| Cult of Mac

Retroactive app lets you run Aperture, iTunes in macOS Catalina

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screenshot of Retroactive from GitHub
It's OK to update to macOS Catalina. Retroactive will modify Aperture, iTunes and iPhones with the new OS.
Screenshot: Retroactive/GitHub

Apple told us it was time to move on when it killed two of its most popular apps, Aperture for photographers and iTunes, a music storage system that launched many DJ careers.

But an open-source app, aptly named Retroactive, brings new life to those beloved programs so that they can run in macOS Catalina.

Divide and conquer your Mac photo library

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Is your Mac photo library a mess? The PowerPhotos Mac photo app can help.
Is your Mac photo library a mess?
Photo: picjumbo.com/Pexels CC

This post is presented by Fat Cat Software, maker of PowerPhotos.

If there’s one thing photo libraries do, it’s grow. And as they increase in size, they also become harder to organize. Duplicates creep in, folders get mixed up, and the size can easily get out of control. But a Mac app called PowerPhotos offers new moves for managing your digital photo library.

Hands on with OS X’s new Photos app

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Photos for Mac is coming this spring. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Photos for Mac is coming this spring. Photo: Stephen Smith/Cult of Mac

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.

8 awesome features in Apple’s new Photos for Mac

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The new photo viewer in Photos for Mac. Now coming this spring. Photo: Apple
Photos for Mac is now in beta. Photo: Apple

Apple is finally letting developers get their hands on Photos, the long-awaited successor to iPhoto. Revealed at Worldwide Developers Conference 2014, the new app is a complete revamp of iPhoto, allowing Mac users to organize, edit, share and print their favorite photos. It packs powerful new tools into a gorgeous, OS X Yosemite-style user interface.

The public launch of Photos isn’t expected until spring, but we took the beta for a spin today to get acquainted with the future of Apple photo software. We found eight new features you’re going to love.

Take a look:

Apple delays Photos for Mac release until spring

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The new photo viewer in Photos for Mac. Now coming this spring. Photo: Apple
The new photo viewer in Photos for Mac. Now coming this spring. Photo: Apple

When Apple killed development of iPhoto and Aperture last summer, it promised a replacement that would blend the best of the two apps into one solution: Photos for Mac.

Originally promised to arrive in “early 2015,” Photos for Mac is available for the first time in a new developer-only beta of OS X Yosemite. Unfortunately, everyone else will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it.

How to nuke pesky location data from your iPhone photos

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"You were in Vegas without me!?" Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

These days, any photo you shoot with your iPhone or other smartphone will typically contain location data (unless you have that feature turned off) to allow apps like iPhoto to place your images on a map.

Even photo-sharing services use this data, with some — like Flickr — posting it prominently on your photo pages (along with all the other EXIF data, like shutter speed and f-stop).

If you don’t want the location of your photos to be known, the Yosemite version of OS X’s Preview can take care of it for you. Let’s strip that location data before we post that photo to the Web, OK?

5 super-quick iPhoto tips to make your photos even better

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Don't overlook this great bit of free software for your photos. Photo: Stephen Smith/Cult of Mac
Don't overlook this great bit of free software for your photos. Photo: Stephen Smith/Cult of Mac

iPhoto is a free download for everyone these days, making it a basic bit of kit for anyone dealing with the deluge of photographic data we seem to collect. Still, it’s often overlooked by the best of us because of its limitations.

That’s unfortunate, because the simple program offers some pretty useful features that can quickly let you get on with enjoying your photos rather than tweaking them.

Here are five simple tips for using Apple’s built-in photo “shoebox,” letting you make your photos better and more organized even more quickly.

iOS 8 gives the Photos app superpowers

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Photos on iOS 8 are so good that you will be able to ditch a whole home-screen folder’s worth of editing and organizing apps. That’s not an exaggeration: Apple’s new mobile OS packs in so many great new features that – even without the extending abilities of iOS 8’s new plug-ins – you can do pretty much any edit right there in the photos app.

The camera, too, has gotten an upgrade, and – maybe the most important for some – so has the iCloud Photo Stream, which will now give access to all your photos, from any device, whenever you want.

Sounds pretty good huh?

Apple kills development of Aperture and iPhoto for OS X

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aperture

Apple gave developers an early preview of its upcoming Photos app this month at WWDC, but what it didn’t tell anyone is that new app for iOS will also overthrow Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture apps for OS X.

A new Photos app for OS X isn’t expected to land on Macs until next year, but in a statement released to The Loop, Apple says it has already stopped development on its professional photography application, Aperture.

Here’s the official statement:

Apple just obsoleted the Mac and nobody noticed

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Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, unveils OS X Yosemite to the world at WWDC 2014. Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple is finally showing us its idea of how we’ll compute in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, this pristine vision of our computing destiny — unveiled after years of secret, patient and painstaking development — aligns perfectly with how we currently use our computers and mobile devices.

The keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month not only showed off a new way to think about computing, based on data not devices, but also silenced pretty much every criticism leveled at the company over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s new way of doing things, which fulfills Steve Jobs’ post-PC plan by minimizing the importance of the Mac.