.
Definitely agree with you on the excessive white space!! I’m excited to test out the new Photos app though. It does seem impressive, as you said!
Yes, I agree that sometimes issues escalate to the level of frustration, and for the premium we pay for Apple stuff we are entitled to much better experience than that. However, I believe we’re on the verge of Snow Leopardish move, where Apple will stop adding heaps of – more or less buggy – new features and will consolidate the existing stuff. Photos in that respect, although new, seems to reflect the fresh attitude – a solid piece of software with useful features. I was impressed by the new Enhance function – it corrected a bunch of important photos with yellowish tint (poor lighting and wrong equipment for it) to a perfect colour in one click. Insanely great ;)
I know what you mean but Every manufacturer these days is releasing i-this i-that. I don’t mind apple moving away from that nomenclature.
Will the new app allow you to still create Events?? That is how I organise pictures for my family.
It seems from the video that Apple has abandoned the high end photo editing provided by Aperture to provide a easier to use iPhoto type app. I’ve been holding out on moving to Lightroom, hoping that the new Photos app would prove to be a feature functional equivalent of Aperture. Any further information and thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Does it support stacks like Aperture? If not, it’s worthless to me.
Where can I get photos app? you guys talk about it as if it is already available but I don’t see it in app store.