I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream.<p>Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud.<p>The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.
What terrifies me (as a MacBook Pro owner) is the recent realisation (due to some random corruption of iphoto data, and yes I have a backup device to restore from) that OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem sitting on top of ever-expanding storage devices that many of us are depending on to archive our photos and other data.<p>I don't understand why Apple keeps pushing the capabilities of the system further and their hardware but haven't yet addressed the critical data storage issues that are eating away at the edges.
Does this still come with the required bloated and brittle metadata libraries and structure that prevents you from setting it up on a shared NAS so that your other non-Mac machines can access it?<p>This has always been my complaint with iPhotos, and I'm betting this is no different.<p>Ideally, it would manage to keep the metadata abstracted from the structure so that you could set it up however and wherever you wanted.<p>But unfortunately for users, their model isn't about building an open and flexible photo storage solution, but rather a solution that depends on the iCloud and the need to purchase more storage capacity.
Photos are probably the most valuable digital files quite everyone has. And as with all things that are precious, there comes (or at least should come) caution.<p>There is nothing that I fear more than loosing my photos, my visual biography.<p>That is why I am super conservative when it comes to software that wants to handle my photos.<p>What are the requirements for software that I allow to manage my photos:<p>- Very good chance of still being in the market in 5-10 years. This basically rules out all Google (Picasa), Apple (iPhoto, Aperture, Photos) products.<p>- Possibility to backup my photos on various destinations (not only one commercial cloud)<p>- A library format that is readable from external applications (SQL, metadata files)<p>- Good tools to search, compare and sort my library<p>- At least support two major platforms natively<p>Unfortunately, the only software that meets most of these requirements is Adobe's Lightroom. And this is very sad:<p>- It has too many features that I do not need - I am not a professional photographer<p>- It does not care about native UIs and its usability I still find weak<p>- It asks for a premium price for professional photographers (both the one-time fee and the creative cloud version)<p>How about alternatives?<p>- Aperture was a very good alternative, despite being only available for Mac<p>- I was disappointed by all open source alternatives; most of which are not easily available for Mac and Windows (Lightzone, Darkroom, Digikam, Shotwell)<p>- Digikam comes closest, but as it's KDE based, installation and native support on Windows and Mac is still weak<p>- Capture One Pro 8 works on Mac and Windows but is even more expensive than Lightroom and hence not worth it<p>- I do not know about any other photo management tool that is stable, multi platform and meets most of the conservative demands
Dang, I want to love this as a "just works" kind of solution, but as soon as I turn on Cloud Sharing, I get dinged with the need to pay for an iCloud capacity upgrade.<p>(Edit:) 5GB seems like a pretty measly free level.
1TB of storage space is $240 a year with iCloud. Amazon Cloud Drive is $12 a year for unlimited photos or $60 a year for unlimited everything. I'll stick to Lightroom and Cloud Drive for my photo needs. Until Apple join the league of Google and Amazon with their cloud storage options, then I'm not interested, even if their products are pretty good.
Given how little traction Apple has gained with web apps and storage, you'd think they'd be a little humble and offer a native app that interoperated with Android devices, and different storage backends (store you're photos on Amazon, organize them with Photos). Either that or unlimited storage.<p>I can't remember the last time I considered a distributed storage service from Apple reliable, secure or flexible.<p>Additionally, as an Android user with a Lenovo T440s with Linux and a MacBook Pro, I am increasingly frustrated with how closely integrated all the Apple toys are these days.<p>And I know it's kind of always been this way, but it seems they're growing myopic with regards to other devices people may own. While I'm not in the majority with Linux on one device I KNOW I'm not in the minority with an Android device.
I have a huge (250GB+) iPhoto library, and it is what is holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS.<p>Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient.<p>Even worse, parts of my photos were imported as RAW and iPhoto was doing its own magic to convert them to JPEG.<p>iPhoto was not bad a bad program, I actually liked it, but relying on it was a lesson for me to never again store my photos in a closed-source program.<p>Currently I'm still looking for alternatives, Lychee (<a href="http://lychee.electerious.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lychee.electerious.com/</a>) looks nice at first sight, but I don't want a PHP server with MySQL managing my photos.<p>IMO the nicest solution would be a well-defined photo directory format that gets indexed by a fast server implementing an API that you can use to access all photos through client programs. It could keep an SQLite database in the directory to store metadata, but if it is gone, the directories should still make sense.
They finally got this right. Photos, for me, was a major upgrade to iPhoto. Allowing me to have full resolution copies on numerous machines, and size optimized copies on mobile, secondary machines with no syncing effort on my part.<p>May not be for everyone; but I love it.
Notice how the Apple screenshots are always full of photos? That only happens if you take a lot of shots everytime you take photos, like when you are on vacation. If not, if you only take occasional random shots, your screen looks like mine, with lonely photos on the left side of the screen, and then acres of white space to the right of them.
What I really need is something that allows both my laptop and my wife's laptop to view and edit the photos. Not even simultaneously. Just from two different machines and two different accounts. Right now we store the photos on a NAS Picasa to view and edit them. (Picasa hates network drives, but symlink magic fixes that.) I don't really like Picasa (It insists on G+ too much, and the UI doesn't integrate well with MacOSX, specifically Finder.), but it works better than iPhoto for large collections.<p>Unless I'm mistaken, this looks like the standard Apple approach where its tied to a single iCloud account. Is family photo sharing/editing really that difficult? We can't be the only ones that want that right?<p>Also 1 TB isn't enough space. We have 14 years of photos we'd have to upload. That's a lot, and these price points are just too expensive.
The one feature I'm really going to miss is the ability to set the location of photos manually, as I was able to do in iPhoto. This would make using the "Places" feature work really well as I could browse photos by geographic location and insure the photos taken on an iPhone (with GPS data embedded) and photos taken with my older digital camera (without this embedded GPS data) would show up at the specified location. Does anyone know any ways to manually set a photo or album's location in the new Photos app? (Or do I need to revert to using something like Exiftool <a href="http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/" rel="nofollow">http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/</a> to set GPS data manually prior to importing pictures into Photos?)
I've been using the betas and have added most of my photos to iCloud Photo Library.<p>My only issue with Photos.app is that there's no way to geotag and add/edit metadata on either platform. I've resorted to writing an iOS app to give me that functionality (using the new-in-iOS 8 Photos framework).
I may not be with it, or hip, or up-to-date on the current feelings compelled by the zeitgeist, but I'm not at <i>all</i> interested in the Cloud features of this release. At all. In fact, its a reason for me to forget about the product - because if I know one thing, if an Apple product has cloud support, its going to be everywhere, and unavoidable. They'll be compelling me to use it at every step of the way - heck, probably its all enabled by default.<p>So what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and <i>still have access to my media library</i>, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Why is it easier for Apple to move all these features into their data center, and not just fix their operating system at the user level to make it safe, secure - and Apple-easy - to share content directly from the machine itself?<p>I've got an rPi at home, doing the job that Apple wishes I would do with its cloud. My rPi is available and accessible from anywhere on the Internet, with ease. Its got all my media that I want access to on the road .. and it works seamlessly with little fuss. If a $35 device can do that - admittedly with a modicum of tinkering on my (not in-experienced) part - then why can't a $99 'bleeding edge' operating system do it, without requiring that I just give all my content to a third party?<p>Because from where I see it, Apple, you're not competing very well with m $35 media-sharing device that just plain works.
I've got 200GB+ of photos,maybe 10 times that in video, all because I have kids and I'll probably never look at most of them again , yet I NEED to save them somewhere!
I have a frew questions for users who already have Photos:<p>1. Is it possible to use Photos without paying for iCloud?
2. Does it work like iPhotos where there's a huge library that's created and organized by Photos and I can't just go in that folder using finder to look at something?
3. Is it fast?
This is one product that's definitely not for me. The UI is dumbed down beyond the pain threshold, removing access to the settings that interest me, organising photos after criteria that are irrelevant for me. And iCloud storage? Worst idea ever since mobile carriers make you pay through the nose for every byte of download and thrice as much for upload.<p>I can't for the life of me figure out who this product is for. Apple destroyed what has worked before, leaving us with broken crap that's too expensive to use, if you even wanted to use it.<p>There was a time when I used to look forward to what Apple might come up with next. By now, I only expect more destruction of previously existing functionality in exchange for higher prices. Apple has become a poisoned fruit.
Finally! I wonder why Apple didn't discuss this at the recent watch event? This is a huge feature that is a big selling point. Maybe Apple wants users to trickle in?
I would love to be able to use my unlimited storage capacity with Amazon prime as a cloud storage center for this, but alas.<p>It's obvious that the seamless cloud storage will become the default moving forward, I just hope it doesn't take too long for other services to implement the same functionality. I really really don't want to be locked into Apple's ecosystem, but damn are they making it tempting.
Even though this functionality is very handy, I think I will never trust iCloud ever again due to many loss of data and time to solve syncing problems. If this photo syncing is anything like keychain syncing, I will have very bad time and while password recovery only takes time, photo recovery won't be possible.
I use Lightroom on my MacBook pro and my library is saved inside Dropbox. I can easily share folders with a Dropbox link and my photos are synced everywhere. The Dropbox upgrade gives me a terabyte of storage and can be used for more than just photos.
Really excited to try this out, had bad experience with iPhoto's performance the past few months.<p>I recently switched to using the Photos functionality of Synology. It's not as pretty as Apple's software but it's very fast.
How can I have two photo streams both feed into the same Photos account? My wife and I take tons of pictures of our kids. How should we configure things so that we can see all the pictures we've both taken?
There is a lot of references to "your" in the OP, but I suspect it is not the plural form. The problem my family has is our ever diverging personal photo collections. I've yet to find a solution.
Hopefully some of its new features make it to iOS8 "Photos" app. The various views (like "Year") and editing tools would fit perfectly for iPad and to some extend also iPhone.
Anyone know if this will work in a household that has a mix OSX and Android devices? Eg, will I be able to see the photos on my Samsung S4 that my wife have just uploaded with her iPad mini?
<i>"And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud"</i><p>So, the big question: is that really _can_be, or is it _must_be stored in the cloud?
This is great.<p>Even cooler: Print Products!<p><a href="http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/osx/print-products/</a> (discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342945</a>)<p>A 20 page hardcover photo book costs $29.99. This is awesome.
I currently use Carousel by Dropbox and have 200GB worth of pics and family videos. Ofcourse I use selective sync to not have them on my MBP<p>I like Apple photos auto smart sync and a native Mac app.<p>If I want to move/copy my pics from Dropbox to iCloud drive, any alternatives to having download them to local machine and upload again to Apple server? Any cloud based sync product that supports iCloud?
Would really like to see Album Sharing rather tha shared photostreams. Help reduce duplicate photos on the device.<p>Also as a Family Sharer I'd prefer the icloud space to be shared across all. Rather than buy 200GB for 5 people I can get away with 200GB for everyone.
I don't care that much about the "cloud" stuff -- I already pay for unlimited online backups -- but it looks like Photos will finally do lens correction. Yay! Now I can finally shoot raw without messing with Lightroom.
iCloud doesn't scale in this case. Take about 1 1:00 video per week for a few years and you've already gone over the 1TB iCloud service limit. Anyone who's kept their personal photo history for 7+ years probably already goes over this limit.<p>It's pretty sad, because it's probably the fastest photo management app out there.
My problem with iCloud Photos is that I have 100 GB of photos that will now show up on my iPhone and iPad. I used to turn on iPhoto syncing with a 6-month window. So I'm not sure I want my entire collection with me always. :-|<p>Edit: I know it doesn't actually download all 100 GB of image data, only the thumbnails. My point is that I now have a 15 years of photos with me at all times and I'm not sure I want that.
i am terified of apple and photo library's.<p>cause I used iphoto and suddenly one day the meta data like sorting and descriptions and tags went corrupt.<p>then it happened again and I stopped using it.