A bit of Mac Photos love

[whiteonline]

Full disclaimer - I'm a hobbyist.

After using Lightroom for many years, I've come to realize that like most hobbies, I paid too much attention to specs and other aspects that really have no impact on me.
As a hobbyist, I realized I don't enjoy - and therefor do not in practice tag my photos or use other categorization methods (this is supposed to be fun - not work). Instead, I am a hard-core culler and rely on date/time and thumbnails to find images.

I decided to throw all my images into Photos - and much to my surprise, it works really well in my case. The auto moments, decent face detection, albums, and date hierarchy work great. Context search is pretty cool too. And I like the fact this all happens locally (versus Google machine learning). Neat too, is when I mixed geo-tagged mobile photos with my (real)camera non-tagged images, they were correctly grouped into a geo-based moment.

Anyway, the included post-processing works great for snapshots, and I use On1 Raw in extensions when needing to do more involved edits.

Overall, it's fun to use - which is all I really want.

 

[r.harris1]

I too like Photos quite a bit. Extensions are very powerful. While I don't use On1 at this time, I do find the Affinity, Macphun, Dxo and Pixelmator extensions to be terrific. I've used Photo Mechanic for years to ingest, cull, keyword, rate, rename and backup and for the most part, Photos is now my go-to for the rest of the work I do, which admittedly is not much more than exposure tweaks and a few local edits. More sophisticated stuff I can generally do in Affinity. With the keywording and rating I do in PM, I can then create smart albums and agree on context search - it's great (for me)!

I'd love to see the Photos app allow (a) the extensions to hook into the RAW pipeline so that I am working with the camera data until I'm ready to export or print and/or (b) at least work with TIFF so that I have more bits to work with. Obviously right now all extensions convert to JPEG. I expect (b) is more realistic and Apple didn't immediately cancel my feature request (via radar, like they've done with many of my others ).

 

[The Bad Guy]

No, just no. I'm not even talking as a professional here. Photos is a step back from the eventually (it initially had promise) woeful iPhoto. Bad OP, bad.

 

[hanser]

I am also a hobbyist and think that photos has surpassed iPhoto. It still lacks some of iPhoto functionality but on the other hand is much faster and also has some additional nice features. Bottom line photos wins for me.

 

[robgendreau]

Glad you like it. I'm sure you're right in the zone of the customer Apple was looking for. As for photo equipment and software, it's such a common tendency for us to get way more than we need, and that sometimes just gets in the way. I still don't use Photos much (mostly just as a vehicle for sharing), but for what it does it does it pretty well.

And BTW RAW Power is the killer extension for it if you do wanna do RAW. Especially if you liked Aperture.