back to article Apple preps to DUMP crappy, sluggish iPhoto FOR GOOD


  1. Anonymous Coward

    We all know how well that went for celebs, don't we?

    The iThing maker is clearly keen to store even more of your selfies ... in its data centres.

  2. Slap

    I've had a look at this




    A tad miffed at the moment

    1. Richard Parkin

      Re: I've had a look at this

      There is no substitute for Aperture for organising photo - I've tried the others. Aperture still works of course and I think I'll just continue using it since we can always run the required OS in a VM.

    2. Strange Fruit

      Re: I've had a look at this

      I hope they don't do this with Logic, but to be fair, us musicians have been alright so far. i was worried when Apple bought Emagic. It proved to be unfounded. I was worried when Logic X arrived, but that seems to have been unfounded as well. It seems to be an area where they've managed to avoid screwing up so far.

    3. Cowboy Bob

      Re: I've had a look at this

      Your advice is incorrect. Just because something stops being made doesn't mean it instantly stops working. Waveburner has not been included with Logic since version 8, but I'm happily still using it alongside Logic Pro X.

      Same with Aperture, you want to keep using it, then keep using it. It's hardly a big deal really is it?

      1. paulf Silver badge

        Re: I've had a look at this

        "Just because something stops being made doesn't mean it instantly stops working."

        I'm not sure that was the point the OP was making.

        I use PS Lightroom (Yes, I know, Adobe) so I'm not sure on the specifics of Aperture but I understand the OP's concerns are in continuing to use a package that has been abandoned by the publisher, not that it will suddenly stop working completely.

        Lightroom gets updates from time to time. vx.0 releases tend to add new features and upgrades cost money. vx.n (n=1-6ish) releases are bug fixes and add support for new camera lenses and bodies - kinda useful for the auto correction of lens artefacts. This support is important when you upgrade your camera/lens and find that there is no auto correct profile for it.

        I did a trials of Aperture and Lightroom but opted for Lightroom (despite Adobe) because at the time Apple were busy screwing over the FCP guys with FCP X and I realised back then that it was only a matter of time before Apple moved on to screw the Aperture users...

        1. Mark 65

          Re: I've had a look at this

          I am also a user of Lightroom despite it being from Adobe. In fact it is one of the few things they have ever done that I would recommend. It is, in my opinion, an excellent piece of software. There are some things it lacks such as where iPhoto will keyword tag by key shortcut which would be very handy for family photos but it has consistently gotten better over the years and is multi-platform thereby not tying you to an OS.

          I discovered it after Adobe bought out Pixmantic who owned RawShooter where some influences can be seen.

  3. depicus

    Sucks so bad

    The new app is awful so far.

    1. A 1000 raw image library in Aperture is 1.8gb yet in Photo it's now 5.9gb - haven't tried any of the big ones yet.

    2. Faces detection is rubbish, after 60 minutes of detecting the seven suggests were so bizarre and trying to reject them did nothing (yes I know it's a beta)

    3. Shut down and then restarted and Face detection started again.

    4. No easy way to organise and it seem like a game of hide and seek to get to maps or other views.

    Will be sticking with Aperture until they pry it out of my cold dead hands.

    1. Mark 65

      Re: Sucks so bad

      From what I have read this is clearly not a replacement for Aperture but instead it is an iOSification of iPhoto so that the basic photo app is familiar to converts from the mobile device market and involves one codebase to support.

  4. ACZ

    So does it *just* support iCloud? What about home NAS?

    I'm just using the free iPhoto app on my MacBook Pro at home. However, the big issue that I've got is the library - I've got the best part of 200GB of photos in iPhoto (I know...) stored locally on my machine and need the space back. I've been avoiding doing anything about it, especially in the knowledge that iPhoto is being ditched, and so this is a good time to look at the available options. I *really* do not want to put my library on a cloud service - cost, speed etc. etc.

    My major question is whether the Photos app supports libraries located on a NAS, i.e. can I have multiple libraries with some located on a NAS? And if I can, how is this set up? Are indexes stored locally for speedy and easy access, or does everything have to come from the NAS?

    If not, I know that it has been asked in many places many times before, but any suggestions for a suitable non-pro package?

    1. Maventi

      Re: So does it *just* support iCloud? What about home NAS?

      Decent NAS support would be extremely useful. I also don't want to carry GB's of photos everywhere with me, nor do I want them in some cloudy service.

      1. P. Lee Silver badge


        I use the globalsan iscsi (snow leopard client / suse backend) for time machine and that seems to be fine. Of course, whether you want to do that over wireless is a different matter.

        I've found the SMB server with snow leopard falls over if you have something like amarok trying to access the itunes music directory. I ended up rsyncing to a linux box and serving out to linux over NFS from there. I'm sure its has improved with Yosemite though...

        I find the NAS thing a bit of a non-starter, but that's because I want a proper home server, not just a file-server. My home server midi-tower case has space for eight disks, runs mysql, mythtv and so on. There are a couple of 7200 rpm disks for Mythtv, 5400 rpm disks for long term video storage, a couple of disks for backups/iscsi. How much will a NAS with eight slots cost you? Do you need a compute node running as well?

        1. ACZ


          Yes... the file-server NAS setup is good for me - I've got a Synology box sat at home happily storing a few TB of data - Time Machine backups, music, video etc. and that's great. So I have the available space and device on the LAN. Just need to be able to use it.

          As before, the use scenario is that I have a large amount of photos which cannot all be stored locally on the machine. However, I want a unified photo app so that I can access *all* of the photos through a uniform interface, irrespective of where they are stored - locally or on a NAS device somewhere else on the LAN. At times, I will want to use the app and access (locally stored) photos when not connected to the LAN, and I don't want the app to throw a hissy-fit about not being to access the other photos. Overall, the basic cloud/cloud app scenario.

          To me, the basic question is whether the new Photo app will allow a NAS device to be the "cloud" or whether it is locked down to a specific cloud provider i.e. iCloud.

          Thoughts/feedback much appreciated. TIA.

          1. Mark 65


            Your requirements, especially the photos on external devices not always attached, seems like more of something Lightroom caters for with the ability to have smart previews. Your photos live on the NAS and your catalog on the local drive. The smart previews enable you to see, tag, adjust, etc the photos using the smart preview even though you may not be attached to the NAS. I believe Lightroom's real restriction is that it doesn't like the catalog to exist on a network share - back it up to one (rsync etc) by all means but don't use it from there.

            PS It is the one piece of Adobe software I have found to be genuinely good.

            1. ACZ


              Thanks for that - really useful to know about the Lightroom setup and features. It's now on the list of candidates :)

  5. Mike Bell

    Photos for OS X has the potential to be a great product. Apple have re-jigged the OS so that RAW processing can now be implemented as a pipeline process, and third-party code can hook into that non-destructively. But I've seen no indications that Photos can make use of this... yet.

    1.0 is going to be pretty lame for a lot of users. No brush edits. No lens correction... These things can be done easily, in particular with Yosemite's under-the-hood work, but it's anyone's guess when this will work its way into Photos.

    As for Logic Pro X, I don't see any reason why Apple would want to drop that. It had a complete re-write about a year ago, and some significant updates happened a couple of weeks ago. It's more in line with other Apple products than, say, Aperture.

    In answer to the above question, Photos supports multiple local libraries, and it's up to you to decide which you'd like to sync to iCloud. Use of iCloud is optional.

    1. ACZ

      Thanks. I think it's an issue of *how* they support the libraries - I believe that the current iPhoto supports multiple local libraries. That's not the issue - it's a case of needing to have the data split between locations, or at least have the main data stored on a LAN and some duplication of data onto the local machine for convenience/ease of use.

      For example, photos + thumbnails + metadata stored in a library located on a NAS. Laptop connects up to the NAS for the first time, pulls the thumbnails + metadata for the library over to it and stores them locally. As and when photos are required, they are pulled from the NAS. As changes (additions, deletions, modifications) are made to the library on the NAS (assuming it's shared), they can be sync'd across to the laptop. Ditto, when the laptop disconnects and reconnects to the NAS, changes can be sync'd across to it. When changes are made to a photo on the laptop, the data can by sync'd back to the library on the NAS. When the laptop is disconnected from the NAS, the thumbnails and metadata are still available locally and the app behaves gracefully when users try to access the photos.

      Hunting around a bit more, I might end up having to spend some cash. Media Pro 1 photo manager, or maybe Photo Mechanic. There is also the open source digiKam. Time to do some testing. Ho hum...

  6. Maventi

    Given the comments so far, I'm wondering why Apple seems so bent on reinventing the wheel lately. They obviously haven't followed Joel Spolsky's advice (ref

    Yosemite networking is still a pig, even with the 10.10.2 update. Networking worked just fine for years until Apple decided to implement an entirely new network daemon in Yosemite for whatever reason.

    Now it seems it will begin all over again with Photos.

    1. launcap Silver badge

      >Yosemite networking is still a pig

      And appears to be largely incompatible with Active Directory (to the extend that new machines are having to have AdmitMac installed on them because the built-in AD bind wither fails to work or, if it does bind, then fails to authenticate).

      Mavericks worked fine so it's not a case that our AD is broken..

  7. hrhpod


    Iphoto is awful. It crashes more often than a formula 1 team. It would be delightful if the new app could remain open without the spinny wheel of doom from making me want to put my fist through my screen.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gawd

      "my Iphoto is awful. It crashes more often than a formula 1 team." is what I think you meant.

      My iPhoto on the other hand, with 25,411 images, (both RAW, jpg and pdf) with 151 faces logged. has not crashed over two machine transfers.

      Quite happy with it.

  8. SpiderPig

    I suffered the pain....

    I used to be an Aperture user, that is until Apple decided those that did more with their photos other than selfies and cat pictures didn't matter.

    I now use Lightroom, the workflow and all the capabilities outshine Aperture 10 fold and iPhoto 1000 fold. I'll never go back to using anything that Apple develops.

    I had well over 6000 images at the time and it did take me quite a while to redo them all. I have recently seen that there is now an application that will alllow you to transfer your Aperture images to Lightroom.

    Aplle really screwed me over, now they can just go take a flying leap.....

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