Like many others I expect, I was excited to see editing features developed in Photos that might do justice (with the right extensions) to RAW photos, along with all the great iCloud integration that we used to have in Aperture. And all in a MacOS-looking app like iPhoto. I invested a lot of time in Capture One 9 and was asked to shell out another $100 before I'd even worked out how I would ever integrate my libraries with iCloud, etc which, of course, will always be hard to do. Capture One proved to be more Mac-like than Lightroom but the interface was still a bit overwhelming at times and hard to keep simple (FCP X is the master of presenting simple controls but providing deep functionality and this is the direction I thought Photos might be taking).
Getting things into Photos is easy. iCloud photo library works really well for both photos and videos. RAW files are easily imported.
Unfortunately reviewing your imported photos is really hard. I thought I could use keywords to replace stars but in reality they are far less convenient. There's no easy way to compare similar photos like you could in Aperture.
Editing is painfully slow on a maxed out 2016 tbMBP. Extensions add extra waiting and jankiness. And of course every step needs to be done again on the next similar photo - there's no 'copy and paste changes'. Some extensions seem to spit back a JPEG, so these need to be the last step in your workflow. A number of gestures and conventions seem to be very unMac like and the opposite to what you expect.
It's great to be able to see edited photos and videos back in iCloud on any device. Again, super easy and useful.
It is super difficult to do anything else with photos and video from the Photos app. Can I quickly show a photo on a secondary display? This was so useful in Aperture. Other than moving the whole library window to the second display, Photos offers no way of doing this. Why? I see they've removed the same secondary display functionality from iMovie too (but at least FCP X still exists though). Even dragging photos to Preview, which will at least do a slideshow on a second display, is finicky. Drag and drop seems to be completely broken in Photos (it was the main selling point of iPhoto 10 years ago) so you have to choose 'Edit with…' to get an image into Preview and wait while it exports.
How do you quickly show a video on a second display? Again Photos has no way. I have not yet managed to get a video from Photos to Quicktime 10, either by dragging or by exporting. It seems to be processing but nothing ever opens in Quicktime. Edit: I have now managed by finding the movie in the 'Open' dialogue in Quicktime, but it feels like a step backwards.
I am beginning to think that using Photos to integrate my media management and photo editing with iCloud was a very frustrating mistake (as well as being the only option at the moment). But if anyone prepared to read my rant has idea to help, I am happy to listen!
Getting things into Photos is easy. iCloud photo library works really well for both photos and videos. RAW files are easily imported.
Unfortunately reviewing your imported photos is really hard. I thought I could use keywords to replace stars but in reality they are far less convenient. There's no easy way to compare similar photos like you could in Aperture.
Editing is painfully slow on a maxed out 2016 tbMBP. Extensions add extra waiting and jankiness. And of course every step needs to be done again on the next similar photo - there's no 'copy and paste changes'. Some extensions seem to spit back a JPEG, so these need to be the last step in your workflow. A number of gestures and conventions seem to be very unMac like and the opposite to what you expect.
It's great to be able to see edited photos and videos back in iCloud on any device. Again, super easy and useful.
It is super difficult to do anything else with photos and video from the Photos app. Can I quickly show a photo on a secondary display? This was so useful in Aperture. Other than moving the whole library window to the second display, Photos offers no way of doing this. Why? I see they've removed the same secondary display functionality from iMovie too (but at least FCP X still exists though). Even dragging photos to Preview, which will at least do a slideshow on a second display, is finicky. Drag and drop seems to be completely broken in Photos (it was the main selling point of iPhoto 10 years ago) so you have to choose 'Edit with…' to get an image into Preview and wait while it exports.
How do you quickly show a video on a second display? Again Photos has no way. I have not yet managed to get a video from Photos to Quicktime 10, either by dragging or by exporting. It seems to be processing but nothing ever opens in Quicktime. Edit: I have now managed by finding the movie in the 'Open' dialogue in Quicktime, but it feels like a step backwards.
I am beginning to think that using Photos to integrate my media management and photo editing with iCloud was a very frustrating mistake (as well as being the only option at the moment). But if anyone prepared to read my rant has idea to help, I am happy to listen!
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