Well, Photos is released just as I was trying to consolidate/sort out my
photos so I thought I'd give it a spin. Here are my first thoughts in
case anyone finds them useful or interesting.
1) It imports some but not all of the iPhoto information. Eg Events seem
to be consigned to the dustbin though it retains whatever you had in
iPhoto. It shows photos like it does on iOS, in collections,
chronologically. This works quite well when you get used to it but if
you spent a lot of time getting everything just right, it may be
infuriating as you have to find another way to organise things into
albums. Oh, and it garbled a lot of my albums and even some dates, so
photos are in the wrong place: maybe it picked up a modification date, I
can't tell.
2) You can have it all in the cloud (paying over 5gb) and therefore
selective sync with iOS or other machines is a thing of the past. If
this does indeed - as it seems to - lets me prune my vast library via
the phone rather than just on the Mac, good. But so far, it seems to
merge everythnig on all my devices so deleted items reappeared. I'll
check properly when it finally finishes uploading in 2016.
3) Faces is ultimately similar though it presents itself slightly
differently. Infuriating aspect #1: it presents them a few at a time
(maybe four on average) then it's a click to the next page for the next
four, then the next, with lots of empty screen that could easily have
been filled. You then discover infuriating aspect #2 at the end of this,
when it says you have manually added X (say, 30) and it's automatically
added 3 or so. This is presumably ones it was sure of but since iPhoto
was prone to labelling all babies as the same person (etc), I wish it
had allowed me to turn that off and do them all manually.
4) Deeply infuriating is the fact that it's virtually impossible to get
to the photo in the Finder. You've got the Share.... menu (which ignores
any changes I make to the prefs and thus becomes irritatingly irrelevant
eg Vimeo which I don't use, and being unable to add Devonthink, which I
do want to use). But if you eg want to drag a photo to a Twitter DM, you
can forget it unless you want to export it to the Finder, find it in the
Finder, drag to wherever, then delete the extra copy. Lots of extra
steps you didn't need before.
5) I can't remember if iPhoto had its own duplicate finding (iTunes has
a crude one) but there's nothing right now. It is good at telling you're
trying to import a photo you already imported though.
I wish they had finetuned it more and been a bit less bossy about it (eg
just let us get to the original photo, will you? Was it really necessary
to lock them away quite so thoroughly?) but I think the work has been to
get the synchronising working properly. You can have it in the cloud
and/or store local copies depending how much space you have which is
good.
So I hope they consider this a 1.0 release and are going to keep
refining it (and that they restore some of the ways of getting to your
own photos!)
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