Ease of Use

If you own another Apple product, such as an iPhone or an iPad, you should be very at home with the way Photos works as it’s designed to be very reminiscent of the way images are displayed on those products.

As such, you’ll find photos are grouped into different sets.

Moments, which is collated by the program itself, groups together images based on location data (embedded in photos from your phone or tablet, or if you have a GPS enabled camera), times and places. There’s also Collections, which groups together “Moments”, and Years, which is well, images grouped by the year in which they were taken.

For each photo, you’ll see a heart icon in the top left hand corner. You can click on this to add it to your Favourites set. There’s no star rating system for sorting things into more discernible groups, though. One way around that is to add a keyword, such as “5 stars” to the image. To do this, right click on any image, click Get Info, then click Add Keyword and add whatever you want to use. You can then use the Search box in the corner of the program to search for these keywords.

At the top of the screen you’ll find the Program is divided into different tabs. You’ll find the Photos tab, where all of your photos can be viewed. There’s also the Shared tab where you can upload photos for sharing with other people with Apple devices, and those shared with you. Interestingly, you can also create shared folders for non-Apple users, as Photos will crate a web page for those people to look at the shots.

The next tab is Album, which is where you have some control over the way your shots are organised. At the top of the screen, you’ll see that there is “All Photos”, “Faces”, “Last Import” and, if you have an iPhone or iPad, photos which are grouped by the specific kinds that those devices are capable of, namely Time-lapse, Slo-mo, Bursts, and Video.

Just underneath this, you will see Albums which you have created yourself. To create a new Album, right click and select “New Album”. After this you’ll be prompted to select some photos to place in that new album. The good thing here is that you can have the same photo in as many albums as you like, without it taking up more hard drive space.

Going back to the Faces section at the top of the screen, this allows you to sort your images by tagging faces in them. If you have contacts stored on your Mac, you can even assign these photos to your saved contacts. The software will suggest a bunch of faces for you to identify, which should mean in theory that they will be automatically recognised next time you take a photo of that same person.

Occasionally however, the Program throws up some very unusual suggestions for faces, so it’s clear that this isn’t quite perfect just yet.

The final tab you will find at the top of the screen is the Projects section. In here, you will see any Projects which you are working on. These can be created when you’re in Photos or Albums view and allow you to order prints, create photo books and so on. You can also create a Slideshow. Different themes for slideshows are available, and you can either use the supplied pictures, or you can use music from your iTunes library.

There are a number of editing controls which you can use in Photos. Double click any photo you want to edit, and then click the Edit box in the top right hand corner.

The options available are pretty basic, but they can be expanded to give more advanced options if you need them, however it is of course no replacement for Photoshop, and it’s certainly not up to the same level as Aperture.

Here you’ll find Enhance, which creates an automatic enhancement of the photo as the program sees fit. There’s also options to Rotate or Crop your image. You can add Filters to your image, and there’s also an option to perform some Spot Healing. The biggest control you have is under the Adjust heading though. Here you can make changes to “Light”, “Color” and so on. Each of these can be expanded to give you greater control, such as Exposure Compensation, or White Balance.

At any time you can revert to the original photo, which is useful. Another handy tip is to hold down the M key on your keyboard to see how your edits compare with the original shot. Although any changes you make will be reflected across your iCloud connected devices, you can revert to the original days / weeks / months after making the original edit.

Performance

Much has been made about the Photos app replacing Aperture and iPhoto. Apple has been pretty keen to point out that it is not intended as a replacement to Aperture, but never the less, the likes of Photoshop and others like it must still be rejoicing at the launch.

It’s not a powerful editing tool, but then neither is it really intended to be, at least for now.

What it is good at though is organising files across iCloud connected devices, so if you are somebody who uses more than one of those devices, you will probably find a lot to like about using Photos.

However, at the moment, those who are a little more serious about photography will probably prefer the performance of more powerful tools, such as Lightroom, Photoshop, or even an old version of Aperture.

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