Software & Apps

Bye Bye iPhoto, Bye Bye Aperture, Hello Photos

iPhoto, gone. Aperture, gone soon. New, available today, is Apple’s new photo app called, simply, Photos. Photos is free (but there’s a catch) and replaces both iPhoto and Aperture. The key takeaway here is that, in case you haven’t noticed, Apple is moving everything to the cloud. The pictures you save in Photos live in the cloud, iCloud.

The good news is that your iCloud photo library can be viewed from any device (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac), anytime you want. Any edits you make using one device is immediately available to be edited or viewed using another device. Or, view them on iCloud.com. It’s instant sharing, no need to wait to get home and upload. All the editing tools you expect are here: straighten the horizon, adjust exposure, brightness and contrast, apply filters, etc.

The bad news is that you have to buy space from Apple iCloud to store all your photos. Like Apple says, “fill your library, not your device.” That library will quickly fill up the free 5GB of iCloud storage Apple gives you. Then you will need to buy more storage space. Storage plans start at $0.99 per month (for 20 GB, $3.99 for 200 GB, $9.99 for 500 GB, and $19.99 for 1TB) and you can go up to 1TB. You can choose to store optimized images or full-size images locally to your mac. We recommend that you save your original full-size images using Finder (or Image Capture) and then decide if you want to import some or all of them in Photos for sharing.

Upgrade to OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and Photos will be installed. Though the Photos icon will replace the iPhoto icon on the Dock, iPhoto is still available from the Launchpad.

Bye Bye Love. Bye Bye Happiness. Hello Loneliness. — The Everly Brothers.