Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual

Foreword

If you’re not a fan of change, a word of advice: Don’t get involved with Apple.

Apple loves introducing a technology, singing its praises, wooing us to use it—and then abandoning it when a better technology comes along. The list of inventions that Apple has celebrated and then junked is longer than most companies’ entire product histories: The floppy drive. The CD burner. The ADB port. The SCSI port. The FireWire port. The 30-pin iPhone connector. The MagSafe connector. The original Final Cut. The original iMovie.

And now, iPhoto.

Apple has put its aging photo-management/editing program for the Mac onto an ice floe and pushed it gently out to sea.

In iPhoto’s place, Apple offers a completely new, free Mac program called Photos. In every possible way, it’s meant to look and work like the Photos app on the iPhone and iPad (that is, on iOS). Learn Photos on your phone, and you’ve pretty much mastered it on your iPad and Mac, too. And vice versa.

If you’re now using iPhoto—or the professional photo-management program Aperture, which Apple will also abandon—then this is big news indeed. You’ve probably got a few questions. You might wonder, for example, what will happen to your existing photo collections, what features you’ll gain, which ones you’ll lose, what will happen to iPhoto and Aperture, and how to convert your photo library to Photos format.

Above all, you might wonder why Apple is asking you to switch to Photos, especially considering that it has fewer features. Yes, you read that right: Photos 1.0 doesn’t offer star ratings, flags, or events (which existed in iPhoto) or color labels, flags, copyright, contact, and content data (which existed in Aperture). So why is Apple starting from scratch with something that’s not fully grown?

Why Photos?

Why Photos?

The answer: Speed and stability.

Nowadays, in the phone-camera era, photography has exploded in popularity and quantity. The world has gone picture-mad. We post 1 million photos a day on Flickr, 35 million a day to Twitter, 40 million a day on Instagram, and a boggling 350 million photos a day to Facebook.

Now, iPhoto was a respected, time-honored hero for its day—but after 13 years, its code had become overrun by software weeds. The thing was being propped up by patches for patches.

Photos for the Mac, on the other hand, is all new. It’s modern and sleek, designed from the beginning to handle huge photo collections, videos, and the kinds of specialized photography made possible by the iPhone, like slow-mo video, burst-mode photos, time-lapse video, and panoramas.

The combination of Photos (for iOS) and Photos (for the Mac) also work together in some spectacular ways—like iCloud Photo Library. This feature, should you choose to accept it, stores all of your photos and videos online—and lets you view them on any Apple product (Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc.) identically. Change a photo on your Mac, and you see that change instantly reflected on your phone, and so on. (This feature is free as long as your photo/video library is very small. You have to pay to accommodate larger collections; see Meet the iCloud Photo Library.)

Making the Move

The transition from iPhoto/Aperture to Photos for the Mac will be gentle, slow, and optional. The original programs still work just fine, so you can keep using them—even side by side with Photos. Which is good, because of those missing features. Over the months and years, Apple plans to restore features, bit by bit, until the new program is even more capable than the old one.

It’s a good thing, in other words, that you have this book in your hands. You have not one but two programs to learn (Photos for iOS and Photos for Mac)—and you also have to learn how to hop back and forth between them without duplicating hundreds of gigabytes of photos.

Fortunately, you have the world’s best instruction book in your hands. It’s in color (as any photography book should be); it’s loaded with important tips, tricks, and details; and it’s written by Lesa Snider.

When she was a young whippersnapper, Lesa spent three years at my side, producing Missing Manuals with me. Later, she co-authored iPhoto: The Missing Manual with me for several editions. Then she took the bestseller lists by storm with her book Photoshop: The Missing Manual.

In other words, if anyone embodies that very, very precise intersection of photography, software, Macs, Missing Manuals, and command of plain English, it’s Lesa.

So yes, Photos is an all-new program, written from scratch. So conversions, adaptations, and new learnings inevitably lie in your future.

But Apple freely admits that Photos 1.0 is only a starting point—and with Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual as your guide, you’re in a perfect position to exploit its panoply of picture-processing powers.

—David Pogue

David Pogue is the anchor columnist for Yahoo Tech, having been groomed for the position by 13 years as the tech columnist for the New York Times. He’s also a monthly columnist for Scientific American, host of science shows on PBS’s NOVA, and two-time Emmy-winning correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. With over 3 million books in print, David is one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “for Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music); in 1999, he launched the Missing Manual series, which now includes 120 titles.