Review: Apple Photos

iPhoto, Aperture and Photos

27 June 2014 is the date when everything changed. This is when Apple announced it was pulling the plug on its two photo-editing applications, iPhoto and Aperture and replacing them with a single new Photos app.

To be fair, iPhoto was starting to show its age, so no-one was very worried about that. A new photo editing application was hardly likely to be dumbed down any further and a redesign and integration with Apple's new iCloud Photos could be just the thing to reinvigorate the Mac's default photo organizing application.

Aperture RIP

The death of Aperture was another thing entirely. To be fair, Aperture never really got the credit it deserved. Too many folk were focused on the editing tools, which were always a step behind those in Adobe Lightroom. But editing tools in a photo organizer aren't there to replace Photoshop, plug-ins or any other dedicated image-editing tools. Some photos would just need the handful of tweaks that Aperture could provide, while others would need to be sent on to a dedicated software app for the full treatment. That's true even for Lightroom, Aperture's deadly rival.

What nobody 'got' about Aperture was its inspired photo management tools. If you've got a big image library that's getting bigger all the time, you need a simple, flexible, versatile and fast way to keep track of your images. Aperture made (and still makes) Lightroom look clumsy.

Aperture had three special tricks. It let you store Albums alongside Projects (the equivalent of folders), where Lightroom, infuriatingly, splits them up. Aperture 'stacked' related images globally, so that they stayed stacked whatever Album or Project they appeared in. Lightroom doesn't – in Lightroom, 'stacks' only exist within the Folder or Album they were created in, and don't exist at all in Smart Albums. Lastly, the Aperture interface was clean, fast and bright. By contrast, the Lightroom interface is complex and oppressive.

So a lot of Aperture fans were understandably worried about what this new Photos app might retain of the Aperture DNA and, specifically, its organizing tools. Apple took the unusual step of showing users how to migrate their Aperture catalogs to Lightroom (hardly a good sign), but a lot of folk still hung on to see whether the new app could replace Aperture.

Well, we might as well get this out of the way. No it does not. Sorry. Aperture has gone, and everything that was great about it has gone with it.

So what is Photos really?

In reality, Photos is at exactly the same level as iPhoto. It's clean, modern and integrates neatly with the Photos iOS app and the iCloud Photos website – all you have to do is log into your iCloud account in your browser and click the Photos button. You might also have to do a little waiting if this is the first time you're hooking up Photos with your existing iOS devices and your iCloud account.

Photo organizing and iOS integration

The Mac OS X 10.10.3 update has finally integrated photo management across the Mac itself (with Yosemite's new Photos app), iOS devices and the iCloud browser tools. On all three platforms you should see the same photos organized in the same way – though there are slight differences – and photos added to one device should automatically appear on all the others. Eventually.

This is where you're dependent on the speed of your own Internet or cellular connection, the number of photos you shoot and whether you shoot regular JPEG images or raw files.

If you take most of your pictures with your iPhone or iPad things should be quicker because these will be relatively small JPEG files.

But if you shoot with a DSLR or compact system camera, and especially if you shoot (much larger) raw files, you're going to need some patience – you can import a batch of 300 raw images into the desktop Photos app easily enough, but how long it will take for these to work their way up on to the iCloud servers is another matter.

It's not just a speed issue. iCloud's storage plans don't favour heavy usage, and the basic free account gives you just 5Gb. There are price plans in between, but if you want 1Tb of storage for a big photo library it will cost you $US19.99/£14.99/AU$24.99 per month. You get that free on Flickr, or you could spend your money on a subscription service like Smugmug and get unlimited storage thrown in.

Getting organized

Photos uses the same basic organization structure on all three platforms, though with some differences between them.

It automatically organizes your pictures using the date and location information embedded in the images – that's fine if you shoot using an iOS device, but shots taken with your camera will only have date and time info (unless it has GPS or you add location data manually).

At the top level, Photos sorts your images into 'Years'. When you click on a Year, you see Collections for that year. Photos groups your pictures into Collections based on date ranges and location and it does a pretty good job of grouping them in an intuitive way – though if your photos don't have location data only dates, it's less effective.

When you click on a Collection, you see your pictures grouped into 'Moments'. Here, you can expect to see your shots grouped by the day they were shot and, if the location changes, by the location too. At this point you can double-click on a photo to view it at full size or press Enter to edit it.

On the top toolbar are what look like 'Back' and 'Forward' buttons on the toolbar but aren't. They don't show you the last thing you were looking at – instead, they move you up and down this simple four-tier hierarchy.

There is an exception. The browser view of your iCloud photos does not display Years and Collections, only Moments, so you could face a good deal of vertical scrolling if you want to browse your pictures in a web browser

Albums

Apple's automatic grouping tools might be fine for ad-hoc iPhone photography, but if you want to get more organised with your photo library (and non-iPhone images), you can use Albums instead. These work in the same way as iPhoto's used to – you can create regular Albums which you add pictures to manually, or you can create Smart Albums which use simple search criteria to filter out photos based on shooting (EXIF) data, filenames, descriptions, titles and more. There are no Ratings in Photos – pictures are 'Favorites' or they're not.

Using Albums is more structured and organised than relying on Years, Collections and Moments, and it's a relief that this system is still included.

When you create an Album you'll also see options for creating Books, Calendars, Cards, Slideshows and Prints. These then appear in the Projects tab and you order the finished product direct from Apple.

Editing your pictures

There was talk in the lead-up to the official Photos release that it would incorporate some Aperture-style editing tools. That's probably going a little too far, but Photos is certain a major step forward compared to the rather crude and clunky options in iPhoto.

Images open in a clean black window (this works even better in full-screen mode) with a set of discreet icons down the right hand side: Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust and Retouch. They look simple, but some of these options have hidden depths.

Simple fixes

The Enhance button is the simplest. You just click it to automatically fix the picture's contrast and color, and if you don't like the result, hit Command-Z or the 'Revert to Original' button in the top right corner.

The Rotate button is equally straightforward. One click rotates your picture 90 degrees anti-clockwise, so you just keep clicking until your picture is the right way round. This is useful if your vertical-format photos are being displayed on their side. It's not designed for straightening up skewed buildings or horizons, though, and for this you need the Crop tool directly below.

Hidden depths

This is where you start to see some of those hidden depths. The Crop tool gives you a rectangular marquee for cropping in on the areas of the picture you want to keep, but there's also a big dial at the side, calibrated in degrees, which you use to straighten pictures taken on a slant.

If you're printing photos or you want them to display full-screen on specific monitor sizes, you'll need to click the Aspect button – this pops up a list of common aspect ratios such as Square, 16:9 or 3:2 (for a standard 6 x 4-inch print, say). When you select one of these ratios, the crop marquee is constrained to those proportions.

The next button down, 'Effects' doesn't offer any hidden depths as such, but it does show some of the neat thinking behind the integration of Photos across devices. Each effect is a single-click fix with no parameters, but they're the same Effects you get in the iOS version and the same ones you can choose when you take pictures with your iOS device.

Adjustments: now we're getting serious

The first time you open the Adjustments panel you might think there's not much to see, which just a handful of basic-looking controls for 'Light', 'Color', 'Sharpen', say. But there are two things you need to do…

First, look for the 'Add' button at the top of the Adjustments panel. This displays a list of all the adjustments available, and it's a lot more than you see at first. They're separated into 'Basic', 'Details' and 'Advanced', and if you select them all you're then using the Photos editing tools at full power.

The other thing you need to do is click the unobtrusive disclosure arrow to the right of the adjustment title – it only appears when you hover the mouse pointer over this areas. This expands the tool panel to display some smart-looking sliders for making adjustments in detail – or you could just click the 'Auto' button at the top to see what happens.

Lastly, there's a 'Retouch' button which lets you blot out imperfections or unwanted objects in your pictures in one of two ways. You can either click and drag to 'heal' areas automatically using surrounding image data, or option-click to choose a source area and clone out defects in the normal way.

There's no rocket science here, and Photos certainly doesn't match the content-aware technology in Photoshop, or dedicated tools like Macphun SnapHeal, but it's fine for sensor spots, say, and other simple fixes.

Verdict

Many will have hoped that Photos would somehow bridge the gap between iPhoto and Aperture and maybe make an acceptable substitute for the latter. It doesn't. Aperture users hanging on to see what Photos would be like will have to heave a heavy sigh and migrate to Lightroom after all.

Instead, you should think of Photos as the 'new' iPhoto, and it does this rather well. You can see what Apple has done with the iOS and iCloud integration and Photos does give a uniform experience across all these platforms, and the use of date and location info to group images is clever – though it does rather lock out regular digital camera images.

The 5Gb free storage is nowhere near enough, however. It means that just at the point where you're starting to think this could be useful, Apple asks you for some money to upgrade your storage. That's bad salesmanship.

The project/gift item tools look very much like those in iPhoto or Aperture and, again, you're locked in to Apple's own gift and printing service. If you want to use a third-party service you'll need to export your images to the Finder and take it from there.

The new editing tools are very good, however. They work on both JPEG and raw images, so even more advanced photographers won't be left out – though, irritatingly, if you try to import JPEG/raw pairs, which many photographers shoot, Photos displays them as a single item with the JPEG version displayed. It's not clear how you're supposed to get to the raw file without deleting them all and re-importing the files choosing the raw versions only.

The adjustments in Photos are non-destructive, so you can go back and undo any changes you've made at any point in the future – or, if you like to see side-by-side comparisons, you can make a copy of the picture first and then edit that.

Like iPhoto (and Aperture), Photos will import your photos into its internal library by default, but you can also 'reference' them in their existing location to keep down the size of your library.

But even though the editing tools are good, Photos still offers only the most basic of image-editing tools. In fact, you should think of it as a 'photo enhancer' rather than an image-editor. Worryingly, there seems to be no provision for external editors like Elements or Photoshop – in iPhoto you could nominate an external editor for more advanced adjustments.

We like

Photos' automatic grouping using location data (if your pictures have it) and dates works very well, so that if you're not really into digital imaging and you just want a tool to help you organise and find your shots simply, it's really effective.

And while there are some minor differences across platforms, Photos really does provide a unified photo browsing and editing experience whatever device you're using.

The editing tools are a big step up from those in iPhoto, too, and while they won't replace those in a proper image-editor, they're fine for enhancing less-than-perfect pictures, which, for most casual snappers, is all you really want.

We dislike

Apple has pitched Photos at a much lower level than many would have been hoping for. It's great for casual photographers who simply use a camera to record their lives, but for people whose hobby is photography, it's too limiting.

Worse than that, the thing at the very heart of this new system – iCloud – feels like the weakest link. Upload speeds will always depend on the speed of your connection, of course, and while all your pictures everywhere instantly might be the dream, the reality involves a good deal more patience. It's measly free storage limit that really grates, though. Apple users pay plenty for the hardware, so they might expect Apple to cut them some slack with online storage.

Verdict

Photos is slick, efficient and in many respects unexpectedly powerful. It's free, it runs on all your Apple devices and delivers the same experience – and the same photos – on all of them. But perhaps the best way to sum it up is to say that it's designed for people who take photographs; it's not designed for photographers.

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